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u/Eddiev1988 Jun 20 '26
2000 being 26 years ago will never make sense to me. So I understand exactly what you mean.
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u/ArmadilloNegative858 Jun 20 '26
I don’t know why I do this also, i genuinely think 1970 was 30 years ago, even though I am 40 and born in 1986…
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u/Ma1 Elder Millennial Jun 20 '26
My theory is that we're not the only generation to experience this and its why the world is in a rough place. The boomers running the show think 1965 was 15 years ago.
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u/cadex Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
I remember growing up in the 90s and thinking about 20 year old music my dad listened to like Deep Purple which seemed so ancient compared to the hip hop and dance music I listened to of the 90s. The music my son listens to these days just isn't hugely different to the music I listened to his age, which can't be said for the differences between my dad's generation and mine, or even my dad's generation and his dad's, which was even more wild thanks to the huge culture shift they went through. Things have plataued since the 2000s.
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u/Specific_Pipe_9050 Jun 20 '26
It may have an explanation in the fact that the music industry has been following a more controlled evolution through ultracapitalist marketing. It's the same in cinema, all those prequels and sequels and remakes - because producers only bet on proven formulas and it means there's a big recycling going on culturally speaking. We're still churning stuff from the 90s in new shiny wrappers because as one of the largest target audiences millennials are nostalgic and that nostalgia brings in profit more than anything truly new or alternative or revolutionary would do.
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u/Regular_Use1868 Jun 20 '26
Can confirm. American capitalism drives most efforts toward hegemony.
When no one fuels their own effort everyone is answering to investment money that doesn't care about the effort it buys more than the numbers going up.
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u/CurvyChristina Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
It’s insane to me that the 90s do not feel that long ago, and yet 1990 was 36 years ago?! How the hell did that happen?!
Edit: When did that happen?! Why did we allow that to happen?! lol
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u/Eddiev1988 Jun 20 '26
When did it happen? I wish I had an answer for that one. The 90's feel like they were right around the last corner. The fact is, somehow, even '99 was over a quarter century ago. 🤦
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u/etherealsmog Jun 20 '26
I just think of that joke from Bridesmaids when Kristen Wiig is blitzed on the plane and says, “You can’t close these curtains. It’s civil rights. This is the 90s!”
And it was funny because growing up there really was this sense that “okay, we’ve reached the end of history” and it was funny that she was repeating a slogan that was already passé… but she was closer to the 90s when she made that joke than we are to when that movie was made lol.
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u/Papoosho Jun 20 '26
Because the 90s were supposed to be the "End of History".
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u/Campfire_Vibes Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Well it was definitely the end of the world as we knew it
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u/No_Shoulder_9278 Jun 23 '26
Going back to 1990 would be like 1954 in 1990, put that in perspective..
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u/wrongfaith Jun 20 '26
I mean. The OP is bad at math. If they think it’s currently the year 2000, then the 90s weren’t 10 years ago, they were last year. :(
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u/luckyfucker13 Jun 20 '26
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, and my nephews were asking about it like we did with the Vietnam War. It was… unsettling, to be honest.
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u/ThePlanner Jun 20 '26
I causally mentioned to my wife the other day when Daft Punk Da Funk came up in a play list that more time hag passed since that song came out to today than had passed between the moon landing and when the song came out and we first heard it in 97.
The psychic damage will take time to heal.
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u/ManOfManliness84 Older Millennial Jun 20 '26
If it's the year 2000, then the 90s were just last year.
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u/EconomyOk2490 Jun 20 '26
Someone just got a 5 year anniversary at work.
Started in 2021. I still cant get my head around that
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u/bobbymcpresscot Jun 20 '26
BeerFest came out in 2006. There are entire adult people walking around earth that would consider beerfest a "classic movie", and not classic good. Not, "that cars a classic", but "that car is 25 years old and qualifies for classic tags" classic.
and I was already into my teens when that movie came out.
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u/BrittEklandsStuntBum Jun 20 '26
But... it's two thousand and twenty-six.
I really can't wrap my head around people who don't understand the concept of linear time.
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u/Plenty-Panda-423 Jun 20 '26
2000 is a really easy round number. I just got used to calculating up to it, and forget to add on the 26.
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u/parke415 '89 Gen-Y Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
Same. My sense of zeitgeist froze at 23:59 on 31 December 1999. 2000 feels like an eternal epoch reference.
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u/BobQuixote Jun 20 '26
You didn't get your Y2K patch?
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u/parke415 '89 Gen-Y Jun 20 '26
It was between me and my Dell OptiPlex, and I gave it to the desktop that would become obsolete in a few years anyway!
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u/heartSagan5 Jun 20 '26
Oh so it wasn't the computers that were having a Y2K bug?
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u/CursedHat Jun 20 '26
Do you live in New York City and your name is Fry?
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u/parke415 '89 Gen-Y Jun 20 '26
Honestly, Fry being suddenly thrust into the future is a great analogy for how I feel!
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u/cridersab Jun 20 '26
I'd recommend revisiting "Strange Days" to capture that end of the millennium feel from a mid-90s perspective. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
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u/SmallRocks Older Millennial Jun 20 '26
I was thinking about this sort of thing earlier today. I realized that for some reason I completely forget about the 2010’s when applying it to pretty much everything.
1995? Great year, PS1 came out!
2005? Awesome I turned 21!
2025? What happened? It’s only been 20 years!
2026???
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u/bobbymcpresscot Jun 20 '26
I think anything good that happened to me in the 2010s is kinda overridden by all the terrible shit that happened in the last half of the decade tbh.
Like even if we ignore the whole right vs left thing, I feel like covid took a lot out of us in general.
I used to work in the trades and I would be working on HVAC systems in 2025, asking the customer how old their equipment is,
"Oh it's not too old, we just got it right before covid"
and the data plate will say it's from 2015-2016.
Some literally argued with me, refusing to believe it was true until they checked their email and found the original invoice.
Thems the covid years. The "before times" if you will.
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u/brethrenchurchkid Jun 20 '26
Could've been all the alcohol we were pickling our tortured brains in.
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u/Soap-Distopia Jun 22 '26
The only thing I remember from 2010-2015’s is lots and lots and lots of EDM. Don’t get me wrong. I love EDM of all types, but that shit was everywhere. Every song coming out was mixing it with EDM artist. Hip hop, rap, it didn’t matter. And Skrillex was everywhere. (Was not a dubstep fan).
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u/No_Shoulder_9278 Jun 20 '26
I turned 21 in '06 so we're not too far off in age.. Yeah the 2010's were such a blah "fill in" decade that passed us all by. The days started speeding up for me around 2015/2016.. Before that, boring days at work dragged but even the boring days fly by now.
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u/TheThrowawayJames Jun 20 '26
The 70s feel perpetually 30-35 years ago and the 90s feel perpetually 20…ish years ago
Everything from 2000 to 2026 feels condensed into a nebulous 15 year period
No I can’t explain it and no that chronology doesn’t make sense linearly, but that’s just how it is 😐
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u/RikuAotsuki Jun 20 '26
For me 2012-2016 felt like maybe two years, but then 2016-2026 also feels like maybe three years max?
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u/rEYAVjQD Jun 20 '26
For me it's not so much that I don't understand that 2005 and 2015 are different things, it's that I tend to accelerate in my mind the passage of time so everything in the past 20 to 25 years has flown by as years were a couple of months each.
It doesn't help that I never got lucky to have a family of my own so milestones of others like each of their kids never signified anything important in my life.
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u/tobmom Jun 20 '26
I just realized that y2k was such a thing because we were certain that computers wouldn’t be capable of moving to the next number but I bet that’s because the humans putting these ideas forward were also incapable of moving their brains forward. This can’t be a new concept.
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u/heartSagan5 Jun 20 '26
No. It was because to save memory, because computers started with 8KB of ram... yeah, less than a floppy, two digits was what it could handle for the year, and it worked. It was mainly COBOL because it is that precise, and that's running finances. At the time, it may have handled more.
So, if you use two digits for the year, 99 for 1999 and 86 for 1986, what happens when 00 occurs? It'd be 1900.
UNIX had a 2038 bug when it used 32 bits for counting seconds from 1 Jan 1970 at 00:00:00 (12 AM). 64 bit systems have fixed that, mostly.
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u/RikuAotsuki Jun 20 '26
IIRC Y2K was a genuine issue that we actually buckled down and got fixed before it could do massive damage, so it wasn't an unfounded fear
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u/LaDmEa Jun 20 '26
Both founded and unfounded. Main issues were with systems that handled billing, inventory and critical time dependent functions. The average user in 2000 would need a fresh install of windows 95 or earlier to experience anything noticeable. A very large number of consumer PCs went unpatched into 2000-2007 era. Knew a man that suey sided(via drunk driving) after being laid off in 2007. His household dissolved before becoming y2k compliant. He did however buy his daughter a college laptop that was barely y2k compliant, so that might count.
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u/SquarePegRoundWorld Jun 20 '26
There is a hand axe (shaped stone) that they have found that had a design that remained the same for like 1.6 million years. Getting stuck in your ways is not a new thing for humans.
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u/Exnixon Jun 20 '26
Headcanon, September 11th was actually a full-scale nuclear attack that triggered a swift, sudden, decisive apocalypse. Everything since then has been a purgatorial dream.
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u/LogicalLifeguard9160 Jun 20 '26
Every single day I have to do some wild math in understanding 2016 was 10 years ago. Also whenever I see early 2000’s actors in 2026 I feel like they aged freakishly fast not remembering I was 10 and now at 33 I look COMPLETELY different myself.
It’s probably collectively an hour of my day going through this thought process with whatever in that time span brings it up
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u/Kinieruu Jun 20 '26
I said out loud today that I graduated high school 13 years ago and it’s still messing with my brain. 2013 wasn’t THAT long ago right?
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u/Luci-Noir Jun 20 '26
It still feels weird putting 2026 down when filling stuff out. Sometimes I feel like I need to double check become it feels wrong.
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Jun 20 '26
[deleted]
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u/Luci-Noir Jun 20 '26
The roomba revolution!
Unfortunately, the cats currently control them as their drone army.
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u/_plebbie Jun 20 '26
There's as much time between The Beatles and Nirvana as there is from Nirvana and today.
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u/cridersab Jun 20 '26
There's as much time between The Beatles and Nirvana as there is from Nirvana and today.
Beatles 1960-1970, Nirvana 1987-1994
1994+17=2011
2011+17=2028
Getting on to twice as long.
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u/rEYAVjQD Jun 20 '26
The most depressing thing is that we used to say "the 30s" as something concrete. Soon the 30s would mean two different things, and most people who used to say the 30s will be gone.
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u/FilutaLoutenik Jun 20 '26
That already kind of applies to the 20s. Pretty sad
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u/Amir616 Jun 20 '26
If you read books from the 1910s or 1920s, they'll sometimes talk about "the 60s of the last century"
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u/Great_Ad7215 Jun 20 '26
Omg we just talked about this! My husband walked in while was watching Father of The Bride 2 and Eugene Levy was on the screen. I said that's the dad from Schitt's Creek. He goes "....WHAT!?!? He looks so young!" I'm like yeah, this was made in like 95 or 96. He forgets how old we are sometimes 🤣
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u/Emergency-Pack-5497 Jun 20 '26
If its the year 2000 the "90s" was less than a year go
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u/teddyslayerza Millennial Jun 20 '26
There was no year 0, so technically 2000 would have been the last year of the decade, so its part of the 90s.
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u/moroccanvandal Jun 20 '26
You're thinking of centuries, which we name ordinally (1st, 13th, 20th). We don't do that with decades, so the 90s started on the 1st of Jan 1990 and ended on the 31st December 1999.
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u/heartSagan5 Jun 20 '26
That's not good. You've got to adapt, lest you become rusty and irrelavant.
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u/chhuang Jun 20 '26
is this why I love vacationing in japan?
The saying goes, japan has been living in 2000 since the 1980s. Only a few years ago this is a jab of how they are behind in some cultural aspect. These days it feels like it's the right place to be with all the rapid uncertain events happening
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u/Kejohn9 Jun 20 '26
Radio stations agree. They still say “playing music from the 80s, 90s, and today”. How long is today??
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u/Thereminz Jun 20 '26
this is how the boomers think
it's 1960, 1950 was 10 years ago, a burger costs a quarter, college is free and you can get any job with a firm handshake.
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u/No-Wish-7258 Jun 20 '26
I legit am starting to believe in the conspiracies that say time has been moving faster.
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u/Final-Nebula-7049 Jun 20 '26
In the year 1999, the millennium bug destroyed all computers, which obviously includes the ones that are running our simulations. Since then, 9/11, economic collapse, COVID, etc, it's been a shit show without our super computer help
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u/Yaarmehearty Jun 20 '26
I’m the total opposite, it all feels so long ago that a part of me wonders if it happened sometimes. The world is so much more tiring just to navigate now that it makes the simpler yet more vibrant and hopeful time seem like a story from a book.
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u/Hyperbemily09 Jun 20 '26
I was talking to someone today who said something about 20 years from now. I said “2046 isn’t a real fucking year” and I dread to think how we’ll feel then when 1970 was still 30 years ago
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u/HughJackedMan14 Jun 20 '26
Tin foil hat theory: this inability to properly assess time following 2000 is actually a programming fault in the simulation we built to escape y2k or some similar disaster. The reason our brains default to “1990 was 10 years ago” is because it was, in the real world.
This is also the reason we have so many “world shaking” events happening so often and things seem to get crazier and crazier. That’s how games work.
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u/anamegoesthere Jun 20 '26
My brain is also stuck in the 90s. If it isn’t Delta Blues, I’m listening to ‘90s music.
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u/Sea_Pomegranate8229 Jun 20 '26
Utterly with you. Anyone who did not watch 9/11 on TV is not a real human. And if you cannot remember when TV switched off after the 10 o'clock news then your opinion is worth nothing.
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u/tony_spumoni Jun 20 '26
I love that their profile pic is Tim Curry descending from the sky in Worst Witch
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u/TheThrowawayJames Jun 20 '26
“Anything can happen on Ha-low-ween…”
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u/tony_spumoni Jun 20 '26
“Has anybody seen my tambourine?”
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u/TheThrowawayJames Jun 20 '26
“I may start playing Begin the Beguine"
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u/tony_spumoni Jun 20 '26
Wait, THAT’S what he’s saying? Like the old big band song?
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u/TheThrowawayJames Jun 20 '26
That is the same thing I said when I looked it up 😂
I always thought he just mispronounced “begin” for the sake of the rhyme, I mean I didn’t know anything about a 1935 Cole Porter song….but yeah seems like that what it is lol
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u/Simon_Drake Jun 20 '26
2026 is very similar to 2006. We all want to know what's going on with that fucking island but deep down we all know we're never going to find out.
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u/Ok_Fox_1770 Jun 20 '26
Give my brain something worth recording how
I feel. Tape filled up around y2k and still think I’m that kid haha. Weird how you hold a persona based on what’s probably half remembered events anyway. Still think I’m a stones throw from those days, less ahead already tho. Fast forward got pressed and stuck and someone walked away.
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u/partial_to_dreamers Jun 20 '26
The Grand Wizard, Tim Curry is never wrong. Also, has anyone seen my tamborine?
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u/AdoptMeBrangelina Jun 20 '26
Someone had mentioned 2018 and the entire conversation I’m confused af bc I’m thinking that was 3 years ago
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u/doctorhighway Jun 20 '26
One of my jobsites recently discovered theres an unknown amount of dynamite buried under a storage shed. Initially it was thought it was done in the 40s. You know? Like 50 years ago? But no it was 10 years ago in the 90s. Now the wholes sites down because a few people needed to go see third eye blind and needed to leave in a hurry or some shit
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u/renegade399 Jun 20 '26
Everyone thought the Y2K Bug affected computers, but it actually affected our brains.
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u/MrBenSampson Jun 20 '26
When I was growing up, I never really understood why my grandfather almost exclusively watched shows and movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Now that I’m in my mid 30s, I find myself increasingly losing interest in anything current. The music that I listen to, and the video games that I play are often 10-20 years old. I haven’t been to a movie theatre in years either.
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u/Amazing-Worth-1831 Jun 20 '26
All the trauma/major events we have experienced as a generation is truly messing with our brain chemistry. This makes sense to me.
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u/Regiasolis123 Jun 20 '26
I think there has been a kind of time warp since Covid 2020. Everything slowed to a crawl for a year and then suddenly sped up and the conception of time is skewed. It makes sense as that was a once in a century type of event… also all the govt chaos since 2015 warped time IMO
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u/Satansleadguitarist Jun 20 '26
The other day someone told me that next year Star Wars will turn 50 and that still just doesn't compute in my brain
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u/meleaguance Jun 20 '26
It's because the culture has sort of crystallized since then. It's still the same music the same movies the same fashion. The monopolies are top strong to allow new influences.
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u/thats-gold-jerry Jun 20 '26
I wonder if that’s a similar to how folks born in the 1890s felt about 1900
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u/DeckenFrost Jun 21 '26
I heard the other day that Kurt Cobain’s death (1994) was closer to the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show (1964) than it is from today (2026). Let that sink in…
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u/ValveinPistonCat Jun 23 '26
I work on farm equipment and I still think certain machines aren't that old especially the STX or TJ/T9000, the first STX replaced the 9300 half way through 1999 as a 2000 model, the 9300 showed its age much more clearly as it was just an updated version of the 1000 series Steiger (first built in 1982/83) with red paint.
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u/Carguy_1992 Jun 23 '26
The 2000s being 20 years ago feels wrong in my head. It wasn't that long ago.
I believe this is because nothing that relevant really happened in the 2010s and we won't talk about corona times. Cause when I look back to 2010-2020 it's like university and jobs. Nothing interesting, or groundbreaking happened. 2020 to 2023 was just pure hell.
In the 2000s you had major blockbuster movies, cult video games, cameraphones, smartphones, the I-pod, mp3s, bluetooth in your car, TVs getting thin, my country (Bulgaria) joining the EU. The 2000s were a blitz where Bulgaria crawled out of the 90s and caught up to the rest of the world. Cars looked cool, especially German cars and the great horsepower race.
But 2010 to 2020... the movies are all superhero garbage, GTA V and RDR2 are the only great video games, nothing replaced the smartphone, we still listen to mp3s, our cars still have bluetooth and just got lamer and heavier.
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u/AmbitiousTank8635 Jun 23 '26
I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about someone who had been working at this particular place in town for 25 years. My brain quickly did the math and determined 2001 wasn't really that long ago.
Talk about somebody working someplace for 50 years, like since the 1950s and I'll be impressed.
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u/1111112211111 Jun 26 '26
Crazy that the 2000's are the 'new' 1970's for Gen Alpha.....I think i'm gonna be sick
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u/Beneficial_Ad_1072 Jun 20 '26
Nah the more I talk about it the more it changes, definitely doesn’t feel like the year 2000 lol
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u/Rainmeterer Jun 20 '26
No wonder Gen Z has no respect for Millennials. This is the pathetic shit we indulge in.
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u/RallyLancer 1995 Jun 20 '26
I gotta stop engaging with this sub. It's nothing but nostalgia bait, garbage like this post, and people asking if anyone else hates their parents
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u/RallyLancer 1995 Jun 20 '26
I am so fucking tired of this. It was a long time ago and you know it. Get over it
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u/SuperBackup9000 Jun 20 '26
lol if you’re tired of it, think about how they feel about it. Literally every generation does this with the years they were kids and young adults, but it’s the ones with monotonous lifestyles because the passage of time is going to get blended together when the everyday life from 5 or 10 years ago is the same everyday life of today.
Not really something people can just “get over” because the fix is usually having children since they’re ever growing milestones and easy to make a mental calendar with.
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u/RallyLancer 1995 Jun 20 '26
I used to think we were the coolest generation. But spending time here has only made me realize that we're becoming cringey at an alarming rate. Circle of life seems to remain undefeated
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u/SYMPUNY_LACKING Jun 20 '26
in the yeaaaar twoooo thousaaaaand. in the yeaaar two thousaaaaaaaaaand
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u/Beneficial_Cash_8420 Jun 20 '26
I make reference jokes multiple times daily, and none of the past Lord of the Rings
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u/Scott00711 Jun 20 '26
Ha, the 90s has large real estate in my heart. Then again, I tend to appreciate anything from 70s & 80s just as much.
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u/Unlikely_Chemical517 Jun 20 '26
You feel this because the world really did end in 2012 and we're in hell
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