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From millennial perspective Y2K was a no event. Nothing happened and they weren’t developers fixing software to ensure that nothing happened.
Am a millennial.
Okay, so:
Gen Alpha has experienced the pandemic, economic shock and recession around that time, followed by insane inflation, the AI disruption and uncertainty, and climate and extreme weather disruption as well. Not even mentioning wars.
Millennials have all that, and the Great Recession, the dot com crash, I guess we could mention 9/11, but like most people were not directly impacted by that but rather the wars after, the housing affordability crisis, and I dunno, maybe the Super Bowl Timberlake-Jackson incident, sure chuck that in.
Gen X has all that, the savings and loan crisis in the 80s-90s, Black Monday, recessions in the 80s, stagflation in their early adulthood and teen years, oil crises, and fucking Milli Vanilli.
And then Baby Boomers… well… whatever. I’m already tired of doing this. Every generation deals with a lotta shit.
And again we kinda glossed over wars.
Let’s have some real fun.
The late Roman “Are We Seriously Doing This Again?” generation born circa 235-260 CE. They experienced the empire nearly falling apart as emperors were replaced like Walmart greeters, a plague to live through, a shit ton of wars and economic debasement along with political instability destroyed any economy they had, foreign invasions were an average Tuesday, and then I think Rome split into basically east and west and the Capitol lost control.
Yeah, generations get amnesia when they don’t listen to their elders.
It’s important to learn history, but “listen to your elders” is just toxic bullshit. Every elder I knew growing up that talked that way was a fucking dick.
ain’t no war but class war.
I think Yemeni schoolbuses hit by US missiles might be more than just a class war.
Yemen? The country right next to one of the world’s largest trade routes? The intervention there seems even more obviously economically motivated than most.
Except those bombs and a gun to the face.
Every generation deals with a lotta shit.
Thank you.
Y2K also didn’t really result in anything because it was a fixable problem that got acted upon. Most of us would have been in school around that time too.
Also don’t really see the problem with 9/11, surely the vast majority of people wouldn’t have been involved in any way or known anyone who was? Of course its a bigger issue for those that were, but it seems odd to stick it in as a generational experience. I didn’t even hear about it until a day or two later when it happened to be on the news before school.
Agreed. I was playing off the meme, but I especially agree about 9/11. Aside from the fear of a draft, unless a young millennial went into the military, or someone lived near the incident in NY or knew people personally affected, most of us were unaffected.
Also, plenty of worse incidents have occurred where WAY more people died. I have always found the 9/11 obsession to just be toxic nationalist propaganda. If the US actually gave a shit about it, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so fucking hard to give affected first responders the Healthcare they deserve.
Can’t be. He’s smoking.
They took that away from us too.
I know that it is one of the most senselessly self destructive acts that one can commit, and that many people think it smells bad, and that it is a representation of class struggle and poor education, but I miss when all of the Cool people that didn’t give a fuck hung out outside of a workplace swapping stories whilst killing themselves at similar rates.
I guess people could stand around and look at their phone for fifteen minutes part way through their shift, but it doesn’t hold the gravity of wincing against a sheet of sleet and recalling the harrowing tale of the Nor’ Easter of ‘95. Or that one time Sheila kicked you out of the apartment for No Reason during the Nor’ Easter of '95.
If I see someone out on a 15 they have their headphones on because they have their reality so bespokely edited that their world is filled with carefully selected music or bantering friends they will never meet.
The shrooms are wearing off, so I should stop yelling at clouds soon.
Smoking is bad and kills you. But it was the last place we had to be social. Now people dont even go outside to smoke cause they just lowkey hit their vape indoors.
I used to think the old timers were lame for talking about “back in my day”, but now i realize what decades of the enshitifcation of everything does to people.
Change has been accelerating so the intensity of differences between today and “back in my day” is only increasing with time. Millenials won’t need to exaggerate to get the same effect boomers needed to exaggerate their stories for.
Gen Z will be like, ‘I used to have to ask strangers if they had games on their phones, Alphas get their first tablet as soon as their eyes can focus. Kids nowadays! I was bored for MINUTES at a time, and I didn’t complain!’
I saw a breadtube that posited that one of the reasons that cigarettes really took off (aside from marketing) is that it gave men and women a reason/excuse to talk.
I believe it was also before any sort of worker’s rights, so most things were highly sexually segregated and everyone just worked until the boss got tired.
Don’t forget all the forever wars.
You just triggered me. ToT
Lol @ Y2K being mentioned on par with all this other shit. Never in life have I experienced such a huge nothing burger.
It was nothing because of the HUGE work that went into avoiding the problem.
Sure, but millenials didn’t do that work. Most of us were like 10 when Y2K happened
It was a huge amount of work that paid extraordinarily well. One could argue that Y2K was a kind-of Keynesian program for software developers, spawning an entire generation of 90s upper-income schlubs and mini-millionaire bosses.
Everyone from Marc Andressen to Mark Cuban owe their personal fortunes to the enormous infusion of cash into the IT sector created by the Y2K business boom. Incidentally, the bottom fell out of the tech market in… 2001.
Yes, but it’s being mentioned alongside things that widely and tangibly affected the (American) populace. Y2K did not have many actual effects for the average person, just a couple of knock-on effects created more from people’s fear of Y2K.
There was an immense effort to rectify the issue, same with the ozone crisis. Cant say the same for current issues, most news has to both-sides everything and there are much more (or atleast more prominent) contrarians like the anti-vaxers. Never again will we see a unified front against a global issue because someone will always benifit personally if failure is on the table.
But the people putting in that effort weren’t millennials, it was their parents.
What have millennials put effort into except complain about how much things are worse for them? At Least Gen X had the fortitude to say ‘huck it, I just don’t care and won’t participate’.
It was overhyped but for the wrong reasons; very simply said it was like converting systems to use 64bit instead of 32 so they could handle the bigger numbers we were gonna needEdit: too simply said and also wrong.
Still easier than people born 100 years ago.
You’re not wrong, but it was easier for people born 60 years ago
Nah. If you were born in 1966, by the time you turned 30 you lived through Vietnam, the AIDS epidemic, the civil rights movement, Desert Storm, and you spent your entire life with nuclear apocalypse hanging over you in the form of the cold war. And the US economy wasn’t doing great either until the 90s.
But in America, you could afford groceries most of that time.
No, they couldn’t afford groceries then either. Goodness. Like do people forget the oil crisis in the 70’s? Wonder why so many receipes came out about Jello and microwaves?
In fairness, microwaves went mainstream in the 1980s. Most people didn’t have them in the ten years prior.
There’s a joke in the movie “American Hustle”, taking place in 1978, about the lead character getting a $3,000 “Science Oven” as a bribe.
Aids and nuclear war I agree but for someone born in 1966, they would be too young to be personally affected by Vietnam and the oil shocks of the 70s and by the time the Cold War ended and the 90s came about they’d be earning well . The Simpsons broadcast in 1989 and Homer was a blue collar worker who owned a house on one income with a stay-at-home wife and three kids. That was possible at the time.
If you were born in 66, you were 8 when Vietnam ended. The civil rights movement was pretty much done by 74 as well. You might have fought in Desert Storm, but that was so small and quick the odds of you being there are pretty small. The AIDS epidemic was bad, but if you didn’t live in a major city you likely wouldn’t have known anyone with AIDS. The Cold War pretty was winding down by the time you were born and the threat of nuclear apocalypse was mostly bit really worth worrying about by the 80s.
*If you were white and American
True – but it is seemingly less so today for white americans (an exeedingly large demographic) to be able to afford basic lifestyles.
It does suggest a major shift in affordability if your main christian white majority can’t buy groceries
Shhh, chronically online white youth don’t want to talk about that. Hell if you were a woman you couldn’t even have a bank account on your own until 1974.
if you were a woman you couldn’t even have a bank account on your own until 1974.
That’s not actually true though. The banks were not required to allow women to open bank accounts but plenty did anyway.
So if the bank manager of your town felt slighted that you didn’t go with him to prom he could deny you a next step in life? Yeah. That’s not so bad.
Edit: I’m not saying you are wrong.
Oh for sure, it’s not a sensible way to run things.
There’s advantages and disadvantages of allowing local/personal discretion.
Was it? Measles and AIDS. Vietnam and Stagflation and Segregation. Nixon and leaded gasoline and crack cocaine. The height of the Cold War. The forty-year run of de-industrialization. Some of the darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement.
It only seems easy because you didn’t have to live through it.
Unfortunately that isn’t even true either.
Y2K wasen’t I big deal to live through… nothing happened. There was more hype for Star Wars episode one
It was a pretty big deal, it just didn’t amount to anything. But a lot of people were worried about it.
My friend had one of the very few personal computers that was actually at risk from the timekeeping issue. The only real threat was that some important computer somewhere was forgotten in the patching that happened beforehand and could cause a cascading failure or something. Otherwise I remember a news story about the old people who had headstones that were pre-carved with 19__ in the death date.
I know you’re right. I’m just saying living through It as an early teen wasen’t a big deal.
911 and Columbine affected me way more
As someone who was working tech in 1999 i will shove forks in your buttocks if you say that again
Lulz, sorry dude. I think I was 12ish at the time. But because of your hard work. It was smooth sailing for me.
I thank you for your service.
It took several billion dollars and basically every computer engineer with the knowledge to make sure Y2K “wasen’t I big deal to live through”.
They saw the storm Coming and plotted a course. Because of that, living through it for me wasn’t a big deal.
Add next year’s “biggest il niño in 500-1000” years to the list
I think the bigger picture is missed here - it’s the natural environment that is suitable for humans to exist that has been pillaged, razed, and sold off for cheap while a handful few have become obscenely wealthy as the guardrails that were put in place to prevent/mitigate such environmental extraction are dismantled all in the name of short term gains. While the guardrails can be placed back in relatively quickly, it is the raping and the alternation of the natural environment that is not easily reversed - if even possible at all right now.
That is the real cards current and future generations have to deal with or the lack of…the longer we ignore this issue, the worse it will get. Tragedy of the commons.
But I will also mention that millennials were pretty much sold lies at every turn while growing up.
This is exactly the reason Billy Joel wrote We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Every generation has its challenges.
And they want people to make kids through all of it too.
I ain’t even thirty and I only “missed” Y2K, ha.
There was a lot of toilet paper and investing in gold.
In retrospect, I wish I had dumped my savings into gold rather than buying that sweet Matrix leather jacket.
Blow jobs are fleeting. Gold is forever.
“They” being the Talking Heads?
Same as it ever wasAnd the days go by…
Two recessions as adults.
Hard men make good times ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Good times make soft men.
Soft men like to take a little nap
