When Jesus Jones dropped “Right Here, Right Now” in 1990, it felt like a moment of pure exhilaration. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War was thawing, and there was this almost giddy optimism swirling around the dawn of a new era. “I saw the decade in which the world could change in the blink of an eye,” Mike Edwards sang, and yeah—it sure did. But back then, the blink felt like revelation. Revolution. Hope. Now, as the 2020s lumber on like an overstimulated fever dream, we collectively respond: “Hold my beer.”
Because change? Oh, we’ve seen change. It’s just that nobody said it would feel quite like this.
Let’s start with the obvious: a global pandemic that stopped the entire world in its tracks. Remember how we used to romanticize snow days? Now imagine a snow day that lasts two years, involves toilet paper scarcity, and includes being told not to hug your grandmother. The 2020s didn’t just change the world—they unplugged it, plugged it back in, and then changed the Wi-Fi password without telling anyone.
Political upheaval? Check. Economic whiplash? Also check. Every institution—from public health to higher education to the way we shop for groceries—was suddenly up for reexamination. “Right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be,” the song says. Cute. Now try saying that while doomscrolling on your couch in sweatpants you’ve worn for five straight days, trying to figure out if it’s safe to go outside or if there’s a new variant with a Greek letter you haven’t learned yet.
Jesus Jones captured the electricity of a world in flux, but the 2020s have taken that flux and turned it into a full-blown existential identity crisis. We didn’t just get “the future.” We got every future, all at once. AI writing sonnets, billionaires playing astronaut cosplay, climate disasters cropping up like pop-up ads, and memes evolving faster than the CDC’s mask guidelines. There’s something deeply ironic about a song that once celebrated the collapse of walls—metaphorical and otherwise—while today we swipe past more walls than we can count: paywalls, firewalls, emotional walls we’ve built to survive the group chat.
And yet, there’s a thread of familiarity. Jesus Jones wasn’t wrong about the world being capable of instant transformation. He just didn’t see the sequel. The world can change in the blink of an eye, and the 2020s have taught us that sometimes that change shows up like a comet, crashing through your carefully organized planner and turning everything into a calendar-free void. But other times, it’s a quieter shift: a Zoom meeting instead of a commute, a reconsideration of what work even means, a long-overdue reckoning with justice, inclusion, and power.
What has shifted is the mood. Right Here, Right Now was triumphant. It believed in the arc of progress. Today, we’re more cautious. Wiser, maybe. A little more meme-drenched and therapy-prone, but we’ve learned that the blink of an eye can bring both revolution and chaos. Our optimism has been battle-tested. Hope now comes wrapped in disclaimers.
And yet—yes, yet—we’re still standing. Still adapting. Still finding new ways to connect, protest, create, survive. We’re tired, sure, but we’re here. The song ends with a kind of rallying cry: “Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.” The 2020s have given us a deeper version of that idea—not a history we wake from, but one we reckon with. Not a moment of wide-eyed wonder, but one of complex, hard-won clarity.
So if Jesus Jones looked at the end of the 1980s and saw a decade that shifted the world, the 2020s laugh in pandemic-weary sarcasm and say, “You sweet summer child.” Because we’ve seen the blink of an eye. We’ve lived in it. And we know it doesn’t always come with synth-pop and a music video. Sometimes it arrives in silence. In chaos. In courage. In TikTok trends and burnt-out healthcare workers and the way your neighbor suddenly knows how to make sourdough.
Right here, right now, the world is still changing. And somehow, so are we.
Even if we do want our beer back.