This is the part III and final post of the “Things Pop Culture Will Romanticize About The 2010s” series. If you haven’t checked out the earlier parts, you can check out part I here and part II here.

In the first two parts, the things and phenomena that I listed about the 2010s, were a bit on the funnier side. But today, I wanted to list some of the more serious (but interesting) things. So, without further adieu, here they are.

Decade of the Underdogs

In the 2010s, somehow everyone is an underdog with dreams. The internet and traditional media is full of underdog stories about people who started somewhere small and ultimately made it big.

And people love these kind of stories because they encourage the thinking that anyone can succeed with the right idea and the right attitude in life. Underdog stories are massive selling points on social media.

In our lives, dreams require the power of newfound notoriety and change to come true. Everyone wants to be somebody or something and change something for good. All of us wish to appear out of nowhere and create or build something that is worth recognizing.

Underdog stories are most prevalent in the technology sector where there are countless stories of young high-school and college kids with dreams and that one great idea and who would often start small, usually from their mom's basement or college dorm rooms, and would ultimately end up creating multi-million dollar tech companies and sometimes even billion-dollar giants.

Remobilization of Youth In Politics

2010s has been the decade when young people around the world started taking interest in politics and political discourse for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

With the end of the Cold War, there was a relative peace around the world and the youth of the world focused on other things like life, technology, entertainment, sports, fashion etc - life's pleasures basically. There was no real need to pay interest to political discourses and nor was there any need to be worried about the geopolitical landscape.

However, since the start of the 2010s, the world order as we know, started changing and changed quickly. The awe-inspiring rise of China has been a major factor behind the change. There is now, for the first time since the Cold War, a nation so powerful that it can be considered a pole opposite to the United States in the affairs of the world.

With countries having to choose one of the two poles and with the risk of inviting the rage of the other pole, the youth of the world began sensing the changing geopolitical landscape and therefore we see them take more and more interest in political discourses and policies; way more in this decade as compared to last decade or even the 90s that followed that Cold War.

Romantically Low Radiation

"Remember that time when technology didn't use to give us cancer?" This is exactly the question that future generations would ask when they would remember the 2010s. We are most likely living in the last decade of low radiation.

The 2000s was the decade when the developed world went totally 'cellular'. The 2010s is when the developing world is going mobile. And we are talking about billions of people in the developing countries experiencing 'the joys of cellular' for the first time along with the dangers it brings to their health.

There is hardly any landscape devoid of cellphone towers now. They are everywhere - in our forests, on our mountains, on our beaches, our farmlands, our cities, our villages, just about everywhere. And cellphone towers emit radiation, a lot of radiation that is dangerous for the health of people living around them.

And the worst thing is, this is just the beginning. As the world will move to breathtakingly high-speed 5G networks in the future involving consumption of terrifically high amounts of data, the infrastructure supporting it would be massive - a scale that will be multi-fold higher than what the current 3G and 4G networks require.