It’s the year 2090. A museum curator is assembling an exhibit called “How They Lived: The 2020s.” She needs to pick ten everyday objects that explain the decade to people who weren’t there. Not the flashiest gadgets. Not the most expensive things. Just the objects that sat quietly in people’s homes and pockets and told the truth about how life was being lived. I think some of the objects that would definitely make it to that curation are as follows:

1. The N95 mask

This is the obvious one and the most loaded. It started as a PPE device most people had never heard of. By 2021, it was a fashion accessory, a political statement, a class marker, and a daily routine all at once. A future historian wouldn’t just see a piece of fabric, they’d see the decade’s central tension: individual freedom versus collective responsibility.  It was the object that forced the world to ask two-fold questions at the same time: 1.  Do I trust the people around me?  2. How do I become part of a solution?

2. The delivery bag

The decade we stopped going to things and made things come to us. Food, groceries, clothes, furniture — anything you wanted arrived at your door in a branded bag carried by a stranger on a bicycle. The delivery bag is the artifact of a generation that traded public life for the convenience of staying home.

3. The QR code menu

It existed before the pandemic. Nobody used it. Then suddenly, every restaurant in the world replaced physical menus with a little square you scan with your phone. Most of them never went back. It seems small, but it represents a massive cultural shift – the moment physical touch points started disappearing from everyday life. No more handing something to a stranger. No more shared objects. The QR menu is a perfect object to describe when demonstration of hygiene became undeniably important to everyone.

4. The Ring doorbell with a security camera

This one is darker than it looks. On the surface, it’s a security camera. Underneath, it’s a symptom of something bigger. The erosion of neighbourhood trust. We used to know our neighbours. Now we watch them on an app. The Ring doorbell turned every front porch into a surveillance point and every delivery driver into a potential suspect. A future historian would look at this decade as the turning point where the culture of community that made people feel safe without a camera slowly started to diminish

5. The AirPods

Not headphones. AirPods specifically – no wires, premium, evolved. They made it socially acceptable to be in public but mentally somewhere else. Walking down the street, sitting on the subway, standing in a grocery line but listening to a podcast, a voice note, your own curated world. The need was real – to separate ourselves from the overload of stimulation around us and create a safe space even in public. We quietly opted out of shared experience whenever we wanted. Without disconnecting fully, we learnt to put the society on mute.

6. The standing desk / home office

Or more accurately the home office setup. The standing desk, the webcam, the fake bookshelf background. These objects didn’t just appear in homes during the pandemic. They stayed. They represent the decade when work moved into the into homes and never fully left. The standing desk is the artifact of a cultural bargain: we traded the commute for flexibility, but we also traded the boundary between who we are at work and who we are at home.

7. The reusable water bottle/tumblers

Specifically, the status ones – Stanley, Hydroflask, Frank Green. Reusable bottles became identity objects in the 2020s. Not because people were thirstier, but because carrying one became a signal – I care about the planet, I’m health conscious, I have taste. A $50 water bottle is an absurd concept if you think about it. In 2020s sustainability went mainstream and became aesthetic. Doing the right thing had to also look good.

8. The air purifier

This one is quite devastating. Air purifiers became household essentials not because of a marketing campaign, but because the air got worse. Wildfires in Canada, Australia, California. Pandemic anxiety about indoor air quality. Pollution in major cities that keeps getting denser. We stopped trusting the air we breathe. When a basic human function requires a consumer product to feel safe, we know that something fundamental had shifted.

9. The smart-health trackers

Perhaps the most telling object of the decade. Not long ago, continuous glucose monitors were designed for diabetics. By the mid-2020s, perfectly healthy people were wearing them to “optimise” their health. Companies like Levels and Zoe turned blood sugar tracking into a wellness trend. Then we started monitoring everything, from calories, sleep cycles to stress levels. The 2020s will be remembered as the decade health became data and the body became something to monitor rather than trust. It reveals a culture deeply anxious about control, willing to quantify everything to get it. Maybe it’s because the bigger things- climate, politics, the economy – felt completely out of control, and people resorted to managing the only thing they could: themselves.

10. Air fryer

The air fryer is proof that people wanted to be healthier but not at the cost of taste. Salads were always an option. Steamed vegetables existed. But nobody wanted that life. So instead of changing what they ate, people changed how they cooked it and the air fryer became the guilt-free compromise of a generation that wanted health without giving up the crunch.

11.The Portable Charger / Power Bank

Though invented in 2011, it was unmissable in any household by 2020s. We carry backup batteries for our devices the way previous generations carried spare change. The power bank reveals the decade’s deepest dependency, smartphones. We’d rather carry extra weight in our bags than risk our phone dying for an hour. It’s the anxiety object of the 2020s.

12.The Ring Light

Everyone owns one now. It started with YouTubers and influencers, but by the mid-2020s it was in everyone’s home offices and living rooms. The ring light is the artifact of a decade when everyone became their own content creators and performers on Zoom, on Instagram, on TikTok. There was a need to look good and presentable all the time even while in the bounds of your own home. This would tell a story about people being concerned about their image online.

These twelve objects won’t make headlines in a history textbook. But they’ll sit in a glass case somewhere, with a small placard underneath, and tell the truth about a decade better than any news article could. They are not the whole story — technology, politics, economics, and shifting mindsets are rewriting the world in bigger, louder ways. But these quiet everyday things? They’re the foundation. The cultural symbols that future generations will point to and say – “2020s was a decade of rewiring in modern human history — a rewiring of habits, routines, personal boundaries, and trust.” It laid the ground for what everyday life would look like for generations to come.

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If you enjoyed this piece and want to go deeper into how everyday things quietly shape the culture of an era, I’d highly recommend “The Century of the Self” by Adam Curtis. It traces how ordinary consumer products — from soap to cigarettes to kitchen appliances — were used to reshape how entire generations thought, felt, and lived. Watching it, you realise that the objects around us have never been just objects. They’ve always been telling us something about ourselves. It’s long and dense but it will change how you look at everything on a shelf. Watch it in your own time