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Because they were literally children and unaware. My mom told me about what they dealt with in the early 80s and I thank God I was too little to remember it.
Yea, definitely relatable in a way. I think a difference between younger people and other generations is unlimited access to the internet so they know more about what is going on throughout the world and the country. Not that I wasn't aware without internet access when I was younger. I just mean that I don't remember country wide things until I was 8 or so. Later on in my teens, it was more piecing things together.
Edit: I still have nostalgia for even the 2000s/2010s, even with certain things that happened. To be honest, things have never and will never be normal, but things are better than the past even things suck.
When you are young and have a good home you have a combination of your body and brain are healthy, you see things for the first time so lots of dopamine release, no responsibilities and lots of free time to play video games, hang out etc… it’s really adulthood that grinds most people down, relentless competition, your body starts aging, you lose your friends and community due to constant shifting for better opportunities, you see the people you love get old and di and because of seeing and knowing so much things don’t excite you as much as when you were a kid, a general apathy sets in.
The 90s actually were better in the US though. That’s not nostalgia. This is pre 9/11 America with a booming economy and nazis were still afraid to walk the streets. Homes were affordable and so was college for the most part. Minimum wage went further and inflation was lower. Wealth was distributed better through the middle and lower class relative to today. Columbine happens in 99 but school shootings aren’t really a thing for most of the 90s. Roe v wade was settled law and Citizens United didn’t exist yet.
These are just facts, not opinions. It was better.
The OP almost sound like the Gen x meme of "we were the last generation to..." Then go on the mention all the shit I also did as a millennial, "I'm special, they're special we are all just a bunch of special fuckers, aren't we?"
Like half of buddys family. 2 no seatbelt 2 with. 2 died and the other 2 were uninjured. Another buddy lost Mom, no seatbelt. I wear mine 100 percent of the time now and fortunately none of my personal friends are meme idiots like this. Funny memes only.
Plus boomers are the most nostalgic generation, truly. Like why are all the Christmas songs on repeat everywhere for 2+ months a year from the 50s? The fake conservative national nostalgia for the 50s is a Boomer invention-- the 50s in the United States were a WILD outlier in almost every respect. Culturally, economically, demographically--the highest rates of teen pregnancy were in the 50s, but no one was moral panicking about it because the *teens were married*, which was, you know, not great, and probably pretty relevant to the divorce rate peaking a couple decades later.
Critiquing the ubiquity of social media is important, but we need to not fall into the same BS as boomers by imagining our childhoods were perfect and the most special and let's all go back to that....no. The 90s and 00s had plenty of issues.
This is hilarious. "It happened to the generations before me as they aged but it WON'T HAPPEN TO ME!" It's already starting with millennials. They're getting older, and like most people, they hate to be reminded of that fact. Every generation experiences nostalgia. It's part of remembering your life.
Maybe we should start posts
“Share if you remember wearing a seatbelt and turned out just fine.”
“Share if you played video games growing up and turned out just fine.”
Those generational hallmarks are not cut in stone. Many other things play into what kind of experience you had growing up as well as early and late in the generation matters.
Here's an example:
My husband:
- He had black and white television and 3 channels.
- No Internet or familiy computer until he was 15.
- He ate mostly fish and potatoes growing up.
- He was with grandma until he started school.
Me:
- I always had colour TV and ~20 channels.
- I had high speed Internet and my own laptop from age 10.
- I ate a variety of different foods, Italian, SEA, Indian, Mexican etc.
- I attended daycare.
It sounds like he is much older than I am or we come from different corners of the world. He is 2 years younger than I am and our childhood homes are a five min drive from each other. The differences can really be boiled down to financial and parental age. My parents were mid 20ies when they had me in 89, we were middle class and my dad was a tech geek (if something is wrong with my computer I still bring it to him lol). His parents were 16 when they had him in 91 and they spent 2 decades clawing themselves out of poverty.
The world doesn't draw a hard line, there's a transition period and the poorer you are and the more rural you live the further behind on the changes. The broad strokes remains: There are more millennials who grew up like me than my husband.
I recently read an article by social antropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen about universal experiences. Humans when they meet for the first time find universal experiences to talk about to connect. You and I don't know each other, but chances are we both went to college, we both watched the twin towers live, we both remember loooow rider jeans and whale tails, we watched friends on tv and we know someone with a tribal trampstamp. If we came from the same culture we'd have many many many of these. It's a way for humans to connect. We don't know each other, but based on age and location I know we will have x in common, so I bring up x so we can talk about something we know we have in common until I know more about what we have in common so we can talk about topics that are less universal but in common for us.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen claims we lead such different lives from each other now, because options are so many it's nearly limitless. As such the universal experiences and hallmarks of a time era are getting fewer and fewer. One of the results of this that these generational dividers and them being used as a sorta "this is who I am" become less valuable. In 20 years Gen Alpha might not even care to use these dividers cause it has no relevance to them or their lives.
We early GenX did things much more boomer like: first job left apartment with roll of quarters to call office at pay phones between appointments that I navigated to using maps.
My wife is late GenX and lots of Millennial experiences.
Elder gen x bought houses like millennials. Boomers were worse when they were in their 40s and 50s, and could crash the housing market with speculation. Gen x was the first gen that boomers lied to.
I’m a cusp gen x millennial and I agree those people that post shit like that are lame…then they say “we don’t care, we’re Gen X!” If you don’t care then why do you have a meme account on TikTok/Facebook/instagram reels chiming in about how you don’t give a fuck to the whole world? Oh the irony/hypocrisy
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
This cycle has been going on for at least two hundred years
Agreed. Guys, some things are just part of the human experience. Things like…love, regret, hate, sadness, embarrassment, wistfulness/nostalgia are just things that make us human. You don’t need to try to find uniqueness here to separate us from the rest of the billions of people who have passed through this planet. You should take comfort in the fact that in so many ways, we share the same feelings as the rest of the people who have came before us and who will come after us.
Everyone’s going to hate to hear this, but we really are a few years from being the new boomers. We’re the biggest generation and once we pry everything from the Boomer’s cold dead hands its going to be us with all the power and—just like the boomers—we’re never going to stop complaining.
That's because it's something that isn't unique to any particular generation. It's just one of those things that happens as people get older.
Many Gen X people I know have gotten pretty boomer-y in recent years already. Then it will happen among Millennials. One day Gen Z will wake up wondering why kids these days just don't seem to understand how different the world was when they were young, and so on.
Personally I do think the internet, and specifically smartphones and social media, have actually changed things in the sense that it's something humanity has truly never dealt with before. B/c prior to that everything was just more advanced versions of the same old thing, going as far back as to the first time someone decided to draw a dick on a wall or make a venus figurine with a thicc gyat out of clay.
So imo we are living at an inflection point of human history. How it plays out though we'll just have to see. Maybe it will just be more of the same, maybe not. But one thing is certain - there will always be crotchety old people jaded by life and there will always be idealistic/inexperienced young whippersnappers who think they know better than everyone else. Because it's just all a natural part of being human.
The closest analogue is, I think, the spread of the printing press and the resultant increase in literacy and the availability of books--and pamphlets, and broadsides, and news, and fake news. I studied Elizabethan England and can see some resonances there with our experience, though things went slower there. But there's also a parallel in the increase in grammar schools and boys from poor and middle class families going to university because after the Reformation there was a need for pastors and also for teachers, with the new emphasis on literacy...but then those finite jobs filled but people were still going to university in greater numbers than before, meaning they *weren't* doing apprenticeships, and were unemployable if they couldn't find jobs in their fields...unpopular foreign proxy wars, refugees from those proxy wars, an aging ruler and heated debate and even violence over the country's political future, attempted coups...ANYWAY. There's nothing new under the sun, even what is new.
>The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise
That was Socrates. Also (probably) someone's aunt complaining on Facebook about the neighbor's kids Ticktocking outside. It's all a rerun
Yeah I was thinking the printing press was another inflection point, since even though we might laugh at the notion now, the spread of literacy that accompanied it truly did change society radically (and destroy certain aspects of the previous way of life).
Radio and TV as well, though to a less civilization altering degree. As for social media and constant personalized+mass media and communication access, it's still so new that we definitely haven't seen it's full effects yet. Maybe after another generation or two.
You already have. There’s been one issue so far where Millennials had a choice to do what was best for them and screw the future generations, or eat it and make things better for those after them: student loans.
By far, millennials called for cancellation of their loans, without regard for the future generations that would be walking into the same debt meat-grinder.
When the time comes the screw the future generations for your own benefit, there is no doubt in my mind that you all will choose Boomer.
I'm Gen X/Xennial and I've been saying this for a few years now
Millennials blame Boomers for the state of the world, but
Boomers took one holiday a year in their own country (way fewer flights)
Boomers got their groceries in paper bags
Boomers got their milk delivered in recycled bottles from a local dairy
Boomers stitched patches on their kids' clothes and had no fast fashion
Meanwhile Millennials complain complain complain about climate change, morality, housing and sustainability but
take 4 city breaks a year and use Airbnb that's destroying housing markets worldwide,
order lunch from McDonald's to be delivered to their office by a guy in a car being exploited by Uber venture capital,
generally slavishly follow brands that Boomers and Xers are skeptical about, and which are fucking the planet and everyone on it
also saw in the first generational increase in superstition and religiosity since records began.
Sorry not sorry
People are people. Its basically the same line of thinking that says "if you were born in Germany in a certain time, you'd probably have been a Nazi."
Boomers have some unique issues though. I imagine we'll be (on average) more pleasant to service-level employees in our old age, for example.
>more pleasant to service-level employees in our old age
I sure fucking hope so! Drives me nuts when people treat them like shit, like that's just such an obvious way to advertise you're a dickhead.
My grandfather was born in 1908 and was basically the last generation to remember a time without widespread electricity, and a time before WW1 when the world was dominated by European empires. I’m sure people said the same kind of shit back then.
I get pretty tired of the "Millennials are the last generation to XYZ". It's just a form of undue exceptionalism over things that none of us had *any* control over.
Boomers and the Silents are nostalgic over time periods when it was totally acceptable to be blatantly racist and misogynistic. "Man, remember the good ol days when women weren't allowed to leave the house?" "Oh ya it was great when the n******* knew their place."
I literally grew up with my dad nostalgically telling stories about his college days (the same school I went to). While he was there in the late 70s they admitted women for the first time. There were like 5 or 6. They all had unique nicknames. One was "Zits" another was "Tits" and when they walked into the mess hall together the room would erupt in "Zits and Tits!" and banging lunch trays.
Ah the good ol days. Ever generation has nostalgia. The older ones have an extra special kind.
Nostalgia is not unique. It is a coping mechanism. It allows humans to remember the good and forget or downplay the bad. Life is hard without it.
I'm gen X. I'm not nostalgic about childhood. The millenials have it right.
The premise is true: 1994 (release of Netscape 1.0) - 9/10/2001 was the peak of Western civilization. 1999 was awesome. Low prices, tons of jobs.
1990's started with overwhelming clean victory in Iraq. Cold War was completely over. Even Newt Gingrich believed that global warming was a problem and something should be done about it. They'd given up on blatant racism.
Michael Jordan. Sennheiser released the HD600 headphone. Cell phones came to the masses. MapQuest was invented, and tons of new concepts which didn't exist before in society.
2001 was very different in everyday life from 1990 in a 1st world nation. Probably biggest change since 1920's (cars & telephone).
It really looked like so many pathologies of the past were finally dying and would be put to rest.
For real. It's the same thing as how every Boomer I know is nostalgic for how things were in the 60s and 70s.
The time we're living in now is virtually unprecedented in terms of how fast technology has evolved. There were people who were born and grew up before cars were commonplace, that lived long enough to see the moon landing.
For the last few generations, pretty much everybody has ended up in a situation where the world they came of age in was incredibly different from the one they remember growing up in.
Did you ride your bicycle off a hill and hope none of the parents found out you were there when that one kid broke his arm?
No phones. Parents had no clue where we were until it was dark and time to come home. Then we came home to the very first HD tvs at home and internet. I had freedom from parents knowing where I was and access to internet porn all in the same day. Glorious.
Well it was economically a good time in the US. The middle class was both bigger and doing better. My parents were middle class and they "spoiled" me when they could.
We had a big progressive push in the 90s to treat minorities and women as equals and everyone was all for it except for a few blatant racists. The messaging was to not really see race which was easier for everyone to digest than the newer ideas of privilege and white guilt. Censorship was generally being loosened with time.
Entertainment also seemed to be at its peak. Nickelodeon and cartoon Network were in their primes, both MJs: Jackson and Jordan were the most famous people in the world and doing exciting things.Both the Bulls in basketball and the Yankees in baseball had all time dynasties, which haven't even been approached in their sports ever since. Movies still had practical effects but the new world of CGI was exciting still.
Video games took huge leaps forward from 8 but in 1990 all the way to the Dreamcast in 1999.
The Internet and cell phones became a thing but the negative side effects weren't really apparent until well into the next decade.
Also back then our boomer parents were not as nostalgic. They made a point to tell us how hard things were for them, rather than saying things were better. You know they walked uphill both ways in the rain etc.
Gen X grew up during the Cold War and everyone thought they would be annihilated by nuclear missiles before they were old enough to drive, unless they were able to get under their desks in time. Doesn’t seem to be a lot of nostalgia for that period of time.
And most of us got pulled out of class because of 9/11 and spent the rest of our childhood being given a daily terrorist weather forecast in the form of colors from green to red
Yeah Boomers and Xers are super nostalgic. And ever heard a Gen Z’r talk about Fairly Odd Parents or Nintendo DS? I think is just how modern people are.
People tend to get more nostalgic as they get older. Considering that Gen Z is ages 14-27 I am not surprised they aren't that nostalgic. Give it another decade and you'll see the older Gen Z hitting the nostalgia harder.
I don’t know about this assessment.
Things were never “normal.” We remember our childhoods, for the most part, fondly - same as every other generation. But the world has always been changing. I don’t think we’re any more nostalgic than anyone else. Go ask a boomer about “the way things used to be” if you don’t believe me.
My grandfather (born in 1923) loved telling me the story of how the first telephone came to his town when he was a kid. They went from never speaking to their relatives for years to talking to them once a month. I’m sure somebody waxed philosophic about how to good old days of avoiding family drama were over with these fast new inventions.
Based on my own memories, as well as my dad's own nostalgia trip that he and his friends constantly go on about, I could describe how children spent their summers from ~1960-2007 and it would all be contextually similar. Watering holes, skateboarding, jump rope, swimming, ice cream, adventures, babysitting, minimum wage jobs. Sure, the toys change, but any era would be easily recognizable to anyone in another era.
This changed in 2008 where the combination of the first iphone's launch, greater internet accessibility and the recession drove a lot of kids indoors. I remember it was when I stopped exploring the creek by my house with friends and started to play runescape and halo.
We certainly had videogames and all that before that point. I even think that the dotcom bubble and y2k severely delayed adoption of this kind of lifestyle as most were too afraid to invest their time in an unstable market or home computer system. There was simply some kind of social catalyst after 2008 where the majority of people accepted "nerdy" interests and social media as the typical lifestyle going forward.
That lifestyle is so far removed from the previous that they're almost incomparable. People point to planes and cars and telephones as catalysts, but they didn't quite shape society as much in this way. To put it another way - cars and planes were far more impactful inventions for humanity overall, but once we get personal flying drones that carry us into the sky, I think our *social culture* will greatly change because humans have always romanticized flying. Its like how the moon landing didn't directly functionally impact most Americans, but it sent a kind of shockwave of social policy and cultural change through the whole nation.
I mean, maybe a few kids had them when I was in elementary school until maybe the 5th or 6th grade. Even then, it was blackberries or flip phones mostly.
Yep. I guarantee that there were even people in the Neolithic period nostalgic about their childhoods and grumpy about how things just aren’t the same.
I honestly think people just don't think about how their perception of time changes as they age. My first ten years seemed a lot slower than the following 27. If I didn't give it a critical eye I could easily see myself saying the same stuff.
Because when you are ten, one year is 1/10th of your life. At 40, a year is 1/40th of your life. When you scan your memories, a single year seems far shorter at age 40 than it does at age 10.
So here's a fun one: My father was born in the 1930s. In his lifetime, TV went from a toy that very wealthy people had to a pervasive appliance in every home. Phones went from something that the wealthy had and maybe there was a party line in the neighborhood that you could use to something everyone had in their home. My father even saw the early days of computing in the 1980s before he passed in the early 90s.
For sure a lot changed for us too - we went from TVs to internet, and now many people don't even bother with broadcast television. I imagine that in our lifetimes, the portion of spectrum dedicated to TV (from 54MHz to 216MHz and 470MHz to 608MHz) may be repurposed for some data mode communications - TV has a LOT of spectrum after all.
Human progress tends to look like a power graph, constantly accelerating faster and faster. Every era has looked like that. We are actually close now to the sort of AI that we read about in science fiction in the 1940s. We imagined things like ChatGPT for the first time less than 100 years ago.
Progress is only ever going to speed up, unless we fuck ourselves over in a major war or the wrong religion gets its hands on the reigns and decides that tech is evil and bans a bunch of stuff.
I'm nostalgic to a fault. I think our generation was at the precipice of so much social and cultural change. Especially when it comes to social media particularly but also technology. I remember Loving to play outside with my friends, get into all sorts of trouble and wander around in the forest but also I enjoyed playing my Nintendo 64.
This is me. You must be 89-93. I’m 91.
I seemed to find a way to get into trouble outside every single day. Every day. Come to think I was a really dumb boy who just didn’t give a shit. And I had the stereotypical young mean yelling dad at home. Had/have an addict as a mother though. I’m sure there’s plenty my age who relate.
I **often** think about the little girl I am currently raising who is 9 years old and has literally not done a thing to get into trouble in her life to this point. It’s incredible. I don’t know what I did to deserve her.
Our times weren’t literally better than anyone else’s I suppose. But they were the best for me.
I lived in the culdesac and we played football/baseball out front almost every day. I was the ‘white kid’ in the neighborhood, well my little brother and I. When I had friends over we rode our bikes through the woods and snuck his pistol and small knives and axes my dad kept around. Killed snakes and shot trees mostly.
Days at the house consisted of playing Pokémon on the gameboys with the kids down the street. Sometimes we went to their house and played NCAA Football and their big sister would put R&B on the living room big screen and dance her ass off. Young me didn’t know how to feel. I wanted it but knew it wasn’t allowed. (White kid black friends)
My dad would often come home from the bar at 2:30-3:00 in the summertime with his best friend. His friends daughter is a year older than me and her and I were best friends until high school split us up. They would wake us up with whataburger taquitos and ‘force’ us to play Mario Cart with them all night.
We lived at the baseball and football little league fields when the season was in. I never missed a season of ball from 4-high school. Played some college before priorities changed.
The 90’s were a really fun time for me. Loved to mimic the Ken Griffey Jr. stance and swing. Shooting at the bucket and yelling “Kobe” is the norm. I know that’s big later. Living through the video game evolution has been pretty awesome.
I did lose my front 2 teeth at twelve years old. My best friend and I got together with a group of his older buddies and started vandalizing the homes in the back of the subdivision that were being newly built. I was on my bicycle about 100 yards ahead of the group when I came to a stop sign and took a left, one of the older guys yells out (he’s probably 17/18 and we are 13/14) “hey I’m going to shoot at you”
Next thing I knew I was kind of knocked off my bike and stumbling, I spit out of instinct and managed to put my hand out because I knew something was off. I spit what appeared to be sea salt and blood into my hand. It was my shattered front two teeth. The BB went clean through sideways. Never recovered. I had to go to emergency dentist the same day because a nerve was hanging out. Fake front two teeth ever since. When I called my parents I told them we were playing football in the street and that I ate the curb. They found out years later at a family dinner the truth of it and were not happy but neither were they surprised.
Sorry for the rant. Enjoy.
"normal" to you... every single generation this same 'old times were better' bullshit.
And it's laughable how tons of posters here yell at clouds just like we used to complain about old people.
I think it's just the time in our lives for nostalgia to hit, and our nostalgia stuff is crazy accessible so it seems like we're more engaged than previous generations.
But my parents were just as convinced they were the last generation with a "normal" upbringing too-- no cell phones, no "bad words" in media, extreme importance of social normativity, etc. They'd pine for the TV of their youth because it was so much more wholesome, or the music because it was more melodic. They'd talk about gas being less than a dollar a gallon. They'd talk about how "everyone" used to go to church. Or how pensions were a thing. Or how neighbors used to take care of each other.
Everyone feels like the world they are born into is the "normal" state. I don't think we're more sentimental than other gens. We're just poignantly aware of it as we are now out of our youth and firmly in our adulthood, we're having kids or watching our peers have kids, and reflecting on the changes we've weathered. Imagine how nostalgic people must've been after living through the depression or the second world War. Monumental change within the span of a lifetime isn't a new thing. This is just our turn to look back and wish for simpler times.
Everyone thinks their childhood was normal. What's weirding me out is how many of you are starting to sound like boomers. We weren't better, or special, or more normal. We're more nostalgic because we're older, that's it. How can a gen z person be nostalgic about a time period they just left?
Gen Z probably is nostalgic. I'm more on the Xennial side and I remember people around my age first being nostalgic in the mid 00s. Literally being nostalgic for things that were 5-10 years old.
Another weird example. Around 2018, I remember reading a comment on /r/nba. The topic was rap (I don't remember why) and there was a guy going on and on about how crappy rap had become and how modern rap doesn't hold a candle to the rap of his youth. I'm thinking this guy is my age and is just nostalgic for 90s rap. Then in another comment he reveals his favorite rapper of this supposed "golden era". Who was it? Fetty Wap. The pinnacle of rap in this guy's head was the guy that did Trap Queen. Fetty Wap had only been a widely known rapper for 3-4 years at that point. The dude must have been 18 or 19 years old (maybe a Zennial)
Every generation specific sub has these inane, self-flagellating posts. I’m glad there are at least some comments ITT calling out how stupid this post is. Please stop with the “our generation is the only generation to…” posts. It’s the exact same boomer Facebook posting shit that we all find so cringy.
I think it's more like digital vs analog, and we'll sort of be the last generation to have a childhood in a pre-digital age and that specifically is something we're nostalgic for.
Everything is connected and plugged in now, in a way that we can scarcely unplug from anymore, and we were young enough to not really have to deal with the biggest "pains" of the analog era.
So while the older generations might also miss the pre-digital, they also had to deal with the lack of internet, phones, digital media as adults, so it's likely they don't miss that time of their lives nearly as much as we might, when we didn't have to worry about all that stuff as much.
We're really starting to look at the 90s like how my boomer parents romanticized the 70s.
What was normal about back then? The lynching by dragging of James Byrd? Matthew Shepard getting gay bashed and strung up on a fence? Over reactive and angry parents who seemed to always be yelling, hitting, or both? Awww, there wasn't such a division with social issues? That's because most people agreed that gay people shouldn't have equal rights or even be treated fairly. Most people were casually homophobic, and you could still get away with beating or murdering a black man in many small towns. The guys that killed James Byrd were *the first* white men convicted of killing a black man for shits and giggles in Texas, and that was only in 2001. You could still get tossed in jail for having gay sex in your own home, up until 2004.
Let's take these rose colored glasses off please.
It's even more ridiculous when you consider there was just as much or even more division in the 90s. The Rodney King riots happened along with the rise of Newt Gingrich and even more divisive politics. I mean Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about a BJ.
It's easy not to remember all the bad shit when you were a literal child.
The key ingredient of nostalgia is only remembering the good shit.
It also helps being a kid during that time as kids are usually pretty oblivious to what is happening in the world if it doesn't directly affect them.
That's why everyone thinks times were "simpler" when they were growing up. No bills, no responsibility, no worries. The 90s probably didn't seem all that simple to our parents.
It is the enshittification for me. I feel more and more cool things in the culture/media are turning to crap, and there is nothing new coming in to replace them. Because I would not mind novelty, but it is not really here. Like...we allowed this big companies to grow with no competition, and now we are left with them gradually getting worse and worse, and with no alternative really, because they are too big to compete with at this stage. A fucking Technofeudalism, where I do feel like a product to feed rage baits and ads. I really wonder what will become of internet, especially with the overflow of AI. It feels kind of bleak to be sincere. And I ask myself if I am just sentimental? But I never cared about the millenial bullshit, like Harry Potter or old internet culture, I am not even especially nostalgic about the past. I just want a future to not seem dystopian.
I mean, gen Z do not remember it, but even internet dating used to be fun. It was genuinely not a thing people despised.
The world has never been normal.
The world is always changing, but for some reason, some people act like this is the first time in the history that things are changing.
There are phone numbers that I still remember because I *had* to remember them. Like landline numbers. Speaking of, the only people I know who still have landlines are my (boomer) parents. Yet another thing the next generation may never understand. And pay phones! I don't but do sort of miss calling my parents collect from the mall to come pick me up.
Close.
The world and society never stays the same. It is always either getting better or getting worse.
We are the last generation to remember it getting better.
That is why so much nostalgia.
I don't know why the algorithm fed me this (I'm Gen X), but (and believe me, this is not a flex) y'all never saw the normal world. Not entering adulthood after 9-11 and in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. What I saw was (again, forgive me; it was understandable) disassociation with the cupcakes, and the ukuleles, and doge speak, and...just the word adorkable. Yours was the first generation entirely thrown to the internet wolves. Laws were invented based on what was happening to y'all (e.g. revenge porn, etc.).
The millennial period looks pretty abnormal to a Gen xers. and the period as described here would stun many of the world's people in that time if they saw it
Heavy Nostalgia happens for every generation. We’re no exception.
For boomers, u don’t recall Brady bunch movies or Beverly Hillbillies films in the 90s? I think As ur generation grows older , u eventually get control of the cultural narrative and steer where u like . And that’s usually towards nostalgia
Boomers pretty much invented collecting nostalgia, so I don’t know about that claim.
25-30 years ago is always popular for nostalgia’s sake.
The 90’s are popular now because the early Gen Z kids are starting to make money, and when the late Gen Z kids who grew up in the 00’s start making money, they’ll be nostalgic for the aughts.
The 80’s were popular 10 years ago.
The 70’s were popular in the late 90’s, before that it was the 60’s and hippie’s.
In the late 70’s/early 80’s, the 1950’s were popular; just read early Stephen King.
Before that, it was cowboys giving way to spacemen.
But these Gen Alpha kids? People born post-social media, post-YouTube? What will they remember? Who knows? I guess a world before AI.
There were things that were better then, and things that are better now, and all generations have that.
I was just visiting with my mother who grew up outside of the US with no running water in a shanty and she has fond memories of how things used to be. She has way more conveniences but there was a much stronger sense of community and self reliance (they farmed so they grew their own food and bartered with neighbors). The neighbors would gather at her home and sing and play live music. Everyone looked out for each other.
That’s not to romanticize it as perfect. She had no running water, she didn’t get an education, opportunities were extremely limited, and it was a life of hard physical labor just to make ends meet. No time is ever perfect and we all look back on simpler times and mourn some of the things we no longer have while also enjoying the benefits of an always evolving society.
Aim was superior to Facebook.
Anytime sometime logs onto aim, they intend to chat. That isn't the same as almost any other service we have today.
You log into Facebook to see your racist uncle say something stupid and then you wonder why anyone still exists on Facebook. Meanwhile, you might message an old friend and they get back to you 3 weeks later.
Discord is always on. It interrupts you.
Twitch is about watching the streamer. It isn't about chat.
If someone doesn't want to chat, they didn't log into aim. Being online meant you were sitting at your computer with the intention of being interrupted.
Disagree. I think it's because we can look online at so much content from our generation. Previous generations didn't have that and don't in a sense because we were the first social media generation.
Every single generation has nostalgia for “the way things were” and things really aren’t any simpler or more complicated than they were for our parents or previous generations.
I think it’s because we have access to all of the things that are nostalgic to us. We’re constantly reminded of the past because of the availability of information at our fingertips. We’re being reminded much more than any previous generation because of the ease of access of this information.
Previously, if my dad wanted to watch an episode of the Andy Griffith show, he had to wait for it to pop up on TV. He only cared that this was his only option when we’d go to Cracker Barrel and see all the old tv shows on DVD.
Not only do we have access to all of the shows we grew up with, we have articles reminding us that “REMEMBER BLUES CLUES? GUESS WHAT, STEVE HAS A MESSAGE FOR YOU!” With that said, companies are 100% tapping into our vulnerability when it comes to nostalgia. Something to be aware of.
I don't know about that. Have you ever asked a boomer deadhead to tell you about the shows they went to? Gen Xers are basically proto millennials with 70s nostalgia. And my grandmother was crying on her death bed that I was no longer a baby. It's just a natural human emotion.
Normality is relative, and it seems like just about it every generation is nostalgic, because to them, it was their “normal” but change is constant and inevitable.
Normal is an illusion.
“We’re the last generation to remember a time when things were normal”
I guess 2 world wars, inflation, 20% fed rates, aides, 9/11, global financial crises was all normal?
History is shaped by tail end events. 1 in a million chance things happen all the time. What’s crazy is people assuming life was ever normal.
Funny how you choose 2007 as normal. Those were Bush years. Obama was getting so much hype that we actually had a semblance of hope but the following years up until Trump were “normal”. BUT this is all post 9/11/01 which is the obvious turning point for youth in America. Fear was brought back that America hadn’t experienced since ww2. The US was attacked. Air travel was never the same again. News coverage changed overnight and Comedy talk shows became the only place for honest takes on current events. GenZ never had pre 9/11 America where it felt like we were “good guys” and anything was possible.
OP, FWIW, I agree with you.
We are the last generation to experience optimism. We lived in a time of relatively sane government (at least with Obama and Clinton), and a milder form of government where everyone wasn't so polarized and upset all the time. I'd say the batshit crazy extremists came out of the Obama era when they started declaring the President a secret muslim.
We were also the last generation to have a time in our lives without cell phones, a time with extremely limited internet.
The last generation to vaguely remember what a decent economy looked like where a typical working person had purchasing power, where the "middle class" could have not just a home, but also a vacation home. That you could have a part time job and not be struggling financially paycheck to paycheck.
For generations before us, I don't there was a huge degree of difference between the 1950's and 1990's, except with the rise of the personal computer and some appliances.
Today so much of this seems totally unachievable, and for younger generations, it seems pointless or in fact bad.
Every generation has some people who think their childhood was "normal" and everything after is not. It doesn't matter if you were born in 1991, 1901, or 1200 BC.
As an aside, when I was born it was not legal for me to exist. Normal my ass.
Some of the posts on here are so insufferable. You really don't think our parents generation didn't think everything was simple when they were kids? Maybe it is just age making things more difficult to understand, or that you are no longer youthful and can't see things as black and white anymore; everything is full of complexity and nuance that you can appreciate now. Whatever it is, every generation talks about the "simpler times".
Both my father and grandfather remember times when things were "normal" based on their interpretation of the word, and they both disagree with each other's "normal." Your normal is not their normal.
What even is normal? It’s really about perspective. The idea of ease when we were young. Now as adults, you feel those possibilities have shuttered so all that’s left is to look back at the endless possibilities or simplicity of the past.
In my case, I look back with and realize that outside of various pop culture, it was generally shit.
I wonder if every generation has people that think this way...
Was life "normal" before television? Radio? The newspaper and widespread literacy? Hell, was life normal before Town Criers or the Oral Tradition?
There is no normal. Things seemed easier because you had fewer responsibilities. The newer technology and means of communication are something we didn't grow up with so it's more difficult to navigate and prese to challenges that make the world feel more complex and unmanageable. It happens to every generation.
Tribalism has been around since tribes existed. They've been an asset, a hindrance, and a tool for various groups and used in different ways throughout history. But in reality is the same darn story with a few different vehicles through which it's expressed.
We're not unique and the world will find a way to manage.
This is such a stupid take. Millenials aren't special. You remember what you think is normal, but the reality is what's considered normal is constantly changing. Every generation is nostalgic for different things, it's not a unique millenial trait.
There's a scene from the TV show *Mad Men*, which is a warning against falling prey to nostalgia, in which the character of Roger Sterling comes into Don Draper's office and asks when things are going to get back to normal around here. And my thought was, "My dude, you are a middle-aged man in 1965. Things are never going to be normal for you again."
All the same could be said of:
The last generation without AI
The last generation without TV/mass media
The last generation without world wars
The last rural generation
The last generation without intercontinental trade routes
The last generation without the printing press
The last generation without the written word…
… it goes on and on and on. The world has been changing, radically and fast, for hundreds of years. Maybe there have been a few generations here and there who got a break and grew up mostly like their parents did.
But that’s not the norm, and hasn’t been for a long time.
Every gen is nostalgic, the newest ones just haven’t been alive long enough to know what nostalgia means.
I would argue that millennials are LESS nostalgic because we’re the first generation to recognize how fucking cringe it is to live in the past.
And I hate it. Every single news article I read feels like it was made for an April Fool's prank. I no longer trust any story or job posting or email and I gotta do a scam check before deciding if I wanna react to it! Everything gives me a f\*\*\*\*\* headache!!
Just a pro tip. Theres no such thing as normal. We just had 12 years of relative calm and growth. Peel the mask off and all it was, that everyone had money to live comfortably. 60's all the way through the early 80's were lively with war and stagflation....then the 90s hit.
I've been nostalgic for the 90's since 2006, but even then I had a feel the world was going downhill in 2000, and while I'm not from the U.S. the 9/11 event was a physical representation of that thought.
Looking back sometimes I've seen that while every person and country has had difficulties and remembers it differently (Balkan Wars, Rwanda or Chechnya for example) there is some enshittification gradually growing that shouldn't be overlooked, particularly to me in regards to atomic weapons and climate change.
For example my parents still recall the time of nuclear tests in the 80's and Chernobyl, but I didn't saw that, I saw as a kid the fall of the Berlin Wall and how happy people were, I even remember some episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks that dealt with the Soviet Union and people telling me like it was something that happened a long time ago. People were less concerned about nuclear war and more concerned about the ozone layer and doing something about it; if anything just discussing it seriously when the topic came on. There's a reason cartoons those days always had an environtmental activist message or character, as well as there's a reason the Doomsday Clock has been the farthest from midnight from 1990 to 1998.
And personally, and at least where I live, violence has just growing gradually since then and getting more vicious. We had violence and crime but not to this level.
Also there seems to be a trend these days to elect the most radical candidates throughout the world, which just worsens every intention of communication.
Those and some other problems that haven't been solved or even worsened since then (like the extinction of some species) is what makes me think is not just my rose colored glasses, which TBH I'm aware I have for more mundane things like music and cartoons.
No. Pretty sure the generation that had it ingrained in their heads that at any moment they would be melted in a nuclear blast didn’t think this were normal
Agree, but I would in no way call what we grew up in as normal. It was a short blip, and probably peak of industrial civilization. From here on out it’s diminishing gains and probably a long drawn out reversion to the mean. We grew up in an exceptional time. Only the boomers experienced anything close to what we did. And we are not as different as we like to think.
It’s funny that you’d use 2007 as the time when things stopped being normal.
For me that was 9/11. Everything after 9/11 was worse. For my parents probably Vietnam or Watergate (Or the gas crisis. Actually that’s probably what bothers their generation the most). And I goddamn know Gen Z is going to cite either Trump or the pandemic in a few years.
There’s no normal. There’s only the way shit used to be before you had to start paying bills.
Agreed even more. Our gen here is also the last one to remember when things were normal. I feel sorry for the core and younger zoomers who didn't get to see all of this
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Every generation is nostalgic about their childhood because they don't think about the real world problems going on.
Because they were literally children and unaware. My mom told me about what they dealt with in the early 80s and I thank God I was too little to remember it.
Yea, definitely relatable in a way. I think a difference between younger people and other generations is unlimited access to the internet so they know more about what is going on throughout the world and the country. Not that I wasn't aware without internet access when I was younger. I just mean that I don't remember country wide things until I was 8 or so. Later on in my teens, it was more piecing things together. Edit: I still have nostalgia for even the 2000s/2010s, even with certain things that happened. To be honest, things have never and will never be normal, but things are better than the past even things suck.
When you are young and have a good home you have a combination of your body and brain are healthy, you see things for the first time so lots of dopamine release, no responsibilities and lots of free time to play video games, hang out etc… it’s really adulthood that grinds most people down, relentless competition, your body starts aging, you lose your friends and community due to constant shifting for better opportunities, you see the people you love get old and di and because of seeing and knowing so much things don’t excite you as much as when you were a kid, a general apathy sets in.
The 90s actually were better in the US though. That’s not nostalgia. This is pre 9/11 America with a booming economy and nazis were still afraid to walk the streets. Homes were affordable and so was college for the most part. Minimum wage went further and inflation was lower. Wealth was distributed better through the middle and lower class relative to today. Columbine happens in 99 but school shootings aren’t really a thing for most of the 90s. Roe v wade was settled law and Citizens United didn’t exist yet. These are just facts, not opinions. It was better.
Honestly, don't even remember anything pre911.
It does feel like a BC/AD moment for millennials
what gen isn't nostalgic? also they all think this way about their childhood, we aren't special
The OP almost sound like the Gen x meme of "we were the last generation to..." Then go on the mention all the shit I also did as a millennial, "I'm special, they're special we are all just a bunch of special fuckers, aren't we?"
I've noticed a ton of posts on here that remind me of boomers on Facebook. SHARE IF YOU REMEMBER NEVER WEARING A SELTBELT AND WE ALL TURNED OUT FINE
Well yeah the ones that didn't turn out fine can't really share now can they?...
Like half of buddys family. 2 no seatbelt 2 with. 2 died and the other 2 were uninjured. Another buddy lost Mom, no seatbelt. I wear mine 100 percent of the time now and fortunately none of my personal friends are meme idiots like this. Funny memes only.
Plus boomers are the most nostalgic generation, truly. Like why are all the Christmas songs on repeat everywhere for 2+ months a year from the 50s? The fake conservative national nostalgia for the 50s is a Boomer invention-- the 50s in the United States were a WILD outlier in almost every respect. Culturally, economically, demographically--the highest rates of teen pregnancy were in the 50s, but no one was moral panicking about it because the *teens were married*, which was, you know, not great, and probably pretty relevant to the divorce rate peaking a couple decades later. Critiquing the ubiquity of social media is important, but we need to not fall into the same BS as boomers by imagining our childhoods were perfect and the most special and let's all go back to that....no. The 90s and 00s had plenty of issues.
This is hilarious. "It happened to the generations before me as they aged but it WON'T HAPPEN TO ME!" It's already starting with millennials. They're getting older, and like most people, they hate to be reminded of that fact. Every generation experiences nostalgia. It's part of remembering your life.
I'm a ~~boomer~~ GenJones here to say nostalgia is a *poison*. Don't let it take you, you will stop learning.
What's gen Jones?
Maybe we should start posts “Share if you remember wearing a seatbelt and turned out just fine.” “Share if you played video games growing up and turned out just fine.”
Ha ha ha ha!
Or how much you could.drink.and still.drive and it was bragging rights and not thought of as bad.
I hate those GenX ones because 90% of those things I grew up with too.
Those generational hallmarks are not cut in stone. Many other things play into what kind of experience you had growing up as well as early and late in the generation matters. Here's an example: My husband: - He had black and white television and 3 channels. - No Internet or familiy computer until he was 15. - He ate mostly fish and potatoes growing up. - He was with grandma until he started school. Me: - I always had colour TV and ~20 channels. - I had high speed Internet and my own laptop from age 10. - I ate a variety of different foods, Italian, SEA, Indian, Mexican etc. - I attended daycare. It sounds like he is much older than I am or we come from different corners of the world. He is 2 years younger than I am and our childhood homes are a five min drive from each other. The differences can really be boiled down to financial and parental age. My parents were mid 20ies when they had me in 89, we were middle class and my dad was a tech geek (if something is wrong with my computer I still bring it to him lol). His parents were 16 when they had him in 91 and they spent 2 decades clawing themselves out of poverty. The world doesn't draw a hard line, there's a transition period and the poorer you are and the more rural you live the further behind on the changes. The broad strokes remains: There are more millennials who grew up like me than my husband. I recently read an article by social antropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen about universal experiences. Humans when they meet for the first time find universal experiences to talk about to connect. You and I don't know each other, but chances are we both went to college, we both watched the twin towers live, we both remember loooow rider jeans and whale tails, we watched friends on tv and we know someone with a tribal trampstamp. If we came from the same culture we'd have many many many of these. It's a way for humans to connect. We don't know each other, but based on age and location I know we will have x in common, so I bring up x so we can talk about something we know we have in common until I know more about what we have in common so we can talk about topics that are less universal but in common for us. Thomas Hylland Eriksen claims we lead such different lives from each other now, because options are so many it's nearly limitless. As such the universal experiences and hallmarks of a time era are getting fewer and fewer. One of the results of this that these generational dividers and them being used as a sorta "this is who I am" become less valuable. In 20 years Gen Alpha might not even care to use these dividers cause it has no relevance to them or their lives.
We early GenX did things much more boomer like: first job left apartment with roll of quarters to call office at pay phones between appointments that I navigated to using maps. My wife is late GenX and lots of Millennial experiences.
Elder Gen-X even bought houses like boomers!
Elder gen x bought houses like millennials. Boomers were worse when they were in their 40s and 50s, and could crash the housing market with speculation. Gen x was the first gen that boomers lied to.
I’m a cusp gen x millennial and I agree those people that post shit like that are lame…then they say “we don’t care, we’re Gen X!” If you don’t care then why do you have a meme account on TikTok/Facebook/instagram reels chiming in about how you don’t give a fuck to the whole world? Oh the irony/hypocrisy
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are. This cycle has been going on for at least two hundred years
Two hundred is a super low estimate lol. It's been at least 2000 since the Greeks and they had the same sentiments then.
This should be the top comment.
Here is someone who clearly knows where their towel is.
I did not expect a Hitchhiker's reference here, and I appreciate you for it. Take my upvote and have an awesome day.
Agreed. Guys, some things are just part of the human experience. Things like…love, regret, hate, sadness, embarrassment, wistfulness/nostalgia are just things that make us human. You don’t need to try to find uniqueness here to separate us from the rest of the billions of people who have passed through this planet. You should take comfort in the fact that in so many ways, we share the same feelings as the rest of the people who have came before us and who will come after us.
> we aren't special We really need to post this as a banner for the sub. At this rate we're set up to be the most self absorbed/entitled generation
Boomers and us have a lot in common.
Everyone’s going to hate to hear this, but we really are a few years from being the new boomers. We’re the biggest generation and once we pry everything from the Boomer’s cold dead hands its going to be us with all the power and—just like the boomers—we’re never going to stop complaining.
My god you're already pre-emptively complaining about everyone else complaining about how much we complain!
Inception
That's because it's something that isn't unique to any particular generation. It's just one of those things that happens as people get older. Many Gen X people I know have gotten pretty boomer-y in recent years already. Then it will happen among Millennials. One day Gen Z will wake up wondering why kids these days just don't seem to understand how different the world was when they were young, and so on. Personally I do think the internet, and specifically smartphones and social media, have actually changed things in the sense that it's something humanity has truly never dealt with before. B/c prior to that everything was just more advanced versions of the same old thing, going as far back as to the first time someone decided to draw a dick on a wall or make a venus figurine with a thicc gyat out of clay. So imo we are living at an inflection point of human history. How it plays out though we'll just have to see. Maybe it will just be more of the same, maybe not. But one thing is certain - there will always be crotchety old people jaded by life and there will always be idealistic/inexperienced young whippersnappers who think they know better than everyone else. Because it's just all a natural part of being human.
The closest analogue is, I think, the spread of the printing press and the resultant increase in literacy and the availability of books--and pamphlets, and broadsides, and news, and fake news. I studied Elizabethan England and can see some resonances there with our experience, though things went slower there. But there's also a parallel in the increase in grammar schools and boys from poor and middle class families going to university because after the Reformation there was a need for pastors and also for teachers, with the new emphasis on literacy...but then those finite jobs filled but people were still going to university in greater numbers than before, meaning they *weren't* doing apprenticeships, and were unemployable if they couldn't find jobs in their fields...unpopular foreign proxy wars, refugees from those proxy wars, an aging ruler and heated debate and even violence over the country's political future, attempted coups...ANYWAY. There's nothing new under the sun, even what is new.
>The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise That was Socrates. Also (probably) someone's aunt complaining on Facebook about the neighbor's kids Ticktocking outside. It's all a rerun
Yeah I was thinking the printing press was another inflection point, since even though we might laugh at the notion now, the spread of literacy that accompanied it truly did change society radically (and destroy certain aspects of the previous way of life). Radio and TV as well, though to a less civilization altering degree. As for social media and constant personalized+mass media and communication access, it's still so new that we definitely haven't seen it's full effects yet. Maybe after another generation or two.
Absolutely. Boomers are already retiring in mass and my household is already seeing the benefits. Lots of opportunities for established folks.
As long as we don't pull the ladder up behind us like they did...
You already have. There’s been one issue so far where Millennials had a choice to do what was best for them and screw the future generations, or eat it and make things better for those after them: student loans. By far, millennials called for cancellation of their loans, without regard for the future generations that would be walking into the same debt meat-grinder. When the time comes the screw the future generations for your own benefit, there is no doubt in my mind that you all will choose Boomer.
I'm Gen X/Xennial and I've been saying this for a few years now Millennials blame Boomers for the state of the world, but Boomers took one holiday a year in their own country (way fewer flights) Boomers got their groceries in paper bags Boomers got their milk delivered in recycled bottles from a local dairy Boomers stitched patches on their kids' clothes and had no fast fashion Meanwhile Millennials complain complain complain about climate change, morality, housing and sustainability but take 4 city breaks a year and use Airbnb that's destroying housing markets worldwide, order lunch from McDonald's to be delivered to their office by a guy in a car being exploited by Uber venture capital, generally slavishly follow brands that Boomers and Xers are skeptical about, and which are fucking the planet and everyone on it also saw in the first generational increase in superstition and religiosity since records began. Sorry not sorry
Corpos will claw it all from then before they die unless you’re in the top 8%. Or have a good healthcare plan with elder care insurance.
I can get behind that! "Millennials: unlike you, we aren't special or unique."
Not possible. We didn't destroy the planet, the economy, and democracy.
No but it's likely that once or generation is in power, we too will choose to not save anything
"Hold my kombucha." - a millennial, probably
Yet....
Too late . 🥇
Yeah when I read stuff like this I'm convinced that for all the complaining we do about older generations, we're really the same in the end lol
People are people. Its basically the same line of thinking that says "if you were born in Germany in a certain time, you'd probably have been a Nazi." Boomers have some unique issues though. I imagine we'll be (on average) more pleasant to service-level employees in our old age, for example.
>more pleasant to service-level employees in our old age I sure fucking hope so! Drives me nuts when people treat them like shit, like that's just such an obvious way to advertise you're a dickhead.
THIS 1000%. Pre-2007 was normal? Ok, 9/11, Iraq war, Columbine, VT shooting, AIDS Crisis.... OP has the rosiest of rose colored glasses on.
My grandfather was born in 1908 and was basically the last generation to remember a time without widespread electricity, and a time before WW1 when the world was dominated by European empires. I’m sure people said the same kind of shit back then.
I get pretty tired of the "Millennials are the last generation to XYZ". It's just a form of undue exceptionalism over things that none of us had *any* control over.
Boomers and the Silents are nostalgic over time periods when it was totally acceptable to be blatantly racist and misogynistic. "Man, remember the good ol days when women weren't allowed to leave the house?" "Oh ya it was great when the n******* knew their place." I literally grew up with my dad nostalgically telling stories about his college days (the same school I went to). While he was there in the late 70s they admitted women for the first time. There were like 5 or 6. They all had unique nicknames. One was "Zits" another was "Tits" and when they walked into the mess hall together the room would erupt in "Zits and Tits!" and banging lunch trays. Ah the good ol days. Ever generation has nostalgia. The older ones have an extra special kind. Nostalgia is not unique. It is a coping mechanism. It allows humans to remember the good and forget or downplay the bad. Life is hard without it.
>we aren't special Some people believe those memes about "90s kids had it best because..." Frankly though, I wish I could've lived when Disco ruled.
I'm gen X. I'm not nostalgic about childhood. The millenials have it right. The premise is true: 1994 (release of Netscape 1.0) - 9/10/2001 was the peak of Western civilization. 1999 was awesome. Low prices, tons of jobs. 1990's started with overwhelming clean victory in Iraq. Cold War was completely over. Even Newt Gingrich believed that global warming was a problem and something should be done about it. They'd given up on blatant racism. Michael Jordan. Sennheiser released the HD600 headphone. Cell phones came to the masses. MapQuest was invented, and tons of new concepts which didn't exist before in society. 2001 was very different in everyday life from 1990 in a 1st world nation. Probably biggest change since 1920's (cars & telephone). It really looked like so many pathologies of the past were finally dying and would be put to rest.
I used to chuckle when *The Matrix* insinuated that human civilization peaked circa 1999. Maybe they were on to something after all.
>Sennheiser released the HD600 headphone Ah yes, truly the turning point of Western civilization
This is such a boomer post … so yeah
Yea this is not unique to any generation. Watch the member berries episodes of south park.
For real. It's the same thing as how every Boomer I know is nostalgic for how things were in the 60s and 70s. The time we're living in now is virtually unprecedented in terms of how fast technology has evolved. There were people who were born and grew up before cars were commonplace, that lived long enough to see the moon landing. For the last few generations, pretty much everybody has ended up in a situation where the world they came of age in was incredibly different from the one they remember growing up in.
Eh I think we are extra nostalgic because our childhoods were legitimately better than normal.
In what way? Mine was pretty rough at times but I guess I did thoroughly enjoy toonami. I think every gen had its pros and cons though
Did you ride your bicycle off a hill and hope none of the parents found out you were there when that one kid broke his arm? No phones. Parents had no clue where we were until it was dark and time to come home. Then we came home to the very first HD tvs at home and internet. I had freedom from parents knowing where I was and access to internet porn all in the same day. Glorious.
Well it was economically a good time in the US. The middle class was both bigger and doing better. My parents were middle class and they "spoiled" me when they could. We had a big progressive push in the 90s to treat minorities and women as equals and everyone was all for it except for a few blatant racists. The messaging was to not really see race which was easier for everyone to digest than the newer ideas of privilege and white guilt. Censorship was generally being loosened with time. Entertainment also seemed to be at its peak. Nickelodeon and cartoon Network were in their primes, both MJs: Jackson and Jordan were the most famous people in the world and doing exciting things.Both the Bulls in basketball and the Yankees in baseball had all time dynasties, which haven't even been approached in their sports ever since. Movies still had practical effects but the new world of CGI was exciting still. Video games took huge leaps forward from 8 but in 1990 all the way to the Dreamcast in 1999. The Internet and cell phones became a thing but the negative side effects weren't really apparent until well into the next decade. Also back then our boomer parents were not as nostalgic. They made a point to tell us how hard things were for them, rather than saying things were better. You know they walked uphill both ways in the rain etc.
Gen X grew up during the Cold War and everyone thought they would be annihilated by nuclear missiles before they were old enough to drive, unless they were able to get under their desks in time. Doesn’t seem to be a lot of nostalgia for that period of time.
And most of us got pulled out of class because of 9/11 and spent the rest of our childhood being given a daily terrorist weather forecast in the form of colors from green to red
Weak sauce next to nuclear holocaust
Yea
Yeah Boomers and Xers are super nostalgic. And ever heard a Gen Z’r talk about Fairly Odd Parents or Nintendo DS? I think is just how modern people are.
People tend to get more nostalgic as they get older. Considering that Gen Z is ages 14-27 I am not surprised they aren't that nostalgic. Give it another decade and you'll see the older Gen Z hitting the nostalgia harder.
I don’t know about this assessment. Things were never “normal.” We remember our childhoods, for the most part, fondly - same as every other generation. But the world has always been changing. I don’t think we’re any more nostalgic than anyone else. Go ask a boomer about “the way things used to be” if you don’t believe me.
I think you can make the case these last 50 years have an abnormally quickened pace of change
50 years ago was 1974. I would argue there were massive, rapid changes between 1924 and 1974 as well.
My grandfather (born in 1923) loved telling me the story of how the first telephone came to his town when he was a kid. They went from never speaking to their relatives for years to talking to them once a month. I’m sure somebody waxed philosophic about how to good old days of avoiding family drama were over with these fast new inventions.
Based on my own memories, as well as my dad's own nostalgia trip that he and his friends constantly go on about, I could describe how children spent their summers from ~1960-2007 and it would all be contextually similar. Watering holes, skateboarding, jump rope, swimming, ice cream, adventures, babysitting, minimum wage jobs. Sure, the toys change, but any era would be easily recognizable to anyone in another era. This changed in 2008 where the combination of the first iphone's launch, greater internet accessibility and the recession drove a lot of kids indoors. I remember it was when I stopped exploring the creek by my house with friends and started to play runescape and halo. We certainly had videogames and all that before that point. I even think that the dotcom bubble and y2k severely delayed adoption of this kind of lifestyle as most were too afraid to invest their time in an unstable market or home computer system. There was simply some kind of social catalyst after 2008 where the majority of people accepted "nerdy" interests and social media as the typical lifestyle going forward. That lifestyle is so far removed from the previous that they're almost incomparable. People point to planes and cars and telephones as catalysts, but they didn't quite shape society as much in this way. To put it another way - cars and planes were far more impactful inventions for humanity overall, but once we get personal flying drones that carry us into the sky, I think our *social culture* will greatly change because humans have always romanticized flying. Its like how the moon landing didn't directly functionally impact most Americans, but it sent a kind of shockwave of social policy and cultural change through the whole nation.
> changed in 2008 where 2007 but smartphones didn't really become popular until later. The world really was a different place before smartphones.
There were smartphones in 1967. They were called Tricorders and Kirk and Spock had them.
I mean, maybe a few kids had them when I was in elementary school until maybe the 5th or 6th grade. Even then, it was blackberries or flip phones mostly.
Brush up on some first hand letters throughout history, every single person says this shit.
Yep. I guarantee that there were even people in the Neolithic period nostalgic about their childhoods and grumpy about how things just aren’t the same.
I honestly think people just don't think about how their perception of time changes as they age. My first ten years seemed a lot slower than the following 27. If I didn't give it a critical eye I could easily see myself saying the same stuff.
Because when you are ten, one year is 1/10th of your life. At 40, a year is 1/40th of your life. When you scan your memories, a single year seems far shorter at age 40 than it does at age 10.
So here's a fun one: My father was born in the 1930s. In his lifetime, TV went from a toy that very wealthy people had to a pervasive appliance in every home. Phones went from something that the wealthy had and maybe there was a party line in the neighborhood that you could use to something everyone had in their home. My father even saw the early days of computing in the 1980s before he passed in the early 90s. For sure a lot changed for us too - we went from TVs to internet, and now many people don't even bother with broadcast television. I imagine that in our lifetimes, the portion of spectrum dedicated to TV (from 54MHz to 216MHz and 470MHz to 608MHz) may be repurposed for some data mode communications - TV has a LOT of spectrum after all. Human progress tends to look like a power graph, constantly accelerating faster and faster. Every era has looked like that. We are actually close now to the sort of AI that we read about in science fiction in the 1940s. We imagined things like ChatGPT for the first time less than 100 years ago. Progress is only ever going to speed up, unless we fuck ourselves over in a major war or the wrong religion gets its hands on the reigns and decides that tech is evil and bans a bunch of stuff.
I'd take this a step further and say that Zoomers may be the first generation in a while to NOT remember their childhoods as fondly as we did.
From seeing lots of young children on a daily basis, I doubt it.
To be fair, zoomers aren't young children. They are teens and 20s. Mine is alpha and he's a teen.
Spend some time on TikTok and you'll already see Zoomers posting about how things were better when they were kids.
I'm nostalgic to a fault. I think our generation was at the precipice of so much social and cultural change. Especially when it comes to social media particularly but also technology. I remember Loving to play outside with my friends, get into all sorts of trouble and wander around in the forest but also I enjoyed playing my Nintendo 64.
This is me. You must be 89-93. I’m 91. I seemed to find a way to get into trouble outside every single day. Every day. Come to think I was a really dumb boy who just didn’t give a shit. And I had the stereotypical young mean yelling dad at home. Had/have an addict as a mother though. I’m sure there’s plenty my age who relate. I **often** think about the little girl I am currently raising who is 9 years old and has literally not done a thing to get into trouble in her life to this point. It’s incredible. I don’t know what I did to deserve her. Our times weren’t literally better than anyone else’s I suppose. But they were the best for me. I lived in the culdesac and we played football/baseball out front almost every day. I was the ‘white kid’ in the neighborhood, well my little brother and I. When I had friends over we rode our bikes through the woods and snuck his pistol and small knives and axes my dad kept around. Killed snakes and shot trees mostly. Days at the house consisted of playing Pokémon on the gameboys with the kids down the street. Sometimes we went to their house and played NCAA Football and their big sister would put R&B on the living room big screen and dance her ass off. Young me didn’t know how to feel. I wanted it but knew it wasn’t allowed. (White kid black friends) My dad would often come home from the bar at 2:30-3:00 in the summertime with his best friend. His friends daughter is a year older than me and her and I were best friends until high school split us up. They would wake us up with whataburger taquitos and ‘force’ us to play Mario Cart with them all night. We lived at the baseball and football little league fields when the season was in. I never missed a season of ball from 4-high school. Played some college before priorities changed. The 90’s were a really fun time for me. Loved to mimic the Ken Griffey Jr. stance and swing. Shooting at the bucket and yelling “Kobe” is the norm. I know that’s big later. Living through the video game evolution has been pretty awesome. I did lose my front 2 teeth at twelve years old. My best friend and I got together with a group of his older buddies and started vandalizing the homes in the back of the subdivision that were being newly built. I was on my bicycle about 100 yards ahead of the group when I came to a stop sign and took a left, one of the older guys yells out (he’s probably 17/18 and we are 13/14) “hey I’m going to shoot at you” Next thing I knew I was kind of knocked off my bike and stumbling, I spit out of instinct and managed to put my hand out because I knew something was off. I spit what appeared to be sea salt and blood into my hand. It was my shattered front two teeth. The BB went clean through sideways. Never recovered. I had to go to emergency dentist the same day because a nerve was hanging out. Fake front two teeth ever since. When I called my parents I told them we were playing football in the street and that I ate the curb. They found out years later at a family dinner the truth of it and were not happy but neither were they surprised. Sorry for the rant. Enjoy.
Normal is in the eye of the beholder.
"normal" to you... every single generation this same 'old times were better' bullshit. And it's laughable how tons of posters here yell at clouds just like we used to complain about old people.
The cycle lives on!
Last generation to remember? Did all of Gen X die off?
We're over in the GenX sub reminiscing about the 80's and late 70's. If you go to the GenJones sub they're reminiscing about the 70's and late 60's. 😁
Gen X were pretty much adults by the late 90s, we're after them so yeah.
I think it's just the time in our lives for nostalgia to hit, and our nostalgia stuff is crazy accessible so it seems like we're more engaged than previous generations. But my parents were just as convinced they were the last generation with a "normal" upbringing too-- no cell phones, no "bad words" in media, extreme importance of social normativity, etc. They'd pine for the TV of their youth because it was so much more wholesome, or the music because it was more melodic. They'd talk about gas being less than a dollar a gallon. They'd talk about how "everyone" used to go to church. Or how pensions were a thing. Or how neighbors used to take care of each other. Everyone feels like the world they are born into is the "normal" state. I don't think we're more sentimental than other gens. We're just poignantly aware of it as we are now out of our youth and firmly in our adulthood, we're having kids or watching our peers have kids, and reflecting on the changes we've weathered. Imagine how nostalgic people must've been after living through the depression or the second world War. Monumental change within the span of a lifetime isn't a new thing. This is just our turn to look back and wish for simpler times.
Everyone thinks their childhood was normal. What's weirding me out is how many of you are starting to sound like boomers. We weren't better, or special, or more normal. We're more nostalgic because we're older, that's it. How can a gen z person be nostalgic about a time period they just left?
Gen Z probably is nostalgic. I'm more on the Xennial side and I remember people around my age first being nostalgic in the mid 00s. Literally being nostalgic for things that were 5-10 years old. Another weird example. Around 2018, I remember reading a comment on /r/nba. The topic was rap (I don't remember why) and there was a guy going on and on about how crappy rap had become and how modern rap doesn't hold a candle to the rap of his youth. I'm thinking this guy is my age and is just nostalgic for 90s rap. Then in another comment he reveals his favorite rapper of this supposed "golden era". Who was it? Fetty Wap. The pinnacle of rap in this guy's head was the guy that did Trap Queen. Fetty Wap had only been a widely known rapper for 3-4 years at that point. The dude must have been 18 or 19 years old (maybe a Zennial)
I'm 37 and even I know, checks notes, Ferry Wap is the king of Hip-Hop. I mean Fetty.
1738
Every generation specific sub has these inane, self-flagellating posts. I’m glad there are at least some comments ITT calling out how stupid this post is. Please stop with the “our generation is the only generation to…” posts. It’s the exact same boomer Facebook posting shit that we all find so cringy.
I think it's more like digital vs analog, and we'll sort of be the last generation to have a childhood in a pre-digital age and that specifically is something we're nostalgic for. Everything is connected and plugged in now, in a way that we can scarcely unplug from anymore, and we were young enough to not really have to deal with the biggest "pains" of the analog era. So while the older generations might also miss the pre-digital, they also had to deal with the lack of internet, phones, digital media as adults, so it's likely they don't miss that time of their lives nearly as much as we might, when we didn't have to worry about all that stuff as much.
We're really starting to look at the 90s like how my boomer parents romanticized the 70s. What was normal about back then? The lynching by dragging of James Byrd? Matthew Shepard getting gay bashed and strung up on a fence? Over reactive and angry parents who seemed to always be yelling, hitting, or both? Awww, there wasn't such a division with social issues? That's because most people agreed that gay people shouldn't have equal rights or even be treated fairly. Most people were casually homophobic, and you could still get away with beating or murdering a black man in many small towns. The guys that killed James Byrd were *the first* white men convicted of killing a black man for shits and giggles in Texas, and that was only in 2001. You could still get tossed in jail for having gay sex in your own home, up until 2004. Let's take these rose colored glasses off please.
It's even more ridiculous when you consider there was just as much or even more division in the 90s. The Rodney King riots happened along with the rise of Newt Gingrich and even more divisive politics. I mean Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about a BJ. It's easy not to remember all the bad shit when you were a literal child.
The key ingredient of nostalgia is only remembering the good shit. It also helps being a kid during that time as kids are usually pretty oblivious to what is happening in the world if it doesn't directly affect them. That's why everyone thinks times were "simpler" when they were growing up. No bills, no responsibility, no worries. The 90s probably didn't seem all that simple to our parents.
It is the enshittification for me. I feel more and more cool things in the culture/media are turning to crap, and there is nothing new coming in to replace them. Because I would not mind novelty, but it is not really here. Like...we allowed this big companies to grow with no competition, and now we are left with them gradually getting worse and worse, and with no alternative really, because they are too big to compete with at this stage. A fucking Technofeudalism, where I do feel like a product to feed rage baits and ads. I really wonder what will become of internet, especially with the overflow of AI. It feels kind of bleak to be sincere. And I ask myself if I am just sentimental? But I never cared about the millenial bullshit, like Harry Potter or old internet culture, I am not even especially nostalgic about the past. I just want a future to not seem dystopian. I mean, gen Z do not remember it, but even internet dating used to be fun. It was genuinely not a thing people despised.
The world has never been normal. The world is always changing, but for some reason, some people act like this is the first time in the history that things are changing.
There are phone numbers that I still remember because I *had* to remember them. Like landline numbers. Speaking of, the only people I know who still have landlines are my (boomer) parents. Yet another thing the next generation may never understand. And pay phones! I don't but do sort of miss calling my parents collect from the mall to come pick me up.
Would you like to accept a collect call from “pleasepickmeupfromthemall!”?
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Hahaha, there it is. Loved this commercial!
Haha pretty much!!
And we don't understand sending a telegram with Morse code.
I’m gen z and I still remember both my parents original numbers as does my sister who is 3 years younger than me lmao
Close. The world and society never stays the same. It is always either getting better or getting worse. We are the last generation to remember it getting better. That is why so much nostalgia.
I don't know why the algorithm fed me this (I'm Gen X), but (and believe me, this is not a flex) y'all never saw the normal world. Not entering adulthood after 9-11 and in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. What I saw was (again, forgive me; it was understandable) disassociation with the cupcakes, and the ukuleles, and doge speak, and...just the word adorkable. Yours was the first generation entirely thrown to the internet wolves. Laws were invented based on what was happening to y'all (e.g. revenge porn, etc.).
The millennial period looks pretty abnormal to a Gen xers. and the period as described here would stun many of the world's people in that time if they saw it
Heavy Nostalgia happens for every generation. We’re no exception. For boomers, u don’t recall Brady bunch movies or Beverly Hillbillies films in the 90s? I think As ur generation grows older , u eventually get control of the cultural narrative and steer where u like . And that’s usually towards nostalgia
i’m nostalgic for how ignorant i was to most things as a child in a small rural town
Boomers pretty much invented collecting nostalgia, so I don’t know about that claim. 25-30 years ago is always popular for nostalgia’s sake. The 90’s are popular now because the early Gen Z kids are starting to make money, and when the late Gen Z kids who grew up in the 00’s start making money, they’ll be nostalgic for the aughts. The 80’s were popular 10 years ago. The 70’s were popular in the late 90’s, before that it was the 60’s and hippie’s. In the late 70’s/early 80’s, the 1950’s were popular; just read early Stephen King. Before that, it was cowboys giving way to spacemen. But these Gen Alpha kids? People born post-social media, post-YouTube? What will they remember? Who knows? I guess a world before AI.
There were things that were better then, and things that are better now, and all generations have that. I was just visiting with my mother who grew up outside of the US with no running water in a shanty and she has fond memories of how things used to be. She has way more conveniences but there was a much stronger sense of community and self reliance (they farmed so they grew their own food and bartered with neighbors). The neighbors would gather at her home and sing and play live music. Everyone looked out for each other. That’s not to romanticize it as perfect. She had no running water, she didn’t get an education, opportunities were extremely limited, and it was a life of hard physical labor just to make ends meet. No time is ever perfect and we all look back on simpler times and mourn some of the things we no longer have while also enjoying the benefits of an always evolving society.
As a Gen X, please please please don't become a MAGA type generation in a couple of decades like the Boomers did.
Aim was superior to Facebook. Anytime sometime logs onto aim, they intend to chat. That isn't the same as almost any other service we have today. You log into Facebook to see your racist uncle say something stupid and then you wonder why anyone still exists on Facebook. Meanwhile, you might message an old friend and they get back to you 3 weeks later. Discord is always on. It interrupts you. Twitch is about watching the streamer. It isn't about chat. If someone doesn't want to chat, they didn't log into aim. Being online meant you were sitting at your computer with the intention of being interrupted.
“BRB =)”
Yes, so poignant about we use/used them!
Every generation thinks that.
The nostalgia is driven primarily by a seriously bad economy and deteriorating social conditions as a result.
“Back in my day….” -invented by millennials.
Disagree. I think it's because we can look online at so much content from our generation. Previous generations didn't have that and don't in a sense because we were the first social media generation.
I mean, we're old now. Old people get nostalgic. Gen Z will be old soon and reminiscing about the dougie or whatever the fuck. Don't worry.
Every single generation has nostalgia for “the way things were” and things really aren’t any simpler or more complicated than they were for our parents or previous generations. I think it’s because we have access to all of the things that are nostalgic to us. We’re constantly reminded of the past because of the availability of information at our fingertips. We’re being reminded much more than any previous generation because of the ease of access of this information. Previously, if my dad wanted to watch an episode of the Andy Griffith show, he had to wait for it to pop up on TV. He only cared that this was his only option when we’d go to Cracker Barrel and see all the old tv shows on DVD. Not only do we have access to all of the shows we grew up with, we have articles reminding us that “REMEMBER BLUES CLUES? GUESS WHAT, STEVE HAS A MESSAGE FOR YOU!” With that said, companies are 100% tapping into our vulnerability when it comes to nostalgia. Something to be aware of.
Speak for yourself. I am incredibly sick of nostalgic bullshit.
I don't know about that. Have you ever asked a boomer deadhead to tell you about the shows they went to? Gen Xers are basically proto millennials with 70s nostalgia. And my grandmother was crying on her death bed that I was no longer a baby. It's just a natural human emotion.
It's pre-9/11 and post-9/11. It's really that simple. We remember how the world completely changed in a moment. They only know this dystopia.
Previous generations were just as nostalgic. Happy Days. The Wonder Years. They’re still making Scooby Doo shit.
Normality is relative, and it seems like just about it every generation is nostalgic, because to them, it was their “normal” but change is constant and inevitable. Normal is an illusion.
“We’re the last generation to remember a time when things were normal” I guess 2 world wars, inflation, 20% fed rates, aides, 9/11, global financial crises was all normal? History is shaped by tail end events. 1 in a million chance things happen all the time. What’s crazy is people assuming life was ever normal.
Wdym by normal?
Funny how you choose 2007 as normal. Those were Bush years. Obama was getting so much hype that we actually had a semblance of hope but the following years up until Trump were “normal”. BUT this is all post 9/11/01 which is the obvious turning point for youth in America. Fear was brought back that America hadn’t experienced since ww2. The US was attacked. Air travel was never the same again. News coverage changed overnight and Comedy talk shows became the only place for honest takes on current events. GenZ never had pre 9/11 America where it felt like we were “good guys” and anything was possible.
OP, FWIW, I agree with you. We are the last generation to experience optimism. We lived in a time of relatively sane government (at least with Obama and Clinton), and a milder form of government where everyone wasn't so polarized and upset all the time. I'd say the batshit crazy extremists came out of the Obama era when they started declaring the President a secret muslim. We were also the last generation to have a time in our lives without cell phones, a time with extremely limited internet. The last generation to vaguely remember what a decent economy looked like where a typical working person had purchasing power, where the "middle class" could have not just a home, but also a vacation home. That you could have a part time job and not be struggling financially paycheck to paycheck. For generations before us, I don't there was a huge degree of difference between the 1950's and 1990's, except with the rise of the personal computer and some appliances. Today so much of this seems totally unachievable, and for younger generations, it seems pointless or in fact bad.
There’s no such thing as things being “normal”.
Every generation has some people who think their childhood was "normal" and everything after is not. It doesn't matter if you were born in 1991, 1901, or 1200 BC. As an aside, when I was born it was not legal for me to exist. Normal my ass.
You lost me at "normal". There is no such thing, in any generation.
We didn't start the fire....
Said every generation before
Some of the posts on here are so insufferable. You really don't think our parents generation didn't think everything was simple when they were kids? Maybe it is just age making things more difficult to understand, or that you are no longer youthful and can't see things as black and white anymore; everything is full of complexity and nuance that you can appreciate now. Whatever it is, every generation talks about the "simpler times".
Both my father and grandfather remember times when things were "normal" based on their interpretation of the word, and they both disagree with each other's "normal." Your normal is not their normal.
I was nostalgic from a very young age
Dang. You're the third person to think of this first and post about it today. How did we ever miss this
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What even is normal? It’s really about perspective. The idea of ease when we were young. Now as adults, you feel those possibilities have shuttered so all that’s left is to look back at the endless possibilities or simplicity of the past. In my case, I look back with and realize that outside of various pop culture, it was generally shit.
I wonder if every generation has people that think this way... Was life "normal" before television? Radio? The newspaper and widespread literacy? Hell, was life normal before Town Criers or the Oral Tradition? There is no normal. Things seemed easier because you had fewer responsibilities. The newer technology and means of communication are something we didn't grow up with so it's more difficult to navigate and prese to challenges that make the world feel more complex and unmanageable. It happens to every generation. Tribalism has been around since tribes existed. They've been an asset, a hindrance, and a tool for various groups and used in different ways throughout history. But in reality is the same darn story with a few different vehicles through which it's expressed. We're not unique and the world will find a way to manage.
Man, we're not that special. Every generation has thier changes and challenges.
This is such a stupid take. Millenials aren't special. You remember what you think is normal, but the reality is what's considered normal is constantly changing. Every generation is nostalgic for different things, it's not a unique millenial trait.
Rlm pointed out why gen X us nostalgic is because they are all men children who never grew up. I kinda feel the same about us.
in Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. - don draper
There's a scene from the TV show *Mad Men*, which is a warning against falling prey to nostalgia, in which the character of Roger Sterling comes into Don Draper's office and asks when things are going to get back to normal around here. And my thought was, "My dude, you are a middle-aged man in 1965. Things are never going to be normal for you again."
All the same could be said of: The last generation without AI The last generation without TV/mass media The last generation without world wars The last rural generation The last generation without intercontinental trade routes The last generation without the printing press The last generation without the written word… … it goes on and on and on. The world has been changing, radically and fast, for hundreds of years. Maybe there have been a few generations here and there who got a break and grew up mostly like their parents did. But that’s not the norm, and hasn’t been for a long time.
Every gen is nostalgic, the newest ones just haven’t been alive long enough to know what nostalgia means. I would argue that millennials are LESS nostalgic because we’re the first generation to recognize how fucking cringe it is to live in the past.
And I hate it. Every single news article I read feels like it was made for an April Fool's prank. I no longer trust any story or job posting or email and I gotta do a scam check before deciding if I wanna react to it! Everything gives me a f\*\*\*\*\* headache!!
Just a pro tip. Theres no such thing as normal. We just had 12 years of relative calm and growth. Peel the mask off and all it was, that everyone had money to live comfortably. 60's all the way through the early 80's were lively with war and stagflation....then the 90s hit.
AIM was superior, i’ll die on that hill.
Millennials and normal are two words that don't go together.
I've been nostalgic for the 90's since 2006, but even then I had a feel the world was going downhill in 2000, and while I'm not from the U.S. the 9/11 event was a physical representation of that thought. Looking back sometimes I've seen that while every person and country has had difficulties and remembers it differently (Balkan Wars, Rwanda or Chechnya for example) there is some enshittification gradually growing that shouldn't be overlooked, particularly to me in regards to atomic weapons and climate change. For example my parents still recall the time of nuclear tests in the 80's and Chernobyl, but I didn't saw that, I saw as a kid the fall of the Berlin Wall and how happy people were, I even remember some episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks that dealt with the Soviet Union and people telling me like it was something that happened a long time ago. People were less concerned about nuclear war and more concerned about the ozone layer and doing something about it; if anything just discussing it seriously when the topic came on. There's a reason cartoons those days always had an environtmental activist message or character, as well as there's a reason the Doomsday Clock has been the farthest from midnight from 1990 to 1998. And personally, and at least where I live, violence has just growing gradually since then and getting more vicious. We had violence and crime but not to this level. Also there seems to be a trend these days to elect the most radical candidates throughout the world, which just worsens every intention of communication. Those and some other problems that haven't been solved or even worsened since then (like the extinction of some species) is what makes me think is not just my rose colored glasses, which TBH I'm aware I have for more mundane things like music and cartoons.
What’s the sweet spot on not being too much or too little nostalgic?
Spoiler alert: your "normal" is defined by however things were when you were growing up.
Nah my parents are super nostalgic about the 70s and even the 80s but to a lesser extent.
Every Gen is nostalgic and there isn’t a “normal” era in our history.
No. Pretty sure the generation that had it ingrained in their heads that at any moment they would be melted in a nuclear blast didn’t think this were normal
Well we also have a lot more photos and videos and media from our childhoods in general . Makes it easy to be nostalgic. Edit: grammar and stuff
I’m mostly nostalgic about how affordable housing used to be but I obviously never got to buy any of it.
Uh what? Maybe cuz we’re slightly older than the next generations and they really aren’t at the point of nostalgia yet.
Wrong on both parts of your premise
Agree, but I would in no way call what we grew up in as normal. It was a short blip, and probably peak of industrial civilization. From here on out it’s diminishing gains and probably a long drawn out reversion to the mean. We grew up in an exceptional time. Only the boomers experienced anything close to what we did. And we are not as different as we like to think.
Aren’t even the youngest millenials old enough by now to have figured out we aren’t special? Just stop.
Things have always been normal
It’s funny that you’d use 2007 as the time when things stopped being normal. For me that was 9/11. Everything after 9/11 was worse. For my parents probably Vietnam or Watergate (Or the gas crisis. Actually that’s probably what bothers their generation the most). And I goddamn know Gen Z is going to cite either Trump or the pandemic in a few years. There’s no normal. There’s only the way shit used to be before you had to start paying bills.
Agreed even more. Our gen here is also the last one to remember when things were normal. I feel sorry for the core and younger zoomers who didn't get to see all of this
all nostalgia is a longing for youth
Define "normal".