The next time you have a spare hour, look up ssa.gov/OACT/babynames. It has searchable baby name rankings going back to 1879. Even niftier is wolframalpha.com, which displays popularity profiles for given names and surnames, replete with statistics and frequency distributions.

These resources, though not without their limitations (they seem to exaggerate the dominance of Anglo-American names, and lots of interesting micro-trends go undocumented because the ranking stops at 1000), are crying to be overanalyzed in a reflective piece about the past decade’s major social trends. Are we mice, or are we liberal arts students?

Ten years ago, we were a nation of Jacobs and Emilys, of Michaels and Hannahs, of Madisons and Matthews and Ashleys and Joshuas. Today the boys are pretty much the same (Jacob and Michael are still the top two), although we somehow invented Jayden (11th) and Aiden (16th). Emma and Isabella are the top two girls. Also Chloe, Mia, Ella, and Addison bitch-slapped Victoria, Brianna, Kayla, and Taylor off the girls’ Top 20.

Really? Addison? Do you know anybody named Addison? Or did the hospital just lose Madison’s M? According to WolframApha, there are 16,367 Addisons running around our fruited plains. Judging by the age distribution, the vast majority are prepubescent. That’s over three Dartmouths-full of prepubescent Addisons. And Mia? As in who, Mia Hamm? Do you want your daughters to gallavant down soccer fields, jerseyless? And none of this explains how homely Victoria got onto the 2000 list in the first place.

I mean, I guess it makes some sense. Anne Hathaway’s Mia Thermopolis got the Genovian crown in 2004. Chloe’s been helping Jack Bauer figure out GoogleMaps since 2003. Mia Hamm just got inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, and we all know Hathaway’s Ella Enchanted had a pretty sick princess career, too. But these are rather arbitrary figures to deify—unless we define the past decade as a primarily medieval, shirtless, terrorist-fighting one (which, in some ways, it might have been).

We would also have to accept Anne Hathaway as the most influential political leader of the decade. Think about this.

Unwilling to believe that our decade boiled down to shirtless feudal she-demons, I began testing hypotheses. Surely iconic fictional characters had left their mark? Apparently no. Bella and Edward? Not a peep. Harry and Ronald? At least they plummet well. Hermione never cracked the top 1000, and Jacob peaked in the late 1990s. Then again, we could be dealing with a time delay. Flash forward to 2020: the kindergartens overflow with Emmetts and Alices, the sandboxes burst with Bellas and Edwards, and soccer moms sleeplessly patrol the streets, silver Volvos blasting Lykke Li.

Actor names redeemed our female hellion model to some extent. While our decade’s guy actors never generated much buzz, its female actors spawned huge microtrends. Kiera climbed 99 places between 1999 and 2008 (from 416th to 315th), Angelina rose 168 (from 237th to 69th), and Reese leaped a jaw-dropping 730 (from 886th to 156th). Way to go, Witherspoon.

By now, you’ve probably noticed that boys don’t get cool names. Unless his parents are consciously attempting to make the kid Googleable, his name will be a workhorse: not too unique, not much aplomb, just grimness and masculinity and century-weathering stoicism. (Though I, for one, know a real live baby named Barack. He’s also extraordinarily white. Ouch.)

What determines trends in baby names? Were the ’00s really populated by a bunch of jersey-swinging, terrorist-smashing, curse-breaking princesses? Were their males really featureless Puritanical lumps? Well, my child, the good Lord works in mysterious ways. He lifteth up, and He breaketh down. He nameth some one thing, and He nameth some another, and frequently He changeth His mind.

We can all marvel at the success stories, the long and glorious baby-name empires—like John, who hasn’t left the Top 20 in a century, or Michael, who swept across the baby steppes in the 1930s, settled in the top 5 in 1949, and hasn’t budged since. But we can also see the mossy ruins of shattered civilizations, the stark Machu Picchus against the blood-red baby sky. A century ago, Mildred and Clarence were living the high life. Today, they’re probably rattling tin cups at passing strangers. To get money. To buy liquor. To forget.

It’s sort of cosmically humbling, when you think about it. Because why, ultimately, do parents pick a name? To honor the dead, to please the ear, to give the poor tyke a social chance. For all our human striving, we can rarely dissolve these pebbles of truth. Great men and events may wash them, but theirs are merely feeble waves.

I personally will be naming my children Mildred Fionab’elle and Tayshawne Barack-Clarence, after my fairy godmother and deceased great-uncle. By the time Google takes over the world and buys quarter shares in everybody’s souls, Mildred and Tayshawne should have their own Fortune 500 companies and name-specific Gmail addresses. They’ll be vacationing in Genovia with Ella of Frell and Mia Hamm. Will yours?