I watched this documentary on Netflix the other day about 1975. Apparently, it was a significant year. Saigon fell that April, marking the failure of America’s nearly twenty-year war in Vietnam. The previous July, Nixon had resigned as president after facing probable impeachment for his role in the Watergate cover-up. The times were cynical, and as a result, a lot of classic movies got made that year that reflected the downbeat mood, like Nashville, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon. That was the gist of the doc. I thought it was good and worth checking out. Then, a couple of days after, I read an article about how shit 2016 was. A lot of famous people died, like Bowie, George Michael, and Prince. There was also Brexit, and Trump got elected for the first time. It all added up to a massive downer. Apparently. Either way, both of these things reminded me of a three-minute speed lecture I did on the significance of 1968 a few years ago. It’s on this site somewhere, so if you want to know the details, check it out. To save you the effort, it was a year of protests, uprisings, great art, and famous people getting shot; examples include the Paris student demos, the Prague Spring, The White Album by the Beatles, and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

All of this begs a few questions, I reckon. What makes a significant year? What makes a year bad or good? And why does any of this matter, if at all?

First, consider the following. The sacking of Rome by the Goths in 410, which kick-started the collapse of the Roman Empire after 800 years. It also heralded a further thousand years or so of the Dark Ages. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, which led to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and its replacement by the Ottoman Empire for the next 500 years. The fall of Beijing in 1644, which saw the Ming dynasty usurped by the Qing. They would rule for another 268 years. And the Russian Revolution in 1917, which brought down the Romanov dynasty after 300 years and gave us Communist Russia. Surely one way of judging significance is through the rise and fall of empires. I mean, that’s history literally spelling it out for us, isn’t it? As to whether they were good or not, well, that probably depends on which side of the fence you were on at the time.

Now consider these events. The Antonine Plague of 165 AD, eight to ten million dead. The Yellow Plague of 664 AD, nearly a third of the population of the UK and Ireland dead. The Black Death of 1347-48, upwards of 200 million dead. The Spanish flu of 1918, fifty-odd million dead. And Covid in 2020, around 7 million dead. Here then is another possible way of judging significance—through pestilence and disease. At least with this one, there is general unanimity on how shit a year it was.

I could, of course, talk about natural disasters, such as Vesuvius exploding and wiping out Pompeii in 79 AD. Or the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. I could even talk about 536AD, when the poor bastards unlucky enough to be alive at the time had the absolute misfortune to experience a double whammy of calamity. Not only did they have to deal with the Justinian plague, but they also faced a natural disaster of a volcanic winter that caused untold misery across the globe. Again, not much debate needed on the shitness of it.

To return to more recent vintages, there are a couple of years that stand out. Apparently. 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, which triggered the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The first one, anyway. The political, historical, and cultural significance of that event alone surely warrants a special mention for the year. In addition, in that same year, the UK experienced the so-called ‘second summer of love’ as dance music and underground raves exploded across the country and influenced culture around the globe forever. Surely a good year. On the contrary, 2008 saw the financial collapse and the start of the Great Recession, which made it a bad year for almost everyone. Actually, if you’re a Brit, you may well argue that every year after that has been getting steadily worse. Maybe not just Brits.

On one level, arguing the toss about which year was the worst, or the best, or the most significant is fun. It allows us to indulge our hankering for nostalgia—a pain or ache from a longing to return home, according to the Greeks—that seems to be buried deep in our psyches. And it’s comforting too. History shows us that we’re not alone in experiencing what we do, whether good or bad. On a different tip, this whole exercise also demonstrates a key philosophical point. Although there does seem to be a general consensus on certain years—the aforementioned 536AD, probably 2020—most of this sort of talk comes down to our own individual experience. For example, I, for one, had a great year in 2016. I was having a ball running my own bar in the Philippines, oblivious to pretty much everything else. Therefore, in the final analysis, truth is subjective. Apparently.