Winners & Losers of 2020
You're legally required to begin any article summing up 2020 with the photo of either a dumpster fire or a mushroom cloud, so we decided to go with dumpster fire © Eli Duke / CC-BY-SA-2.0
Editor's Note: No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. This is a list of winners and losers for the year 2020, and we're posting it just before Valentine's Day in 2022. Why, you ask? Have you ever seen that video of David Hasselhoff literally crawling around on the floor of a hotel room, vainly struggling to eat a cheeseburger, while drunkenly blathering on about god knows what? A video that he filmed and released on purpose in the hopes that it would finally make him confront, deal with and overcome his long-term alcoholism?
Well, this is our version of that, only instead of confronting our long-term alcoholism (luckily, highly functional alcoholics like us needn't ever worry about that - haha!) we're laying bare our debilitating, lifelong struggle with procrastination for the whole world to see, or at least the dozens of people who might be reading this.
Hopefully, this courageous act of bravery on our part will serve as inspiration for others to take the necessary steps to work on their own personal flaws and shortcomings. Which is to say, this article was originally drafted in December 2020 while we were living like the Zeus himself, above the clouds on the 30th floor of a condo in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And yet due to the aforementioned debilitating procrastination, it's only be posted now - a scant 13 months later - while we're living in a ground floor apartment 100m or so from the beach in Riohacha, Colombia.
Both the calendar and our location may have gone through several transformations in the interim, but the list we originally came up with has stood the test of time (more or less), so it's only been lightly edited (mostly changing the present perfect tense to past simple, for all you grammar nerds out there). Hope you enjoy it.....
It would have made more sense to put the infamous burger eating video here, but no one wants to see that and this roast is hi-fucking-larious. Greg Giraldo at his absolute apex, which makes it all the more ironic that six weeks later his career died on a hotel floor too….
So, 2020 was quite a year, wasn't it? Our preferred adjective from around mid-March of that year was ‘exciting’, which garnered us no small amount of criticism at our day job. But since Travelling Curmudgeon's corporate structure is more horizontal, with the editorial freedom to say whatever you want, we’ve got no qualms about stating unequivocally that 2020 was the most exciting year of our lifetime. That said, when coming up with our annual list of winners and losers, it was a bit more difficult than in years past to try and balance the two sides. But as always, we've put in maximum effort, tried our best, not cut any corners or procrastinated in the least.
Now, without further adieu, we'll start with the winners, since they were much easier to spot in 2020 than usual.
#1a Stoicism
Stoicism was already making a comeback over the past decade or so, some 2000 years after its heyday, and the pandemic just accelerated this trend. Why? Because Stoicism is great for turbulent times, since it's a pretty straightforward philosophy that essentially just says don't worry about the shit you can't actually change, and do your best with the things you can.
#1b Marcus Aurelius
Since the so-called philosopher king of ancient Rome's meandering personal Meditations is the seminal text of Stoicism, it makes sense that 2020 was also a good year for shareholders of Marcus Aurelius stock. if you'd like an entertaining introduction to both the man and his philosophy, this timeless old school lecture is a great, as long as you can handle the nonstop fawning and fanboyery from Professor 1990s here:
#2 Baba Vanga
When it comes to posthumous winners of 2020, everyone's favourite blind Balkan mystic might very well take the gold medal - not that it will be any consolation to her, since she's been dead since 1996, but credit where credit is due. While not all of her predictions came true, the Strumica Soothsayer did clearly warn us that 2020 would be a total shitshow of a dumpster fire wrapped inside a clusterfuck. Or whatever that translates to in Bulgarian.
#3 The Mayans
Sure, the Mayans may have had their 4000 year run as an empire abruptly snuffed out by the Spanish in the early 16th century, but we never saw them referred to more than in 2020. This was of course always in the context of their much publicised 2012 end of the world prediction being misinterpreted eight years too soon, but there's no such thing as bad publicity - plus being off by a decade or so seems within any reasonable margin of error.
#4 REM
This legendary band from Athens, Georgia hadn't crossed our mind for years (if not decades), but their classic lighthearted take on the end of times, 'It's the end of the world', was the perfect theme for the early days of the pandemic, getting a solid week or two of repeated play time around the globe, before wearing out its welcome. That's a win in our book, even if the band themselves probably only made like a total of $3.27 from YouTube and Spotify royalties combined.
#5 Fiona Apple
Fetch the Bolt Cutters is fine, or even better than fine. That opinion puts us in the minority though, since everyone else seems to think it's not only the best album of the year, but the best album in years. Pitchfork bestowed it with its first perfect 10 in 10 years. Yeah, that's some serious overkill guys, sorry. It's not even the best Fiona Apple album in 10 years, a title which unequivocally goes to 2005's Extraordinary Machine. That said, it was what we listened to excessively in the days prior to and following our ‘release' from lockdown after spending 62 days in a condominium complex in Kuala Lumpur.
#6 Podcasters
Our podcast intake increased exponentially this year, and so did yours. Probably. We don't know anything about you, so it's hard for us to make such assumptions. But loads of podcast networks got bought by Spotfiy for ridiculous sums though, and Swedes aren't stupid, so that's all the evidence we need.
#7 The Environment
It will almost surely make no impact in the long-term, since humanity is the worst and apparently incapable of accepting reality or learning from mistakes, BUT for a few glorious weeks from mid-March till early May we got to see what happened when most of the world's planes were grounded, roads were clear of traffic and factories shuttered. Instead of boring you with hard data, rigorous scientific research and links to conclusive evidence, we'd like to submit as evidence the view from our 30th floor condo in Kuala Lumpur and personal experience of how clear the skies were. Wow, what an insanely beautiful city that is when the rampant manmade pollution doesn't fuck everything up! 💚💚💚
We'd been to Kuala Lumpur numerous times between 2015-2020, and had absolutely zero recollection of it being surrounded by mountains on three sides, an incredibly beautiful city (after a few weeks of lockdown) © TravellingCurmudgeon.com
#8 China
There was never really any question of who would be the world's major superpower by the second half of the 21st century, but if 2020 proved anything beyond any and all reasonable doubt, it's that a centrally run autocratic country of 1.4bn people - the vast majority of whom seem to more or less know the deal and willingly buy into the programme - is always going to win against a hodgepodge collection of brainwashed yokels who can't even seem to agree on the basic facts of science and reality, and whose sham semblance of democracy can barely weather an attack by the sociopathic caricature of a reality TV game show host and some Russian trolls on social media. Just to give one totally hypothetical example. But more seriously, when one side views the world in terms of centuries (or least decades) and the other in terms of quarterly reports from multinationals, it's pretty clear who is going to eventually win.
#9 Almost All Other East Asian Countries
Look at the list of countries with the lowest per capita Covid deaths, or any anecdotal roundup of those where life has more or less gone back to normal, and you're going to see Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and China. (Of course if you look at a list of countries that never had even one single case of Covid you'll find a few islands, a couple Central Asian dictatorships and North Korea, but that's another story.) What accounts for this? Competent governments? Submissive citizens who follow rules without asking any questions? A culture of wearing masks and possible immunity due to previous SARS outbreaks? The answers to these questions are beyond both our education level and pay grade, but there's no denying that on the whole Asian countries have handled the pandemic better than anyone else,
#10 American Billionaires
Whereas Asian countries have collectively handled the pandemic as a society as well as possible, no one in the world had a more successful 2020 in terms of accumulating wealth than the richest Americans and the multinational corporations that are nominally based in the US - it's almost like they tell politicians exactly what to do through direct donations, lobbyists and a shady network of PACs and Super PACS, and the entire US government, legal system and military exist first and foremost to serve the modern oligarchy. So it shouldn't be any surprise that a lazy-eyed, real life Bond villain, a bloated, moonfaced schizophrenic Twitter addict, a sociopathic cyborg with negative charisma, the original Tech wolf in Mr Rogers’ clothing and their 610 billionaire brethren increased their wealth by an estimated 50%, collectively adding nearly $1tn to their net worths in 2020. Just imagine all the new super yachts you can buy with that scratch!
#11 Peter Turchin
Anyone who predicted in 2010 that the global social order would start breaking down in 2020 gets a big fat gold star and a pat on the back from us, even if the reams of data used to support theory - namely that ‘elite overproduction’, ie there are too many well-educated folks with delusions of grandeur and too few elite jobs to fund said delusions - seems oversimplified and somewhat lacking. But he's way smarter than us, so we'll just assume it all makes perfect sense.
#12 Supporters of UBI
As a result of the pandemic, the citizens of pretty much all western countries received de facto UBI (aka universal basic income aka free money aka Andrew Yang's raison d'être) this year. We have to say ‘pretty much all’, because the exceptional USA once again opted out of common sense, choosing instead to support companies and shareholders while sending actual individual humans a grand total of $1400, so they were at least able to afford a month of avocado toast, Frappuccinos® and their own Netflix subscription . But everywhere else the pandemic proved that UBI is not only practical and deployable, but more or less works, which means arguments against it going forward will have to get more creative and disingenuous.
#13 Richard Nixon
Not only is Tricky Dick no longer the consensus choice for worst US president in living memory when contrasted to the dumpster fire that spent the last four years spewing its toxic fumes into the skies above 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, he seems like a downright decent, honest, capable, incredibly good-looking human being, with giant hands to boot.
#14 Vladimir Putin
Rumours concerning Russia's beloved 21st century tsar range from his being the wealthiest person in the history of the world to his suffering from Parkisons and being forced to step down any day now. Whether or not these or any of the others are true, objectively speaking old Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has had one hell of a run over the past two decades. Storming into power after orchestrating a series of false flag attacks that killed hundreds of his fellow countrymen (yeah, that almost certainly happened, you didn't know about that, did you?), Putin quickly consolidated power and wealth and has basically done whatever the fuck he's wanted ever since. Watching his one-time Cold War rival tear itself apart from the inside must be sweet sweet closure for the lifelong little KGB man.
#15 Four Seasons Total Landscaping
It would be hyperbole to state that this humble landscaping company in Philadelphia is the exact spot where both satire and Rudy Giuliani’s legacy died on that fateful Saturday in early November, but it would be fair to say that it’s where they were mercifully taken off life support. What was perhaps the most surreal moment of a most surreal year surely deserves a spot on this list.
#16 Donald J Trump
Sure, he utterly failed in his handling of the pandemic, lost the election in a landslide and tried to cling to power like a two-bit African dictator, but he seems more popular than ever amongst his 70m strong cult followers* and has already managed to fleece them out of close to $500m, which will go a long way towards paying off his personal debt, keeping himself out of jail in the coming years, or - and let's be totally honest, because it's probably going to happen - running again in 2024 and actually winning this time.
*We'd just like to make the point here that while we think Trump is one of the most vile, reprehensible people to ever waddle around this beautiful planet of ours (not to mention a lifelong fraud and the personification of most things that are wrong with the US), we've got zero ill will for the vast majority of the people he's conned into supporting him. To borrow a phrase from the legendary orator himself, many of them are very fine people. And in the same way you'd be disappointed, but not angry, if your friend became a Scientologist or your Nana gave all of her money to a Nigerian prince, we feel the same way about Trump supporters, and have nothing but empathy for them, and suggest you do too, since you can't reasonably hope to have any kind of functioning society if you write off half of its inhabitants as irredeemable pieces of shit. Also, 20 years ago, half the country didn't hate the other half and think they're a bunch of crazies who live in a separate reality. And people didn't inherently change in 20 years. What changed was the media through which we consume information, so it's probably going to be more constructive to direct any anger you might have at the cause of our current problems rather than the symptoms of them. Okay, self-righteous digression over. Now where were we?
#17 Travelling Curmudgeon
Our 2020 started in a flat in downtown Cairo with what we assumed was the police ringing the doorbell for a solid 10 minutes at 7am on 1 January - but turned out to be something even more bizarre - and the year only got better from there! A 30-hour bus ride to Sudan, a minor rebellion by former regime loyalists closing the airport and cancelling our flight out of Khartoum, two weeks aimless wandering around the desert in Jordan barefoot, a week hanging out in Berlin in lieu of a cancelled tourism fair, a week of binge drinking and drugs as the whole world shut down, serendipitously booking a seat on what turned out to be the last flight out of Slovenia 36 hours before it departed, a 2am emergency landing in Istanbul, arriving in Kuala Lumpur exactly 3.5 hours before the country closed to foreigners and then getting to spend the following 9 months on more or less perpetual holiday in Malaysia with virtually no Covid restrictions other than wearing masks and scanning QR codes - the highlight of which was two months living right on the beach in a village with some 200 inhabitants and probably twice as many cats. When it's all said and done, 2020 may very well go down as one of our best year's ever, which puts us in some very strange, awkward, eclectic company.
*Note: If you're viewing this on a phone and want to see the captions for the photos, you've got to click that little white dot in the bottom right corner. Why? Because Squarespace kind of sucks when it comes to website design, which is strange, because that's really supposed to be their thing.
Well, that was an emotional rollercoaster of a list, eh? But we're only halfway through folks, so buckle up, now it's on to the Losers of 2020!
Everyone and everything not listed above, especially women named Karen
Sorry to everyone who didn't see their name mentioned above - especially you Karen, it was totally unfair that your name went from perfectly fine to synonymous with being a terrible person, almost overnight - but just remember, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault....