If you are under 30 you didn’t really experience Y2K, or the 2008 recession.
I may have been a child in 2007-2008 but I did felt the recession when our house had to be sold, and we could barely feed our family just because the Lehman Brothers fucked up.
Im 36 but never had money, so the 1997 AFC, Y2k, 2008 rec were just newspaper headlines I saw and ignored while continuing to eat chips.
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Yeah but like did you have to work on it for your job? Because nothing actually happened to anyone except people who fixed Y2k bugs leading up to it.
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Wow. Your parents were not typical at all, but I can see how you would remember that!
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I think under 30s may have experienced the recession. Maybe not first hand in terms of job loss but I imagine the quality of life impacts on children will have been felt.
Tons of those folks who lost jobs had children. I didn’t know what a recession was but I do remember my mom crying a lot and then us moving from a nice house in the suburbs to an apartment in the bad side of town.
Don’t forget you have Y2K38 coming up. Whereas Y2K was all about mainframes and old databases, Y2K38 will be older embedded equipment. Less impact if it goes bad, but there’s no way to predict everything it’ll affect.
Mainframes and old databases? It was 98/99 not 88/89. I spent all my time updating Netscape navigator, Windows and Java in my IT job for a fortune 500. I’m sure someone was still running crazy old stuff, someone always is, but it was solidly the age of the internet by then. I had a cable modem by that time.
With regards to old databases, they were used by tons of small businesses and industrial users. If a flour mill had a system written to track bulk shipments in 1992, you can bet it would still be in use in 2000. Fortune 500 companies run mostly off the shelf software and keep it up to date, but the SCADA system that runs a factory is a different story.
As far as mainframes go, the financial and manufacturing industries still use them. Quite a bit of the infrastructure we rely on even today is written in COBOL. It’s easy to miss because the mainframe community is almost completely separate from the rest of the IT world, but it’s there and even with IBM’s push to get everyone on Java it won’t be going away any time soon.
You forgot -
- Housing crisis which makes house impossible to afford.
- Rent crisis which makes event renting harder and gives owners freehand to increase rent however they like
- Global job scarcity
- Stagnation of income in sight of exploding inflation
True, but it has to be readable.
- Forest fires that turn the sky red
- Record rainfall and flooding
- Once in a millennium heatwaves
It depends on where you live of course
- being called millenials
I’m banking on it so I don’t have a retirement fund.
If you fuckers fix everything you better have socialized retirement in the package.
Yes, that is why I don’t have a significant retirement fund. It’s all part of my plan. /s
He’s not wrong … I’m retiring in 15 years. Calculated some funds for the first 10 or so… But come 75 I’d be either dead or won some lottery …
Honestly, I’ve seen what happens in care homes and hospitals, and have heard enough horror stories.
Unless you’re lucky enough to have good kids, who are able to visit often and take care of your interests, the last decade of your life can be utterly horrible and sad.
Ukrainian 90s babies living through the collapse of the USSR, decade of banditry and poverty, 2 revolutions, a plague, and the largest war since WW2 before they hit 30:
Yup, you guys where hit worst than most. Not only as magnitude order but also as time span.
Well … I think the Middle East wants to enter the chat. Multiple wars, multiple revolutions, and multiple plagues.
You’re right.
Y2k wasnt a thing, too young to be in the towers, didnt have a job in 08 (most of them) probably wont be a ww3… drama queens…
Another “poor me, the snowflake” meme.
Don’t go taking all the glory of living in a doomed world. Us 80’s babies are right there with you.
Imagine living through the Reagan administration and still having any hope left. I was too young to understand why, but even then I felt it draining from the world. And then Challenger exploded.
@CeruleanRuin We had no idea we were headed for our inevitable demise. I witnessed the Challenger explode when I was 4, one of my first memories. Red flag right out the gate.
But with work experience.
Though to be fair, I don’t really remember the world pre 9/11 as a ‘91 baby, so I don’t miss my freedom
Only thing us 80s babies lucked into is that a few of us were able to buy a house before prices skyrocketed. I don’t know how anyone just starting off could even get a foot in the door in this market.
Yup, I feel like I was the last one in, and it still took 10+ years to save up the deposit
I was just on the cusp of having enough of a down payment during Covid when that 2020 market crashed in big cities. I didn’t make it and now I definitely won’t be making it anytime soon. Glad you made it though.
Does GenZ even remember Y2K?
(Hint: it was a nothingburger for the most part)
I’ve read that it turned out to be a nothing burger primarily because there was a concerted effort to address the problem. That said, yeah, nothing melted down so functionally there was no issue.
Yeah, there was a ton of awareness leading up and code was brought up to spec. I’m not saying nothing was done and we skirted through. Luckily there were only a couple of blips that didn’t really wreck anything
Could definitely chuck Global Pandemic on the list too.
If you’re American you’d probably also include the war(s) in the Middle East, nationwide racial justice protests, multiple impeachments, the arrest & indictment of a former president, the failed coup on Jan 6th, and a lot more.
It’s been a busy 2-3 decades…
Pretty sure “a plague” is referencing covid here, so it’s already on the list
Expecting an American from butt fuck Illinois to know what Plague means? Let him be, he’s only got 500mbs of Internet per month
I grew up in a rural shit hole where we got 50 kbps. In 2010. That’s K like “kill myself” not M as in “Moneybags”. Have you ever downloaded 4 gigabyte video games at 50 kbps so you can play with your friends? These are real problems.
“May you live in interesting times.”
90s kids are too young to have genuinely been affected by most of this. They’re mostly now in their mid 20s and have been in the workforce for less than a decade.
I think 70s and 80s kids saw a lot worse because the recessions actually affected their working lives.
As a 74, the recession in the early 90s was crushing as I entered the workforce. The Y2K Dotcom crash in 2000 ended my career in my mid 20s. The subprime meltdown hit me in my prime working years (34).
I’m born 94. I remember mowing lawns of the neighborhood and selling all of my pokemon cards in 2006 because my parents explain to me we were struggling. They didn’t ask me to do it. I did it on my own. Because I wanted to help.
I didn’t need to be and adult to experience an economic crisis. And it didn’t exactly stop in 2007 either now did it?
I remember 2001 as well. It was a very big deal.
Y2k was nothing. Or so I was told when I asked what the fuzz is about. Since some people acted like the Mayan calendar was coming to an end.
So I don’t see why you feel like you need to gatekeep who did and didn’t “genuinly” experience certain events. Those who knows, knows. Isn’t that enough?
You’re might be thinking of Y2K and I’m talking about the Dotcom crash in the year 20000 where people like me lost our jobs.
Your experiences are valid, just different because you were a child during most of it. Even subprime you were just 14.
I also have memories of things my parents went through like nuclear protests, strikes, things like that, but I was more insulated to them as a child.
You say they are different. That’s true. But that doesn’t make it any less genuine or felt.
I may have been 12 when the economy turned sour in 2006. But so what? I can Guarantee you, I felt that just as much as anyone else.
Good for you that you were insulated from protests and strikes. I cant say I was insulated from an economy that collapsed. I didn’t lose a job. Because I didn’t have one. But that doesn’t really seem to matter at all when I was affected by it just like everyone else.
I didn’t lose a job. But I had to eat oatmeal 3 times a day. I chose to sell my stuff and do extra work to provide some extra money to my household. Because times were rough. So tell me again how me being a kid matters?
Are you really arguing that having no actual responsibilities is the same as having the weight of a collapsing world on your shoulders? Having been a kid, then a teenager, and now an adult, I can’t even comprehend how someone can seriously make this argument.
No. That is not what I’m arguing. Would you like to read my comment again and apply more than a kindergarten level of reading comprehension?
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They also remember the before times, so they understand what was lost.
Do 90s babies really remember Y2K and 9/11?
I was Born '83 and remember chernobyl. Not that i would have known anything about it. But my parents ran out, hauled me inside and said no more playing outside. In retrospective that was quite disturbing it seems.
Trauma, unlike wealth, actually does trickle down. So even though kids don’t understsnd where it’s coming from, major traumatic events will affect them second-hand.
Being in the UK no one believed me when I was concerned at school after hearing about 9/11. My grandad was in there, and it took us a whole day to get a hold of him to find out if he got out in time… 9 year old me hearing on the radio coming back from swimming after a trip at school that the Twin Towers got hit, I remember turning thinking I misheard it to ask my teacher left to me in the coach “My grandad works in there”.
Her eyes opened wide. I got collected early from school by my crying mother early. Then I understood and got worried. No one at my school helped calm me, thankfully I must have looked so clueless and confused anyway. I was an odd kid so no one probably cared or noticed.
Odd day. Don’t really need to explain much else.
So in answer to the comments on here saying kids don’t remember, of course they do! We didn’t just start consciousness and wake up at age 10 or whatever.
You’re definitely right, it can affect second-hand, even if the child didn’t directly understand.
I wouldn’t draw the conclusion that all kids remember it based on your experience. What you experienced was likely very traumatizing.
For anyone your age, even in the US, their main “trauma” was not being able to watch cartoons because the news was on every channel. Unless, of course, someone they were close to worked in or around the towers like in your case.
That’s such a shitty take. Plenty of kids my age were freaked out by it eveb if we weren’t personally affected.
I was just basing it on the comments I’m seeing from people who were kids at the time. Clearly it depends on age.
That happened during the school day for me. West coast would have been asleep. On the east coast, at least, no kid was nagging about cartoons unless they were out sick in a non-flu month and also particularly stupid.
Granted, I was 11 then, so definitely on the higher end of the 90’s baby scale. But there are at least 630 child millenials that very clearly remember that, because our teachers were ordered not to say anything, told us they were ordered not to say anything, and then immediately disobeyed because they felt it was important. They led my entire grade out into the main hallway to watch it live.
I’d had too much of a sense of realism to ever think we were “innocent” or whatever, in order to understand what people mean when they say they lost that. I think this reaction would be more prominent in the middle class than my PTSD-riddled ass. I assume they just mean a lost feeling of safety?
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the kind of silence several hundred tweens aren’t supposed to make, my main emotion was a deep dread. Anyone with a brain in their head knew we were going to retaliate. I didn’t want a war.
I also remember Y2K. It was hard to hear anything else. 1999 is the first new year’s eve I clearly remember, actually, simply because it was anxiety-inducing in comparison with all the others. Just sat there with my headphones on, not listening to music. I was a stressed out kid.
This. I don’t remember 9/11 for what it is, but I remember being antagonized as a child for being in the country while not being a white person.
If you remember 9/11 that’s actually one of the things that makes you a millennial instead of gen z. Most people born on/past 1997 don’t remember 9/11, myself included.
My partner is only 2 years older than me, but she’s a millennial and I’m gen z. It’s weird how much those two years do. She can remember 9/11 and there’s a lot of other little things you can read about.
That’s another crazy thing, in just 4 years, gen z will be in there 30’s!
Iirc, the rough delineation is if you remember the challenger disaster = gen x, 9/11 = millennial, covid = gen z, after that = gen alpha.
I was born 94, vividly remember 9/11 on the news and being annoyed no cartoons were on. I remember the turn of the millennium but not specifically about Y2K
Sounds like you truly grasped what it meant for 3000 people to be murdered in an intentional spectacle
It’s almost like I was only 7, shock horror
You would’ve been in first grade during school hours lol, why would you have expected cartoons?
Edit: I forgot timezones exist lol
I’m from the UK so it actually happened more in the afternoon. The one thing I don’t remember is if it was after I finished school normally or if we were sent home earlier. I think it was the former though
IMO if you were American, you would remember it for being traumatizing rather than for disrupting your cartoons. I’m about the same age as you and it had a huge impact on everyone I knew.
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I mean, you remember it for being annoying. Others remember it for being traumatizing.
I mean I understood it somewhat, but I also didn’t want it to be the only thing consuming my afternoon. It was very depressing and I was only 7. Of course I didn’t want to just dwell on that all afternoon. I was also at my nanas at the time so there was nothing else i food do but watch tv till my mam came home from work. So i had nothing else to distract me. But yeah you are right I didn’t fully grasp the gravity of the situation at the time. I think watching it through the tv allowed me that kind of separation. Obviously as time went on, those memories got skewed as i understood more of what actually happened, but I still remember that moment of when I went to my namas bedroom tv in hopes of finding a different channel that might be showing something different. I didn’t.
I remember them, but I was born early 1990, so I’m one of the early 90’s babies.
They create crises in order to expand their power.
I recall memes similar to this from ten years ago. That’s a throwback.
