The clock is ticking and the countdown is on. The end of the year is upon us. As a bonus, we will soon be bidding adieu to the 2000's. This means that we are bombarded with "Decade in Review" features from every media imaginable. Everything that is good, bad, or ugly (or any combination of the above) about this decade are dissected in great detail.
Many people, myself included, are fascinated by such reviews. Perhaps it is because such reviews help us recall the major happenings and events that caught our attention over the past decade. Perhaps such reviews help us to anticipate the things that are in store for the upcoming decade.
Why are these reviews so popular? For those preparing the reviews, working on reviews likely means a lighter work load at the end of a decade — research for such feature can be done simply by sifting through the archives. For the rest of us, such reviews help us recall the events that we might have forgotten. The problem is that we often forget the content of the reviews shortly after we finish reading/watching the feature.
Sometimes I find it strange that decade-in-review features are almost always being broadcast before the conclusion of the decade. (The same goes for year-in-reviews.) However unlikely, major events can occur between the time a feature is released and the beginning of the new decade. Perhaps I am nitpicking, but why review the major events that occurred in a decade when the decade is not yet over?
Some of the end-of-decade reviews also re-examines some of the predictions (from ten years ago) on what would happen in the current decade. By revisiting the predictions, we can see that most of them are way off the mark. (Even so, many predictions about the upcoming decade have been made. Let's wait and see how many of them turn out to be correct at the end of 2019.)
Many also perform a review of their own lives at this time. Often people realize that, in spite of the inordinate number of entries they write in cyberspace, they have done little in the past ten years after making their own decade in review, which can dampen people's mood entering the new decade. On a more positive note, such reviews can lead people to resolve to become better in the new decade (new decade's resolutions?).
Yes, it sounds silly to write about review-of-decades rather than reviewing what happened over the past decade. Luckily for you, the readers, such articles probably appear only once every decade.