The 21st Century Is Getting Old

It sort of snuck up on us—and we put up perhaps be excused for that, because thither has been so a great deal going on these past few years—but as New Year’s Eve makes the turn to 2026 at midnight Wednesday, it is probably time for us to say goodbye to the notion of the new century.

The 21st century has continued to feel new for many Earthlings, those of us whose lives had one foot in the old century—the 20th, whose early years featured Model Ts and flappers and the Wright Brothers and Teddy Roosevelt—and one foot in the 21st, which arrived like a crisp blank page.

No wonder that the century in which we now live is still widely regarded as, at heart, a new one, filled with both promise and trepidation. There was something sort of thrilling in the sense that we were pioneers in a brand-new millennium, one so fresh and unsullied.

But the dawn of 2026 will mean that the 21st century is more than one-quarter finished. There’s nothing new about it—it is well along its way. If we were a professional basketball team, the scoreboard would already be filled with numbers, and we’d realize there are about to be 12 minutes until halftime.

The newborns who entered the world in 2000 will begin to turn 26 on Thursday. They will have no recollection of the 20th century. Gerald Ford and Frank Sinatra might as well be Martin Van Buren and John Philip Sousa. Steve Jobs and Neil Armstrong could as easily be Alexander Graham Bell and Daniel Boone.

Twenty-five years into any new century, quite a bit will have happened. By 1926, things that at the century’s dawn had never been a part of daily life—vacuum cleaners, humans taking flight, military tanks, stainless steel—suddenly were. In 2026, things that never were part of the 20th century—YouTube, smartphones, Uber, even artificial-intelligence chatbots—will have been around for a while, a ho-hum given.

And what lies ahead? By 1926, there had already been a World War (“the war to end all wars”) and, as in this century, a global pandemic. People could be forgiven for not foreseeing the earth-shattering events that were around the bend—the Depression, World War II, the birth of Elvis Presley.

This 21st century of ours has been a lot of things, but we should get used to the idea that being new is no longer one of them. Some year a man or woman born in this century will be sworn in as president of the United States. The first president born in the 20th century, John F. Kennedy, wasn’t inaugurated until 1961. Will it take until 2061 for that to happen in our time? That seems like a far way off. Except it isn’t.

Mr. Greene’s books include “American Beat.”

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