[davesque]

Sorry, but I think I can objectively say that a year in which a global pandemic occurred that took millions of lives and completely upended normal life for the majority of people counts as one of the worst years since 1920. The fact that anyone would question that in this forum is, I think, extremely telling.

[username90]

Are you just ignoring all the wars with more than a million casualties, all the famines with many millions of casualties etc, during the past 100 years? 2020 doesn't even make it to the top 10 possibly not even top 20. Maybe it was one of the worst for USA, but not if you take the world overall.

[kbelder]

I think that the last several decades... maybe the last 5-6 decades... have been so GOOD compared to what came before, and to the bulk of human history, that when a bad year comes around it's especially shocking. The window has shifted.

I'm not arguing that 2020 wasn't a really bad year, but just that a hundred years ago this wouldn't have seemed such an outlier.