It’s been a tough decade so far.

If you’re asking, “Why 2014, exactly?”, then clearly you don’t remember all of the great things about 2014. Let me remind you!

 

You can grow a mustache and wax the ends so they curl up! Or pair it with a beard and a manbun! Or get a tattoo of a mustache on your finger, so when you hold it up under your nose, it looks like you have a mustache! That shit never gets old.

 

We’re going to write fanfic. The guys are going to wear outfits that make people wonder, “Hipster, or Amish?” We’re going to eat salad out of mason jars and make our own kombucha. We’re going to knit giant scarves. We’re going to play ukeleles. We may do some light girlbossing. It’s going to be fantastic.

 

Could your apartment use some new decorations? May I recommend chevron or ikat throw pillows, or a rose gold and marble end table? You can put a couple of succulents on it. In the bedroom, you literally cannot go wrong with collages of instant camera photos, accessorized by swags of twinkly lights.

 

They have shockingly positive music in 2014. “Happy” by Pharrell Williams, (but we’ll uh, skip “Blurred Lines’), “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, “Best Day of My Life” by American Authors, “Flawless” by Beyonce, “Counting Stars” by One Republic, and “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift, which is exactly what we’re going to do.

 

But obviously, it wouldn’t be 2014 if we weren’t also discovering new music. A new playlist full of bangers will cheer you up faster than a bottle of booze. Which will not cheer you up at all, actually. So as Drake says, “Hold on, we’re going home,” and as the KONGOS say, “Come with me now!”

 

Were there trends that you missed out on back in 2014? Like a feather tattoo with birds flying off the ends (I think it’s pretty!), using that loopy Live Laugh Love font, or going to a club dressed as though you were about to share a Powerpoint presentation? Or going to a club, period?

 

Do you wish you’d tried out overalls, hope, personal boundaries, or saying “bae” or “YOLO”? Maybe you just want to watch a television show with 23 episodes, as nature intended? Now is your chance to do it!

 

I can’t literally time travel, but I can control my mindset, how I live every day, and the media I consume, which is almost the same thing. 

 

Going back to 2014 means not spending too much time on social media apps. Some of us can’t abandon them altogether. I certainly can’t—I have a book coming out next week! But we can cut back by 50%, or 90%.

 

True, you might’ve spent a lot of time on social media apps in 2014. But in 2024, the biggest ones are much more finely tuned to serve up the the world’s most hateful takes and horrific content, in order to keep you huddled up in front of them, liking and downvoting posts, arguing with strangers, hating most people, and scrolling for comfort in vain. You will never cultivate a 2014 mindset that way.

 

You can go on Tumblr, actually. Nobody’s bothering much with it these days. Plus a lot of the kids there love 2014, and who can blame them—even if they were five years old at the time? But if you’re addicted to the big social media platforms, take some advice from a blockbuster movie, and Let It Go.

 

Cutting your time on the bigger platforms has its drawbacks, of course…for the billionaire owners, who are selling your attention to advertisers. You are Mark Zuckerberg’s oil deposit on the ocean floor, and he does not give a fuck about oil spills. If his algorithms abet a genocide in Myanmar, violence in Ethiopia, or a civil war in the United States, so be it! The man spent around 50 billion dollars on a “metaverse” and virtually (ha) nobody cared, so he’s got to make that up somehow. Elon Musk’s father owned an emerald mine, but on Twitter, you are Elon Musk’s emerald mine. Any pain you share there, he monetizes, plus he thinks it’s hilarious. He enjoys strip-mining your one wild and precious life almost as much as TikTok does, and that’s saying something.

 

So yeah, if you spend less time on their apps, that’ll suck for them. For you, though, it’ll be amazing!

If you want to read, you can read blogs—like this one, which was founded in 2014! You can read magazines and books! You can write a book! Or, if you already did that, write your best one yet!

 

If you want to chat, you can do it in REAL LIFE. Where? Bars. Book clubs. Cafes. Random events at your library. You can use Meetup.com to meet new weirdos. Many of them will suck! Someone might be cool! Roll the dice!

 

This is going to sound wild, but you can talk to your actual neighbors. Bring them some cookies or ask them over to have a beer on your deck or something. Or even visit a church or mosque or temple or meditation group or coven, if there’s one that suits you!

 

Anyone who thinks I’m joking about all this has not seen me frolicking around in a high-waisted Modcloth dress with owls or foxes or dinosaurs or some other cute shit printed on it, but believe me, you will.

 

I admit that I don’t have the same body that I had in 2014. But you know what? I can get back there. I can walk a lot, go to the gym, and maybe even run a 5K. Those things are good for my mental and physical health, which makes them the opposite of doomscrolling.

 

So let’s do this. Let’s head back to 2014. But let’s also get involved with ways to make this world a better place. Maybe we’ll do some new ice bucket challenge, which actually increased Americans’ overall charitable giving in 2014. Like I was saying,

 

rage-posting on social media is the opposite of making the world a better place. People who don’t like you love to see you do it, and they will always vote for the person who makes you the angriest!

 

We can get involved behind the scenes, and preferably not just behind the screens, with organizations, causes, or random acts of kindness. We can volunteer at charities or join grassroots political organizations. If you have a cause you care about, or if you’re worried about people’s rights, organization and action are needed.

People need our positive words and actions more than ever,

and who knows? Along with green smoothies and galaxy-print leggings—or even better, the new things we come up with, once we cut ourselves loose from algorithms and despair—they might eventually lead us to a new Best Year Yet.