I’m happy to announce that today is the 5th year anniversary of this blog. My, my, my, how time flies.

I started this blog just after the events of 2016, a month after we’d gone to D.C. for the Women’s March. I remember that I had already been mulling the idea of blogging again. I think the intensity of national events in that time period really had my thoughts churning. I wanted to start sharing them again, on more than just social media.

On social media and other online forums you don’t have as much control over your content. Technically, what you post belongs to someone else. That’s a reason why I wanted to start up a blog. With a blog, you own the content, assuming you host your own site instead of using something like Tumblr which is just another social media platform. I had maintained a blog called “Generation Watch” in the 2000s, which I painstakingly crafted with direct HTML in a text editor, so I had some experience already.

This time, I researched blogging software, and decided on WordPress. I already had the “stevebarrera dot com” domain name from way back, which at that point just redirected to a simple web site. With WordPress, it was pretty straightforward to set it up on a hosted platform, and I shifted the domain name to that.

On February 25, 2017, I launched “In The Zeitgeist.“ My first blog had been focused on “news and views of the generations” – it was all connected to my study of generations theory. This new one has a lot of generational analysis posts, but also more personal stuff. It’s part commentary, part personal diary. As the tag line in the header image indicates, it chronicles my experience in this era. And what an eventful era it has been.

When I started this blog I lived alone, in a house I owned in North Carolina. Since then, much has changed in my life. I switched jobs, sold my house and moved to Pennsylvania. Then I switched jobs again. Then a pandemic happened. I moved into my BFF’s house and started working from home. I’m still here, still staying home most of the time, keeping very busy with work and multiple other projects, and watching world events unfold.

It’s been an amazing 5 years, and I’ve enjoyed blogging throughout it all. This is the 216th post on this blog, which means I’ve averaged 3.6 posts a month during this time. I hope to keep up the pace in the years to come.

Thank you to all who have read and commented on my posts, and liked and shared them on social media. It means a lot to me to know that people are reading what I write. I’ll keep chronicling these times, and I wish us all the best of luck navigating the changes.