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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.
Y2K wasen’t I big deal to live through… nothing happened. There was more hype for Star Wars episode one
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 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
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.
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.
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.
And they want people to make kids through all of it too.
Add next year’s “biggest il niño in 500-1000” years to the list
This is exactly the reason Billy Joel wrote We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Every generation has its challenges.
Hard men make good times ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Good times make soft men.
Soft men like to take a little nap
dont forget:
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housing crisis
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fentanyl crisis
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destruction of unions
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Billionaires purchasing all MSM
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Destruction of the internet
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Citizens united
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Trickle down economics
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2 failed invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan
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militarization of police
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normalization of genocide
Oxycontin crisis, satanic panic, Columbine and the proliferation of the modern school shooting crisis, all the tobacco execs lying to congress about nicotine being addictive and facing no consequences, and the open and acknowledged deployment of weapons of war in space thus opening us up to a brand new version of the Cuban missile crisis… In Space (space space space)
Oh we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world’s been turning.
War on Terror BS War on Drugs BS
It is a rather long list of BS
Oh oh oh, and that one time George Bush collectively cock teased us all by almost choking to death on that pretzel.
We also had to deal with Obama giving us an iota of hope for a short period and then ends up all he wanted to do all day was drone strike poor people.
My biggest tinfoil hat take is that the fent was put there on purpose to punish drug culture, as the public discovered that many drugs that are scheduled aren’t really as harmful or addictive as we’re told when done in moderation, and they hated that they were losing control of the narrative that the police state is for your own protection.
So they decided to poison dissenters so they could say “See? Told you so.” I don’t think they quite realized how many opioid soccer moms were trying to cope at that point, but I wouldn’t expect much competence from a government that was willing to purge their own citizens for the crime of “going to a rave occasionally”.
Huh.
That actually makes sense…
Don’t forget all the climate stuff happening exactly as predicted like twenty years ago.
i thought they did those predictions in the 70s
Yup, like he said twenty years… Oh, wait… I’m too old…
And we need to start calling it, sucking up economics.
Also to add to your list.
- Patriot act, establishment of the surveillance state.
- Obama betrayal to the Oligarchs.
- You will own nothing and be happy.
- 2008 recession and ongoing housing capture
- America exiting the rules based international order.
- Climate denial turning into climate-“fuck off, we are a death cult”
- Growing wealth chasm.
10 things we are so passionate about here’s what you’ve done for each, please correct me if I’m being too cynical of you personally, but this applies to most so:
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing, and how easy is it to get the ball rolling on union stuff
Nothing, consumed said media
Actively posting our worthless thoughts, we are ruining the internet rn
Voted for citizens united candidate or didn’t vote at all
Nothing
Nothing, maybe made the internet worse about it
Nothing
This is my favorite: nothing but with a sense of superiority for pointing it out
I don’t want you to take this as a personal attack but I feel like that’s what we as a generation are accomplishing in regards to your list.
These things are not some helpless thing we are assigned forever. We can be the change.
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“Living through Y2K”? What does that even mean?
Don’t you remember all the computers bursting into flames and every nuclear bombs going off?
I specifically remember how that didn’t happen. Because people did a lot of work, sure; but what could it possibly mean to have “lived through” other people doing work and solving problems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on mitigation.
Yeah but what does it mean to “live through” that?
Don’t forget all the forever wars.
You just triggered me. ToT
Generation X lived through the Cold War, the oil crisis, the Powell Memo (the beginning of the corporate takeover), Reaganomics, neoliberal deregulation, the aids epidemic, the threat of nuclear annihilation, Y2K, 9/11, a pandemic, 2 economic recessions, and a possible AI apocalypse along with more nuclear annihilation threats and watches as America turns into a fascist hellscape all before they hit 57 years old.
Yay, we win.
Dot.com bust?
Most of those happened before we were 10 years old therefore we were unaware & unaffected, and Y2K was a big ball of nothing. So I’d say we’re about equally politically traumatized as millennials except we had way funner childhoods 😜
I very much remeber being a kid and having a very cold apartment in winter because the energy costs were sky high. I still layer like I’m in Antarctica every winter and try to never turn up the heat (though that is a meme I guess).
We were the first with video games though.
We were the first with video games though
I’ll never forget Christmas 1979 or 1980 Dad bought the family our first gaming console, an Atari 2600, and I’ll never forget that they said it cost $100, and apparently that was a lot of money back then. My dad was 30 years old and had bought the house we were living in when he was 26 years old, a newly built single -family home in a new subdivision, a 26-year-old supporting a family of 4 on one income 🤯
Y2K was only nothing because people around the world rallied to address it. I guess we can rally for some things.
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.
Don’t forget the return of fascism 😮💨
Purely as an excuse to post this video, Fascism never really went away… https://youtu.be/OLkPwxcIji0
Every 100 years there will be a rise of facist, and only the Avatar can stop them.
Which one? The last airbender, one of those 10 feet tall blue guys with the magical ponytails, or someone else?
I am thinking this is the one we need
I would like to change my answer. We need this avatar.
With a side of them
This
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.
