Oh, the 2000s. People were celebrating that the world didn’t end in 1999. Flipphoneswere all the rage, low-rise jeans were the hottest thing in fashion, and tweens and teens were listening to pop-punk on their MP3 players. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but the British, for example,thinklife was best in the 2000s.Although I was a tween in the noughties, I don’t really see it. But othermillennialswould like to argue that this was the case. The people in this thread came to the defense of the ’00s, sharingwhat life was likeback then, including the good, the embarrassing, and the bad.Bored Pandareached out to the person who started this thread, u/They kindly agreed to have a chat with us about the 2000s and what things people will probably miss from the 2020s. Read our conversation below!This post may includeaffiliate links.
Oh, the 2000s. People were celebrating that the world didn’t end in 1999. Flipphoneswere all the rage, low-rise jeans were the hottest thing in fashion, and tweens and teens were listening to pop-punk on their MP3 players. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but the British, for example,thinklife was best in the 2000s.
Although I was a tween in the noughties, I don’t really see it. But othermillennialswould like to argue that this was the case. The people in this thread came to the defense of the ’00s, sharingwhat life was likeback then, including the good, the embarrassing, and the bad.
Bored Pandareached out to the person who started this thread, u/They kindly agreed to have a chat with us about the 2000s and what things people will probably miss from the 2020s. Read our conversation below!
This post may includeaffiliate links.
I knew the phone number of everyone in my circle off the top of my head.
“I wanted to ask people about their experiences in that time period to know if it was ‘accurate.’ The netizen tells us they were born in 2005, so they haven’t really experienced the decade in its full swing. “[I] genuinely have about six memories from the late 2000s,” they told us in a message.
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I was excited for the future. I’m 43 now. I am no longer excited for anything :|.
We used to go over to someones house after school and just sit on the computer. Like 4-5 people just playing flash games or going to weird, random sites they had heard of and watching terrible content.Now a days, idk, maybe kids do a similar thing with their phones and send each other media. But I’ll always remember those days, and knowing when that mother f****r Adam got on the computer that I was about to see some weird s**t.
The thing that fascinates the netizen the most aboutthe 2000sis the lack of social media. “Just the concept of not constantly consuming media and not having a device on you 24/7,” they say. “I virtually grew up with a phone/iPad on me at all times and social media was also definitely very mainstream and developed compared to the 2000s.“Every decade has something people miss; whether that’s poofy hair from the ’80s, ’90s flannel, or LAN parties from the 2000s. When we started chatting with u/1dfk000 about what things people could possibly miss from thisdecade, they it’ll probably be social media. “Or cars that run on gas,” they also add.
The thing that fascinates the netizen the most aboutthe 2000sis the lack of social media. “Just the concept of not constantly consuming media and not having a device on you 24/7,” they say. “I virtually grew up with a phone/iPad on me at all times and social media was also definitely very mainstream and developed compared to the 2000s.”
Every decade has something people miss; whether that’s poofy hair from the ’80s, ’90s flannel, or LAN parties from the 2000s. When we started chatting with u/1dfk000 about what things people could possibly miss from thisdecade, they it’ll probably be social media. “Or cars that run on gas,” they also add.
I can tell you this we had a lot healthier relationship with the internet when it was confined to a single point, the home computer.
It was a simpler time. We hung out at the mall, played video games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto. Social media wasn’t as big, so we actually called our friends on the phone to make plans. Napster and LimeWire were the go-to for downloading music.
“I think social media may become less prominent since a lot more people are starting to crave interactions with people rather than communicating through their phones,” the Redditor says. “I also think fuel-powered vehicles will become less common and people will probably start becoming nostalgic for it and missing them.”
The internet wasn’t overloaded with an abundance of the dumbest people on the planet. There were a lot of idiots online, but nowhere near as many as there are now. Also significantly less people worshipped politicians. Prices for most things were way cheaper than they are now. Music was really popping off. Cancel culture wasn’t really a thing yet, and you could actually be mildly offensive online without pissing off a million people with blue hair. Life was honestly pretty good in the early 2000s.
The 2000’s was a lot of fun. Actually, to be completely honest, all of my life has been fun. I was born in 1981 so I got to experience the 80’s to a degree, the 90’s as a kid and the 2000s as a young adult.All of those decades had some great things about them. I would not have asked to live in any other period of time. I got to experience the simplicity of life and the nuttiness of current time, both somewhat comfortably. The changes of technology didn’t scare me, and the independence of being a “latch key kid” was also something I got to experience. I don’t think I really answered the question though…but life was fun.
16/f/cali u?u/Godzira-r32:My whole life changed when I experienced MSN Messenger for the first time. And getting the screen name from a girl you had a crush on? Man, there was nothing like it for 13-year-old me.
A thing I see people rarely mention is that being someone who didn’t really use the internet wasn’t frowned upon. I knew lots of people who just used their home phone and mail for everything and did fine even. If they needed a computer you could just go to a library.
We had dial-up internet at first, which was super slow. Kids today don’t know the struggle of waiting for a page to load. We used to rent movies from Blockbuster. And if you missed an episode of your favorite show, you’d have to wait for the rerun.
You could actually understand what rappers were saying.
Everyone had a fk ton of DVDs, but people also burned music CDs. If you had money, you had an iPod. Gas became expensive during the 2007 crash, but in the early 2000s, it was close to a dollar per gallon. Cash for clunkers hadn’t happened yet, so cars were ridiculously cheap. You could pick up a crpy one for a few hundred dollars, and a lot of the time, if you were mechanically inclined, you could work on it yourself to keep it running. The Internet started off cr**py but quickly got better. As that happened, online gaming took off. Prior to that, if you wanted to game with your friends, one of you had to haul your PC over to the other’s place for a LAN party. Teen movies glorified drinking and partying, so a lot of cheap beer was consumed.
Boring. Although we didn’t realise at the time that was a luxury.
Two things that were really different:1) New episodes of shows came out at a specific time on a specific day, so you’d plan your week around it, then talk about it the next day at work/school or plan to watch it with someone every week. Sometimes I’d even call friends during commercial breaks to discuss what was happening in that episode2) The incredible amount of fat-shaming and fat jokes that were so pervasive in 2000s society. It’s really hard to communicate effectively because even though people are definitely still d***s about it, and the media and social media still focuses on/idolizes thin people, there were so many magazines constantly recommending diet tips, gossip magazines negatively commenting on stars who took a single bad photo (“[starlet] gained 20 stress pounds!”) and regular people would compare diets as a normal social interaction. You also never saw clothes in sizes bigger than L in non-plus size stores. It really is a different world in that regard.
Humanity peaked at Windows XP.
I worked at a cellphone store 2006-2008. Was a crazy time as we had like 60 different phone models with like 12 different operating systems. It was actually a difficult job because you had to know a lot about each individual product. Anyone remember BlackBerry? The motorola Razer? Nokias? The TMobile Sidekick? Those hundreds of similar candy bar phones? Ringtones? When low rez camera phones became a thing? T9 texting? I remember texting and driving was more common and actually a lot safer because with T9 it was muscle memory and you wouldn’t have to look at the screen to text.
Texting was $0.10 a message.
Born in 1989, so most of my childhood and development happened in the 2000s.I got in trouble with my parents for racking up $40 on our cell phone bill because I was texting my crush too much. Couldn’t call her until after 7pm either because that’s when free minutes on Sprint started. Speaking of cell phones, it was actually really controversial in my parent’s social circle when they gave me a cell phone when I was 12. It was still almost unheard of at that point, and I even got in trouble for bringing it to school, even though I kept it in my backpack.Also, I miss that gaming seemed so much more social. It was weird and frustrating if you played with anyone who didn’t have a mic. All the angsty AIM away messages that quoted some s****y Midwest emo rock bands. And man I miss AIM.Everything just overall seemed simpler. Technology is a wonderful thing. I’ve made a career out of it. But I do miss how much more simple it felt like when it was still evolving.I look at it with nostalgia, but the events in the 2000s also setup millennials to have a hard time in our adult years. 9/11 flipped the world upside down. I graduated from high school into the 2008 Great Recession. And for a lot of us trying to make financial progress through the 2010s, a lot of us had that progress wiped away in 2020 during the pandemic. So a lot of people in our generation has become justifiably bitter and pessimistic.
Touch screen as we know it today was still this sci-fi technology you only saw in movies.
I remember when working from home meant 4 phone lines for me, one for home phone, one for work phone, one for dial up and one for a fax. Hard to believe that faxes are still a thing though.
Pretty awesome as a kid tbh, I have fond memories of spending entire days skating all over town with friends and then going home and playing the original SKATE or Fallout 3 till midnight.Also, moviegoing was so much better and more fun. Before Marvel picked up its steam, the big blockbuster event that everyone would go to the movies for was Pirates of The Caribbean.
We ranked our friends 1-8 on Myspace, hung out at the mall, wore makeup 3x too dark for our skin tone, we loved the Snooki Poof, anything Abercrombie (or Hot Topic, depending on your vibe), watched a lot of Ebaum’s world, used AIM and cryptic away messages, watched TRL, wore low rise jeans, doubled up on polo shirts with popped collars, and spent a lot of time outside.
I was in my 20s for the whole decade- finishing college, my first job, meeting my future wife, etc. My view on it:The two defining events were 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash. In retrospect, Bush vs Gore and the Supreme Court stepping in to give it to Bush was the defining event of the decade and maybe the rest of our adult lives. So yeah, much of the decade was spent in the shadow of 9/11 and the Iraq war. The revelations about torture, people slowly realizing they’d been lied to etc.And ofcourse the housing bubble where people I graduated with bought apartments for like $30k and made insane money, while others bought in too late and were ruined financially especially people who got adjustable rate mortgages. It’s hard to explain how easy it was to get financing, how much people were approved for. I was making like $40k out of college and was approved for well over $200k, which at the time could get you into a pretty decent place, at least where I lived. I received good advice and locked it down with a fixed rate mortgage for a rowhouse in a gentrifying neighborhood…made like $800 payments for a solid decade before selling and having enough for my next down payment. Silly how one decent decision can really put you on your way.On the flipside, the bubble bursting, the resulting financial crisis and the s****y job market afterwards was terrifying., people were super worried about being laid off, people graduating into a crisis and having their future prospects screwed because they couldn’t get a job out of college. The painfully slow recovery.Obama’s campaign is hard to describe. People were so sick of Bush, so excited for Obama…he was such an incredible, inspiring speaker, the prospect of a black president was so thrilling. In today’s cynical environment it’s really hard to capture that feeling.The last burst of rock, all the awesome indie rock and garage bands, people losing their minds over Strokes and White Stripes. The rise and fall of Napster, so many great shows.People covered tech and internet pretty well- AIM, PS2, Goldeneye, message boards, blogs, early Facebook, Fark, ebaumsworld. It was fun, slightly taboo, uncensored, mean, cheeky, random. But you still had alt weeklies, people still used online to plan to hang out in person. Mix of analog and digital that will never exist again.
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One thing that shocked me, back then if you liked anime in school you got beaten up or bullied.When I went back to college, my gen z classmates openly talked about and watched anime. I even got called a hipster and a boomer for saying I wasn’t currently watching anime.Feels kinda unfair. I had to hide that s**t for years. XD.
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Music Festivals were making a strong comeback, and they were awesome. It seemed like every weekend there was a music festival with an amazing lineup occurring somewhere in the country. You could go to Bonnaroo for just $142, and not have to wade through crowds of influencers trying to brand themselves in the middle of a show. Lineups were a lot more eclectic too. It was a great moment in time to experience.
Great.Music was still pretty good, the internet was taking off, cell phones were starting to be more accessible and we didn’t all die at the end of 1999.
You could walk around town with a stack of printed cvs and get a job…like that!
MySpace top 8 was wild. I also remember using layouts and music to make my page super cute (but actually annoying).
MySpace made me learn HTML. I enjoyed it so much I took classes later on. Kinda hate I forgot everything, though.
The internet was a new frontier full of possibilities.
Online? Mostly lawless lolOffline? pretty much the same as the 90s with more technology.
“2 unread messages” on a green LED exterior display on a flip phone hit really, really hard.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of time..we were on the precipice of a new age. Still renting movies but on DVDs now, the internet was still in its juvenile stages but didn’t need to use a phone line (sometimes). Weed was hit or miss but you always took it, and you learned the headlights of cars to know when a cop was behind you. Flip phones were the height of technology and music was just starting to be digitally pirated.Guys had these haircuts that went forward but were then spiked up in the front like they walked into a wall. It was a weird segue into the new millennium, very strange times. We’d use these writing devices on paper..such a primitive form of communication. And we wrote words that were attached in a flowy way.
Definitely tough to explain this to younger people. The push notification for example wasn’t until 2009. Before that you’d need to logon somewhere to see if you got a message from anyone. No group chats etc. In many ways that’s when everything changed, in terms of communication at least.
People seem to be missing that it was 9/11 and post 9/11. Basically privacy went to s**t and everyone became war hawks and we went to stupid wars. Then there was a huge push back and Bush became super unpopular. Then Obama came in and we all discovered the government watches everything we do - and then the economy crashed in a Great Recession. So it really sucked for those graduating who couldn’t get a job*recession technically started before Obama took office.
I saw two planes fly into buildings when I was like 12 and the economy tanked in 2008 but other than that it was pretty cool I guess.
Pirating oblivion.
I was a freshman in college in 2001. I was a cadet in Charlie company at North Georgia College & State University (I think it has since been renamed). In High School i was very active in JROTC, and I wanted to commission as an officer in the Army. Between room inspections, morning PT and class, I listened to Linkin Park and Foo Fighters.For me, the world really started to change on Sept 11, 2001. The upper classmen were stressed out and amped up. Especially the outgoing, commisioning seniors. For like a month, there was an almost palpable excitement and energy on campus. It didnt take long for the first alumni to die overseas, though, and we had a memorial service for two of them. After that, the mood changed, and it wasn’t a game anymore. Not that we werent taking it seriously prior to 9/11, but it took on a much more somber tone.It may be nostalgia talking, and the rose colored lense youth, but the world has never felt like it did before that time.
The life I expected to have when I had kids… source I make double to triple what my parents made. Im a software developer dual income my mom and dad were a photo studio running their own business.I went on vacations every year sometimes twice a year since we also would go skiing. We also did camping where a night of camping in a rv was like 8 - 10 a night. Same spots now cost as much as a hotel or the difference isn’t noticeable.Parents were able to buy a home in a spot that in 1995 was a tad over 100k. They sold it for over a mill.I got to use some of the first mac pro computers as a kid though since my mom was a graphics design artist so I had a GUI before most people could conceive of it in the general public.Also so much crime existed but I at like no joke 5 - 8 would just go around the neighborhood unsupervised. Now the internet has you thinking the child r*pists are sitting in bushes waiting for your kids to come out.Not going to disagree that in the 1970s it was hard to get a home harder than it is now. Disagree it stayed hard, People in my industry made my pay 20 years ago and I’d have just had sooooo much wealth. As it stands I’m barely upper middle class at my income which is just bonkers.
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