2020 a New Decade, Bring It on!
By Faiza Zia Khan
Newport Beach, CA
The 2020s is finally here! Starting this week, we will now live in the 20s. Exciting times! The year 2020 shortened to “the twenties” in everyday usage sounds roaring, rad, ruthless, and rakish all at the same time.
As I sat down to write the first article of the Year 2020 glancing at the date on the bottom right hand corner of my laptop freaked me out just a little bit. I remember watching Sci-Fi movies with the year 2020 being out there as a faraway futuristic decade. Now we are living in it.
This year is special as it has been singled out to have a dazzling number of technological advancements that will change our lives forever. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is predicted to take over the world. Tesla is nearing completion of its highly publicized Autopilot feature capable of full self-driving while you have the luxury of catching up with emails or do homework on your way in. Movies predicted robots taking over humans and now we see it all in play first hand. Robots have already taken over restaurants. I personally witnessed “Flippy” a cloud connected mechanical arm robot cook flipping and frying 80 baskets of food an hour, monitoring it with 3D thermal scanners for eyes and cleaning up after the cooking is done at a local burger franchise in Pasadena, California.
The coolest fact I could think of is the kids born in this decade and the one prior will see the decade 2030, 2040, 2050, and 2060 that all seem like an Artificial Intelligence (AI) dream cloud before. This is just a rough scope of the world we are living in today and raising our children in this super dynamic era. How do we keep up with it? By setting up goals and resolutions that are in line with this challenging world. Correct!
After attending numerous New Year’s Eve parties over the years not only in our own community but also of various other ethnicities I observed an overlap in many traditions. Some were unique but one custom common in all cultures is setting new year’s resolution and mostly not following through with them. Then meeting up at the next New Year’s Eve party and lamenting over it. Usually the negligence is attributed to not having enough time, laziness, forgetfulness, some unforeseen emergency or event that transpired, and the best one yet of setting too lofty a goal for themselves.
What are your resolutions for the new decade? I am posing this question to you all my readers as I was asked this question intermittently throughout the holiday season and will be asked repeatedly usually until the end of January. Perhaps it makes a topic for a fun conversation or it has become second nature to ask this I am not sure but it is cyclical. Every 365 days a new year comes as the previous one leaves us with mixed emotions.
Every year we set our new year’s resolutions whether verbally, vocally, written, or silently in our heart. How many of us actually follow through with them and put them in action to achieve desired results is another conversation. To celebrate the onset of a new decade with the hype of technological advancements, I decided to list the top ten new year’s resolutions commonly listed in our South-Asian communities I have heard over the years. I personally feel setting a goal(s) is always a good idea.
Having the determination to achieve that goal is a whole other matter. These are the ones prevalent in conversations and then regretted upon at the end of the year by the near and dear alike. Bear in mind this list is not prioritized in any way as everyone has their own pace and personal preferences in life and may trivialize one over the other. I have listed these as a neutral observer. For me personally when I heard these again, I felt that the change in decade or the developments did not affect our community much as these goals were stagnant around the same themes yet again:
1. I want to buy a new car
2. I want to buy a new house/property
3. I have to get my child (daughter/son) married
4. I have to lose weight/become healthier/get in shape
5. I want to make/save more money
6. I want to travel outside of North America (except Pakistan/India)
7. I want to buy more jewelry, designer bags/shoes/apparel
8. I want to look younger
9. I want to make friends outside of our South-Asian circle
10. I want to stop procrastinating and not be lazy about taking on responsibility/ projects
This list may or may not look familiar to you but I have been that person who has set goals to be healthier, get more educated or learn something new in addition to my skill set that I achieved professionally. However, I know that it is not in my nature to be drawn towards materialistic things or acquiring wealth. Therefore, most of these goals/resolutions never appealed to me. But for some, these are the main, real attractions in life. As a community we have our own strengths and flaws. We excel in technology, education, learning, and academia but we also measure success with how much wealth has been acquired by a certain individual. I have witnessed friends or acquaintances choose their friend circle based on the other’s wealth over their education, their status/influence in the community over what line of work they have chosen. Everyone has the natural desire to be cool-by-association, to rub shoulders with the Who’s Who, and the alleged crème de la crème of society. I really don’t blame anyone for how they choose their friends. As long as they are not delineating a genuinely nice person without money over a nasty person with money the world has its saving grace. The new year message I want to convey is as a community let’s start thinking outside the box and keep up with the world that is around us.
(Faiza Zia Khan holds a Master’s in Journalism degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada. She has collaborated with news media outlets including Global National and actively volunteers for several community investment projects for the Red Cross, United Way and the Breast Cancer Foundation)
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