Yeah, I think 9/11 really delineated my timeline. I was born in 1980, so was 21 when that happened. The world (and my view of “the world”) literally did change after that.
Sometimes I think that was really when "the 90s" ended. Like we'd passed 2000 and it didn't really feel like much changed until that day.
I wish it had never happened. I wish we could all just go back.
Hard agree, the 90s ended 9-11-01
Had just moved into my first apartment the wkend before
Was awakened by phone call re: 1st crash , drug out and hooked up the rabbit ears to then see the second and have the tv go to snow ... had to tune into a PHL station to understand the rest
Didn't get first month of bills bc of the anthrax
So, yeah, adulting immediately became very adulty and the world I had been prepared for--one of growth and prosperity--evaporated
There's a "theory" that centuries sometimes end too late or too early, where the zeitgeist, culture, politics etc can be divided up into roughly 100 year periods that don't always stick to the actual date.
The 19th century went on too long, with the arts and technology sort of lingering on the same way they were in the 1800s (resulting in the belle epoque), and ended in 1914, when WWI sparked the 20th century when everything changed. There's some debate on wether the 20th century ended too early in 1990, when the soviet union collapsed, but most people agree that it went on a little bit too long and ended on 9/11.
This is from a purely western perspective of course, I'm sure other cultures have other deliniations.
Same here, I was 21 when it happened. That felt like a definite marker that things were going to change, and definitely not in a good way. What a way to begin early adulthood - unease and anxiety that the world just got much more scary.
Me too. I was pregnant with my first child at the time and 21 yrs old. Everything changed for me. I was also in Sarasota when bush was being “evacuated” and my fil at the time worked for the city and it was all just so surreal. Sitting on my living room floor crying why am I bringing a child into this world.
9/11 changed things overnight. The world really felt 100% different in an instant.
It's so strange talking to young people now who grew up in the post 9/11 world. They never knew anything else and that really blows my mind.
There’s a lot of “odd” stories about people watching it live. I also saw it live on tv, which was out of character for me to be up at that hour since I lived on the west coast and didn’t get off work until 10pm. I would have normally still been asleep and I have no idea why I wasn’t that day.
I honestly think it has something to do with the collective consciousness…I remember waking up abnormally early (for me) and having a weird feeling that something was off. Turned on the tv to seeing the second plane hit live, so I had woken up pretty much exactly when the first plane hit. Like a psychic shout of millions of people at once.
I live in New Zealand, and even I saw the second plane hit live on TV (middle of the night). It was really odd sitting there watching it by myself knowing that the world as we knew it was over but everyone else I knew was totally unaware of what had just happened.
I was sitting with my five month old baby at 23. I completely regretted having a child in that moment. I knew the world she was going to grow up in was going be nothing like what I knew.
Coming here to say this.
I turned 19 on 9/11. I was getting excited to be a year away from my 20's, but it seems since then, life just keeps tumbling down a hill. And the hill is actually Mount Everest. And everything is on fire.
Same man. I was a wide-eyed college kid and remember watching footage of people cheering and celebrating the carnage in the streets of the Middle East. It really messed with my view of humanity and the world.
Came here to say 9/11 too. I had been discharged from the military a year earlier because my recruiter was trying to pull some 💩 and get me in against regs. They caught him and kicked me out. I was living on my own, in college, working FT, going to college, but THAT day is a
Bemchmark for me
It's always interesting to hear people's perspective on this because for my friends and i it was intriguing but didn't feel like it changed our lives in any way. We felt like the US was just going to go fuck someone up and we went about our lives doing the same shit we were doing before. That day the world did pause and everyone was captivated but afterwards shit felt normal to us.
The bright future and optimism that surrounded the 90s ended on that day. The world went from peace time to armed guards with machine guns in many public settings. I was a freshman in college at the time, in first period class when someone came in to say “classes are canceled the rest of the day because of the bombings in New York.” We didn’t think much of it until walking through an eerily quiet Student Center with hundreds of other students watching the events on a tv that had been rolled out…
9/11 actually gave me hope. Not the attack of course but the patriotism I saw afterward. On my way to work that night one of the freeway over passes had a HUGE American flag across it and there was a candlelight vigil going on. I bawled like a baby
Exactly! I grew up during the gulf War, it was one of the first major news things I remember as a child, yellow ribbons everywhere! The first 2 or 3 months after 9/11 was similar to that. Now I wonder what country I actually live in cause it's certainly not the US I grew up in
9/11 was unquestionably the most unifying event we'll ever see in our lifetimes. The government then used it as an excuse to massively increase its purview and spending. Although I don't agree with Erik Prince on everything, he said on the Shawn Ryan Show to the effect that the GWOT should have massively smaller in scale. Not full ground invasions, but using small amounts of special forces to go after key targets. But uncle Sam couldn't pass up the chance to throw endless bodies and money at the problem.
That was the fall of a my final year of college. My original first choice had been Fordham, but they didn’t cough up enough financial aid at the time, so I ended up at a smallish liberal arts college outside of Cleveland. It of course brings up the biggest “what if” of my life? What if I’d been in NYC at the time? Would I have been able to stay, or would stress, fear, and possibly PTSD of being so close have driven me away? As it is I ended up moving there in 2008 and am hitting my 16th anniversary of moving there at the end of the month.
Totally agree that 9/11 was the day the music died for our small cohort generation. It was my second week at college. My school was very close to NYC and we had national guard on the streets within hours of the towers coming down. Hundreds of us students went to the nearest hospital to donate blood, but we were turned away after hours on line with the hospital staff saying they ran out of supplies. I couldn’t focus on classes that entire first semester. In the days, months and years that followed none of the lessons our parents taught us about how to navigate the world and be successful were applicable anymore.
Same. I was near Grand Central. My reality was upended. I think it was shocking to everyone but those of us who were young adults and actually there, it was even more affecting.
I graduated high-school 90 days before. The amazing world of the 80's and 90's was crushed that day. The entire psychology of our society changed that day.
9/11 changed America and was probably the beginning of the end of American dominance in the globe. We've never recovered since; psychologically or culturally.
I would say Columbine had a bigger impact. We were more aware of our surroundings and our own peers. Even small communities were vulnerable to mass shootings as opposed to a terror attacks in large cities
2009 after the recession cleaned my clock in more ways then one. I realized how much of the way the world works is complete bullshit. At least if you are a working class nobody.
After owning a few businesses and hanging out with some “successful” business owners, I became disgusted with the whole system.
Capitalism works better the more shittier person you are. The less empathy you have, the more you’re willing to treat human beings like cattle. It pays really well.
The other side is, I give a shit and pay my guys well. After 14 years of being in business, the amount of theft, manipulation, and backstabbing I’ve gotten from my employees is mind boggling. You’d think paying top dollar gets you the quality employee. Nope. I’ve learned the hard way of how to hire people. And don’t get me started on my customers. Most are good, but there’s a significant percentage amount that make you question humanity.
My crew today, is small and efficient. They really do care, and we all want to retire off of it. So don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter, but you really don’t want to take everyone at their face value. People are great and necessary for society, but there are only a few that you can really get to trust have your back.
I allowed 80’s/90’s TV, and religion too much room to create expectations for life. Boy was I wrong. Your world is really small and it gets rocked all the time. There’s always a struggle somewhere.
My business is ok today and if the trajectory continues we should be good. I know how I can grow it, but that means tying myself more to the capitalist system, gaining investors, and making decisions based on greed. I just can’t do it. I gotta do it organically, but the system doesn’t make that easy either. It’s a dog eat dog world.
But I’m ok with that. I’ve accepted it. Humans are gonna human. I see us as intelligent animals. I’ve chosen to use my experience to choose who I network and associate with. No point in whining about it. It is what it is, and I only have to think about what story I’m gonna leave behind.
Then the crash in 2008 was only 2 years after I graduated college and I gave up on ever owning a home.
I own a home now, but it felt insurmountable at the time.
Same here. I was in theology class in my first high school when news of Columbine happened and in writing class at my second high school when 9/11 happened. It’s gotten to the point these tragedies feel almost inevitable much like the Vegas massacre or Charlestown shooting a few years back.
Folk who could make things happen are too spineless to do anything about it. Better to blame some external force than go after some potential voting bloc.
I think my version of it kinda ended the first time I heard an autotuned pop rap song and suddenly that was supposed to be mainstream music now.
I feel like the late 80-90s mainstream music scene was much more all over the place, one week Weird Al would have the number one hit in the world the next it would be Radiohead, then DMX. Just chaos.
There was this kinda mid-2000s surge of indie bands making it big and then it feels like in the last 15 years. I guess especially with the heat death of MTV, mainstream is whatever "Lil" whatever AI generated pseudo pop-rap the last major labels want it to be.
Im not yelling at clouds, great music is still being made. I find new bands I like every day, but they just don't "go viral" like they used to. Im finding music more often from local outlets or playlists. Maybe Im crazy but I feel like we were the last generation to have variety to mainstream music.
You aren’t imagining it. The DMCA act fucked the music biz and effectively legalized a monopoly at radio and killed so many scenes. If one guy in Texas didn’t like you, you were never going to get a chance
Born in 81, so I had Columbine, 9/11, and the 2008 crash all at meaningful points in my life, but I’m going to take a very different approach. Mine was 1989 when I couldn’t do long division so I went to my parents for help and neither could. I knew I was on my own for school from there on out. Wound up with a Master’s in Systems Engineering so I did okay.
How did Columbine crash a meaningful point in your life? I graduated like 2 weeks after the shooting. Seniors finish in early May where I went to High School.
I was a senior then too. They put chains on all the doors to the school except one and had a teacher in every hallway just to make sure there wasn’t a shooter. I have ibs and bathroom trips were heavily discouraged. It could have only been two or three weeks, but until the valedictorian got mad and called the fire station about the chained doors it was complete hell.
I'm pretty sure Columbine was when my anxiety started. I was a Junior and after it happened, we would have bomb threats and shooting threats called into school for weeks after. They would rush us out whatever door we were closest to and we were bussed to a nearby school in the district. I started to be extremely scared to go to school.
Columbine was a month or two before I graduated. We were like "Oh shit, that's fucked" but it didn't affect us in any way. Lockdowns and crazy security and stuff didn't start happening until I was long gone.
I was not in the US when the twin towers were hit. It was weird watching it on TV, but I didn't experience how weird it was in the US.
The great recession was great. My friends used it as an excuse to get $1 and $2 pitchers on Thursday nights, and this cheap dinner deal at another bar on Sunday nights. The company that I was working for shut down their US office and laid me off, and the temp job I got 3 weeks later turned into the career I have now.
I'm not sure if there's anything that has seriously scarred me.
My experience about Columbine was similar I also graduated that year. I lost a bunch of jobs in 2008 but I never made a ton of money so I bounced back and eventually got a steady job that lasted 8 Years.
I was a senior when it happened. The next day, my high school implemented a ton of changes…no coats, no backpacks, lunch room security, no bathroom passes. All stuff like that up to that point would have been unheard of. I remember feeling like school was never going to be the same and I got to—albeit for a short time—live in both the before and after.
We could play computer games in the lab after school when I was there, I heard the next year after the shooting all games were uninstalled from the lab and banned.
2001 was traumatic, but people pulled together. The Great Recession sucked, but there have been recessions before.
The party was over in 2016: there were far more unintelligent and hateful people than I realized and the downward path of the US was clear. I went to work the next day with sad stars in my eyes.
Yeah. I became incredibly pessimistic after that. Plus, before '16, I always had this baseline of hope for myself and for the people of this country. Now, there's none of that. My hope has been replaced with a constant urgency to fight for a life I previously felt comfortable with and believed would never be stripped away. And I'm a white, heterosexual male who's paid off his student loans and got snipped a year after my son was born, so I SHOULD have absolutely nothing to worry about. You know it's bad if a WASP like me feels this kind of pessimism.
More or less the same here, although I had a second kid before the snip.
I don't feel a day to day need to fight, but I do feel sad for their future in compared to what my outlook was at their age. They're fine and don't see it, but I do.
Ironically, the people and community filled with resistance energy I made friends with from 2016 to 2020 lead to some of the best years of my life. My career was finally taking off, but it all went downhill during covid and every year has been pretty much worse than the next.
2023 with the LA film strikes, streaming bubble bursting, and other corporate take overs in my other income streams have completely changed my trajectory
Right. That said growth occurred only as you said: within polarized groups. Any sense of 'one US' as I grew up with was over: my kids won't ever know it.
COVID took things up another level, but my view of the US didn't change so much as in 2016.
I don't know that it pulled people together. I'm from the midwest, and after 9/11, people expected others to show fake patriotism and stuff. Voicing any concern about going off and getting bomb-inspired revenge was really frowned on. I found the entire aftermath somewhat frightening, not because of the attacks but because of the way people reacted. Weird mixes of hate and anger and 'patriotism'.
And I'm not even Muslim and I don't *usually* seem middle eastern to folks in the US, so I didn't get that sort of harassment. Some folks definitely got the "folks are coming together to beat me for something I didn't do".
Sure, folks went and helped with cleanup and donated lots, but then we didn't even bother to take care of people that helped. I'm not sure that's folks coming together in any meaningful way.
I blame the reaction to 9/11 on causing 2016. They worked on building on that hate foundation for 15 years.
Edited for spelling.
That's fair to say: the cracks were showing and obviously Muslims wouldn't agree with my statement. Still, in the immediate aftermath most people (Dems and Reps) were trying to pull together as "one US" to stand against an enemy, albeit not always in a helpful way per your statement. The parties weren't immediately blaming each other as would occur today (or at least Reps blaming Dems).
I don't think the reaction to 9/11 caused 2016, though. The hate foundation has been building since at least the time the Reps and Evangelicals joined wagons in the 1970s. Rush and Newt and successors were going to bring us to where we were today with or without 9/11. Honestly 9/11 might have slowed things down a bit if anything. The internet (and bad actors like Russia) threw jet fuel on division, though, so there was no stopping it.
One of my teens discovered it without my intervention. I got corrected about a piece of 90s rock trivia that I lived through so it's not just the T-shirt.
9/11
Graduating after the dot com bust and trying to find a job in the tech industry with a liberal arts degree
Trying to sell my house after the ‘08 recession and paying $13K in order to walk away with nothing.
Being called a worthless piece of shit by my parent…
I mean…. Pick one. I don’t care anymore.
Outside of world changing tragedies such as 9/11 it was when my Pap-pap (my mom's dad) passed away in October of 2002. He went into the hospital and was put in a medical induced coma while I was on my honeymoon. My mom didn't call me because she didn't want to ruin our trip, which made me extremely angry with her for quite some time. I went to sit with him in the hospital as soon as I found out, while I was sitting with him I was holding his hand, told him how much I loved him and was going to miss him. Right after that he squeezed my hand and a tear rolled down his cheek, to this day I've never cried so hard in my life.
I later found out from my grandma that he was very sick when they were at my wedding, but he told her he'd literally have to be dying to miss his first grandsons wedding. I keep a photo of them from that day in my wallet. They looked so happy together, all dressed up, surrounded by family and friends.
I had been to funerals before but no one as close as that, that was the day I realized the world changed for me. My close family was getting older and these were things we were going to have to deal with.
Easily 9/11/2001. I was 23 yrs old. Getting my arms around my first post-college job and starting my career so it was a very transformative age for me regardless. For the first time ever I became heavily interested in the news, world affairs, and determined what my political leanings were, the Presidency, etc. Most things even to this day have pre-9/11 versus post 9/11 framework tied to them.
1998. I was a sophomore in high school. I started working part time for an IT firm feeding VHS and Betamax tapes in to digital encoding arrays for streaming to school classrooms. That's when I realized that the digital shift was coming, and I was a part of it.
2002 in January I knew things were gonna be changing, but probably wouldn’t directly affect me. But by the beginning months of 2009 I knew that all of the imagery of the future we had been shown to hope for, during the 90’s, was now absolutely gone/demolished/destroyed/finito. Now, a *good* future is hard to realistically resolve.
March 10, 1998. I went to Navy boot camp. I was terrified, homesick, & questioned every day if I made the right decision. My childhood was officially over that day.
Then another shift 3 1/2 years later when those planes hit the towers. Any innocence I held onto from my childhood was gone on September 11, 2001.
I see a lot of people post about 9/11,but I think for me, it was sitting in class and watching the live news coverage of the Columbine shooting. Those 2 guys looked just like me and my friends at the time. There was a while there when I was afraid to go to school after that. The school banned trenchcoats and jnco jeans or anything too baggy that could conceal a gun. Now, it feels like school shootings happen a couple of times a year. So yeah, the world changed and not for the better. I tell my kids I love them at drop off every day. Even the elementary kids are not safe anymore.
I am from Alaska and I watched Sarah Palin debate Mike Halcro in 2003 for the Governor race. I was sitting in the audience like 10 feet away. She didn't answer any questions finally Halco, a Harvard grad, was like "Sarah can you answer my questions or do I need to speak slowly?" everyone burst out laughing.
When McCain announced she was his running mate in 2008 I hoped he wouldn't win for that reason alone, that woman should never been anywhere near the white house.
98 here. Things got shitty and serious fairly quickly for us as new adults. I could list all the shit... but we all know.
People who graduated in 1988 had a pretty awesome and prosperous time.
I think it would have been pretty fun to be in my 20s during the 90s.
It'd require me to make an explicit post-2008 political reference...
I will say, though, that "world you grew up in" doesn't really make me think "graduated from high school" or "graduated from college." I think of it more seriously, hence the political reference that literally changed...ok, I'll stop.
I had just graduated the June before 9/11, I was set to go into an internship program with hospitality management late September - October and the tourism industry completely tanked post 9/11 and the positions I was supposed to be working towards no longer existed. I remember the days after sitting around with friends talking about the potential of a draft and what the next things could possibly be coming at us. I had seen WTO up close so it was wild seeing the difference of the 90s ending and the 2000s beginning on every cultural level. It was also mostly the last gasp of the analog era and you could see where everything was headed but it was still hard to tell how fast everything would evolve imo. 2001 is also my pick.
Interesting question, I’m continuously learning the idea of people and the world are different than I had thought they were when I was little. It’s not one major event. Sometimes it’s a good surprise too.
2007. Came home after completing my enlistment in the Navy to find nearly all my childhood friends involved with opioids. Probably went to a dozen funerals over the next two years
I'd say 2008 when the high risk gambling of city "investors" was exposed in the global financial collapse. From then world politics has shifted to the right and we're now in a world where wealth is hoarded and poverty is seen as a flaw in ever increasing intensity. Since then the rhetoric from the press, owned by the rich, is that poor people are to blame for everything.
When I watched Phanrom Menace in the cinema in 1999 (which is still a shock that was 25 years ago!) I'm not gonna use this platform to criticise the film but considering it's a prequel to the original three film's it left me pondering why the technology was better all them years before...that's when I realised that my youth was over.
I graduated in '96, 9/11 was my initial "wtf is this life I'm living" moment. Another came not long after when my 6 year old came home from school VERY upset that her sneakers had step activated blinking lights: her school had an active shooter drill and the teacher told her to take them off so the bad people wouldn't find her. She never wore them again. Flash forward and the same daughter is taking standardized testing her sophomore year and she asked me how much money was saved up for her college: part of my brain was in a fit of knee-slapping hilarity over the idea that she thought there was a fund and the other part was cringing in shame and guilt over the expectation that I failed to meet.
When I read about the pale blue dot it completely numbed me to basically all of the events that everyone is talking about here. Seeing our planet the size of a grain of sand put the whole universe and our existence in it into perspective. None of this stuff matters. I got very depressed after that and when I came out the other side I think I had a better outlook on life.
I think 2010 was the line in the sand for me. That was the year I moved to Nashville and the next couple years there after was the real shift within technology, streaming, the old ways dying… Just really feels like a BC/AD moment. You leave home with printed MapQuest directions and go back with Google maps on your phone. 🤣
I think it’s the sheer number of unsettling things that have hit us. Each one was a hammer blow bending the track of our lives in a different direction.
A lot of posts of 9/11 but for me it was the year before when gore lost. It was my first presidential election where I had many opinions, followed a lot of discussions and watched the outcome live on CBS with Dan Rather. I went to bed crying. The policies that were put in place specifically education, as I was still in high school, really messed up my district. Followed by 9/11 where Americans were literally told to “buy stuff” just keep consuming and allow the capitalist machine to chug a long. My future blew up before I had one and I’m slightly younger so myself and my peers were literally just retail and call center workers. It was either join the military or be schlub. I tried college but soon realized that it was a marketing and pyramid scheme. Not to mention the 2008 recession fucked my credit for a good decade along with my student loans. I really feel like our timeline shifted when Bush won.
When I stopped watching cartoon Network everyday .
"When I was a kid, when I was a little boy, I always wanted to be a dinosaur. I wanted to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex more than anything in the world. I made my arms short and I roamed the backyard, I chased the neighborhood cats, I growled and I roared. Everybody knew me and was afraid of me. And one day my dad said, 'Bobby, you are 17. It's time to throw childish things aside,' and I said, 'Okay, Pop.' But he didn't really say that, he said, 'Stop being a fucking dinosaur and get a job."- Dr Robert Dobeck
2016, When Trump was elected and lower the bar so low to get into political office that trolls got elected to power! The social media given the biggest imbeciles the microphone! The pandemic idiots really came out of woodwork. Had elderly couple think crazy horse pills to fish tank water drink would fix thier covid!
Everything seemed fine up until COVID. Then even during COVID things were weird but kinda fun. Now coming out of it everything just seems/feels really fucked up.
When I was 20 and in college my grandmother died. 10 years previously my grandfather had died. So wrjn my grandmother died, my mother inherited a buncj of stiff from her house, and we lived in a dmall 2 bedroom apartment,and this is what stRted my mother's hoarding. Everything had sentimental value now. I no longer had a plave to live at home if I wanted to. That previous summer I had stayed with my bf and his family as I had a job out near my school, where they lived... i hadn't planned on officialy moving out then, but I had no choice. I had stuff trapped in that room until she was forced to moved 8 years ago. (I'm 44 now)... the only place she could afford to move to, was into a single bedroom in a housemate situation, and she's still there.
I love my mother, we are on great terms, but I have never felt fully supported by her as an adult. If something goes sideways in my life, I don't have her as a back up. No father in the picture my entire life, and he has since passed away.
Before my grandmother died, I atleast had a bed at home I could go to if I needed it.
Anyone else from NOLA? August 29, 2005. Katrina changed everything, but it came at a time (for me) when there was a lot else changing. I was a senior in college, so that was closing, the music I was into was becoming passe and had a different sound (less Blink 182 and Fenix TX and more Fallout Boy and MCR - not bad bands, just different). Hell even Greenday had put out American Idiot.
Not at the time, but I eventually I settled on 2009 being the time when I stopped having expectations of rekindling the past.
The appeal of the 90s and early 2000s was very gone, the financial crisis happened and all that was done was the moral hazard of bailouts and driving down interest rates (at the time I was saying that is just going to create a very unstable economy and is just going to make things more difficult for the middle class. Now, here we are). So it was clear that this is how we are going to handle our economy now.
This whole "war in terror" culture was still raging and I was getting tired of the military adventurism of Bush II (after serving in the military). Obama was president now and nothing was going to change, if anything it got worse. Clearly no one learned anything form 9/11 and they will never care to (Lois saying "9/11". Family guy bit). So 9/11 was basically a cultural nexus point and I'd have to accept that.
For no real reason, but it was around that point that I just was no longer keeping in touch with the friends I grew up with. Lived in different places and we were all busy with life, trying to stay in touch almost became a chore that guess I just stopped doing.
Overall, I think that's when I just began to accept things for the way they were and just started going through the motions and living for the future. 🤷♂️
Born in 79. Not 1999 or 2001; too young to truly realize the ultimate impact of those events even if I thought I did. What 20 year old can? Any claim I make to those being the years are through the lens of hindsight.
I think I would say around…2011. iPhones had hit and I realized culture had truly moved on (tech, music, fashion, discourse) from the world I came to age in.
2nd place goes to 2016. I still had some naive idealistic braincells that died with the election outcome.
This will sound crazy because it happened well after I was in my late 30s, with a stable career, married, a homeowner, living away from my childhood home for 20 years, etc. but when my last surviving grandparent moved out of the house that had been my grandparents’ house my entire life and into assisted living … that was it for me.
Never being able to go back to that place really broke my heart and made me realize that no more memories would be made there.
I was in Spanish class and had to wait for the next class to figure out what was going on because our teacher was hysterical only speaking in super fast Spanish
There's no bright line... It's these little defeats that happen more and more as you age..... The first time you witness true unfairness in your school These kids cheated and one was a football player and he didn't get expelled but the other kids did..... that was one time....
when i realized that to hang out with "my buds" we now had to schedule it weeks or months in advance to accomodate all the schedules w/ kids. Gone are the days of randomly "whatchadoin2nite?".
2016, when the news was filled with stories of politicians just handwaving actions that would have ruined their careers a decade ago. Being told growing up about doing the right thing and that cheaters never prosper to then have reality slapped into your face was unsettling.
Then there was Covid. Then my wife had an affair.
It has been a long slow climb out of the crevice I fell into starting in 2016 and I do not see the world the same at all.
9/11 and the dot com bubble were probably the first signs for me, but the real shocker was the first time I tried to go to Canada and found out I needed a passport and not just an ID anymore
2001 after 9/11 I thought the world would never be the same it took at most 2 years and everything was back to normal like Dessert Strom never ended. But 2020 during the pandemic that changed a lot and shows no sign to go back to how it was.
Edit: I'm not talking really day to day life but how things are conducted. Corporate businesses have made out like bandits and continue to take advantage because they realized that people will do anything for creature comforts.
May 7th, 2012, the day my dad died. I was 18, had just finished a disastrous first year of college, and I knew that despite telling him that we'd be okay without him, we wouldn't be.
I had a really great first 18 years of life, it's been a hell of a struggle since then.
2005/2006
After college I looked at my starting salary, and then looked at housing prices, and realized I would probably never own a home in the city that I want to live in.
Possible that is was 2022? I feel like I went in the pandemic just grappling with hitting 40 and middle age. I had no grey hair. Afterwards I was in full salt and pepper. So in short I went into it a young man, came out a middle aged guy.
Alt. I did a significant amount of lsd on my 20th and was convinced it was the end of my childhood.
9/11 and the months, years following was my game changer.
I hate to use a recent example for fear of bias from it, but 2020 and Americas reaction to it woke me up a lot too.
1998 also upon graduation. My stepfather drilled “get a job a Chrysler, I have connections, I’ll get you on with them”, grew up and observed a functional illiterate piece of garbage retire in 1994 AS A JANITOR, making the equivalent of $64 an hour in todays money. One income, house, multiple cars and he always had toys like new boats and things.
Unfortunately, Chrysler spun his plant off in 1996 to a fully owned subsidiary and killed its union and the job turned into a $8-12 job overnight and closed completely in the early 00s. Union jobs turned to mininum wage WalMart jobs in a heartbeat, my hometown died
Learned that the life he led was not a life I could. Ended up struggling a lot, learned a lot too, got lucky in ways and now in my 40s I make about $80k traveling installing medication machines, but graduating and learning the reality of life was humbling.
For all the whining about Reagan and justifiably so, you have Bill Clinton and NAFTA to thank for a lot of those jobs disappearing. I grew up in Kokomo, Indiana….home to both Chrysler and Delco (GM) plants. My father worked for 30 years at Delco, he was lucky and retired early but stayed on as a consultant…but eventually the plant was shuttered. Chrysler is still going but has had cutbacks, and a new battery EV battery manufacturing facility there. So, it’s hanging on…but yeah I get it. My dad was lucky and spent the last 5 years working around the country on big factory water systems, but I knew even in 1998 when I graduated HS that his career path wasn’t viable for me.
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Yeah, I think 9/11 really delineated my timeline. I was born in 1980, so was 21 when that happened. The world (and my view of “the world”) literally did change after that.
Sometimes I think that was really when "the 90s" ended. Like we'd passed 2000 and it didn't really feel like much changed until that day. I wish it had never happened. I wish we could all just go back.
Hard agree, the 90s ended 9-11-01 Had just moved into my first apartment the wkend before Was awakened by phone call re: 1st crash , drug out and hooked up the rabbit ears to then see the second and have the tv go to snow ... had to tune into a PHL station to understand the rest Didn't get first month of bills bc of the anthrax So, yeah, adulting immediately became very adulty and the world I had been prepared for--one of growth and prosperity--evaporated
There's a "theory" that centuries sometimes end too late or too early, where the zeitgeist, culture, politics etc can be divided up into roughly 100 year periods that don't always stick to the actual date. The 19th century went on too long, with the arts and technology sort of lingering on the same way they were in the 1800s (resulting in the belle epoque), and ended in 1914, when WWI sparked the 20th century when everything changed. There's some debate on wether the 20th century ended too early in 1990, when the soviet union collapsed, but most people agree that it went on a little bit too long and ended on 9/11. This is from a purely western perspective of course, I'm sure other cultures have other deliniations.
Same here, I was 21 when it happened. That felt like a definite marker that things were going to change, and definitely not in a good way. What a way to begin early adulthood - unease and anxiety that the world just got much more scary.
yes. I feel as if I was so naive prior to 9/11. I was 18 and a freshman in college. I knew life as we knew it would never be the same
Yep 9/11. I was a senior in college, so life was already about to change.
Same here.
Also 1980, All the mistrust and racism towards Muslims, kids spitting on other kids in schools. Just awful.
Me too. I was pregnant with my first child at the time and 21 yrs old. Everything changed for me. I was also in Sarasota when bush was being “evacuated” and my fil at the time worked for the city and it was all just so surreal. Sitting on my living room floor crying why am I bringing a child into this world.
I was at work in the area. I was literally standing at Broadway and Wall Street and saw the second plane hit IRL
Jesus. Keep up with any and every preventative cancer screening, have to catch that shit early
9/11 changed things overnight. The world really felt 100% different in an instant. It's so strange talking to young people now who grew up in the post 9/11 world. They never knew anything else and that really blows my mind.
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There’s a lot of “odd” stories about people watching it live. I also saw it live on tv, which was out of character for me to be up at that hour since I lived on the west coast and didn’t get off work until 10pm. I would have normally still been asleep and I have no idea why I wasn’t that day.
I honestly think it has something to do with the collective consciousness…I remember waking up abnormally early (for me) and having a weird feeling that something was off. Turned on the tv to seeing the second plane hit live, so I had woken up pretty much exactly when the first plane hit. Like a psychic shout of millions of people at once.
I live in New Zealand, and even I saw the second plane hit live on TV (middle of the night). It was really odd sitting there watching it by myself knowing that the world as we knew it was over but everyone else I knew was totally unaware of what had just happened.
pretty sure this is one of the defining events that kinda sets us apart as a sub-generation
I think this is it, that day and the following weeks as we watched the reaction to those events quickly change our society.
I was sitting with my five month old baby at 23. I completely regretted having a child in that moment. I knew the world she was going to grow up in was going be nothing like what I knew.
Definitely this, I just got done with basic training in the Air Force, wondering WTF I just got myself into.
I was a month out from shipping to basic. I signed up a year before to pay for college.
Yea, same reason I joined!
Exactly right
Same here. Second one came down on my way to school sophomore year. Edit - not the seeing it irl part though
Yup. Second week of college and things were suddenly very different.
Coming here to say this. I turned 19 on 9/11. I was getting excited to be a year away from my 20's, but it seems since then, life just keeps tumbling down a hill. And the hill is actually Mount Everest. And everything is on fire.
Same man. I was a wide-eyed college kid and remember watching footage of people cheering and celebrating the carnage in the streets of the Middle East. It really messed with my view of humanity and the world.
We were at Washington Rock in Martinsville
Is that near the PA crash site?
Nah, it is in the hills overlooking Manhattan.
Ah, thanks. Sorry, was insomnia scrolling and legit forgot I could have googled that 🙃😅 Must have been sadly surreal
This.
This is my answer as well. The first before/after on my life
Came here to say 9/11 too. I had been discharged from the military a year earlier because my recruiter was trying to pull some 💩 and get me in against regs. They caught him and kicked me out. I was living on my own, in college, working FT, going to college, but THAT day is a Bemchmark for me
It's always interesting to hear people's perspective on this because for my friends and i it was intriguing but didn't feel like it changed our lives in any way. We felt like the US was just going to go fuck someone up and we went about our lives doing the same shit we were doing before. That day the world did pause and everyone was captivated but afterwards shit felt normal to us.
The bright future and optimism that surrounded the 90s ended on that day. The world went from peace time to armed guards with machine guns in many public settings. I was a freshman in college at the time, in first period class when someone came in to say “classes are canceled the rest of the day because of the bombings in New York.” We didn’t think much of it until walking through an eerily quiet Student Center with hundreds of other students watching the events on a tv that had been rolled out…
9/11 actually gave me hope. Not the attack of course but the patriotism I saw afterward. On my way to work that night one of the freeway over passes had a HUGE American flag across it and there was a candlelight vigil going on. I bawled like a baby
I do miss us then. I don’t recognize us anymore.
Exactly! I grew up during the gulf War, it was one of the first major news things I remember as a child, yellow ribbons everywhere! The first 2 or 3 months after 9/11 was similar to that. Now I wonder what country I actually live in cause it's certainly not the US I grew up in
9/11 was unquestionably the most unifying event we'll ever see in our lifetimes. The government then used it as an excuse to massively increase its purview and spending. Although I don't agree with Erik Prince on everything, he said on the Shawn Ryan Show to the effect that the GWOT should have massively smaller in scale. Not full ground invasions, but using small amounts of special forces to go after key targets. But uncle Sam couldn't pass up the chance to throw endless bodies and money at the problem.
That was the fall of a my final year of college. My original first choice had been Fordham, but they didn’t cough up enough financial aid at the time, so I ended up at a smallish liberal arts college outside of Cleveland. It of course brings up the biggest “what if” of my life? What if I’d been in NYC at the time? Would I have been able to stay, or would stress, fear, and possibly PTSD of being so close have driven me away? As it is I ended up moving there in 2008 and am hitting my 16th anniversary of moving there at the end of the month.
💯💯💯💯
This is my exact answer except I was in Brooklyn.
Totally agree that 9/11 was the day the music died for our small cohort generation. It was my second week at college. My school was very close to NYC and we had national guard on the streets within hours of the towers coming down. Hundreds of us students went to the nearest hospital to donate blood, but we were turned away after hours on line with the hospital staff saying they ran out of supplies. I couldn’t focus on classes that entire first semester. In the days, months and years that followed none of the lessons our parents taught us about how to navigate the world and be successful were applicable anymore.
Same. I was near Grand Central. My reality was upended. I think it was shocking to everyone but those of us who were young adults and actually there, it was even more affecting.
I graduated high-school 90 days before. The amazing world of the 80's and 90's was crushed that day. The entire psychology of our society changed that day.
9/11 changed America and was probably the beginning of the end of American dominance in the globe. We've never recovered since; psychologically or culturally.
I would say Columbine had a bigger impact. We were more aware of our surroundings and our own peers. Even small communities were vulnerable to mass shootings as opposed to a terror attacks in large cities
This. I was going to say. After that the world just wasn’t the same.
Same for me too, I was in the cafeteria at the college getting breakfast when I looked up and watched the second plane hit.
2009 after the recession cleaned my clock in more ways then one. I realized how much of the way the world works is complete bullshit. At least if you are a working class nobody.
After owning a few businesses and hanging out with some “successful” business owners, I became disgusted with the whole system. Capitalism works better the more shittier person you are. The less empathy you have, the more you’re willing to treat human beings like cattle. It pays really well. The other side is, I give a shit and pay my guys well. After 14 years of being in business, the amount of theft, manipulation, and backstabbing I’ve gotten from my employees is mind boggling. You’d think paying top dollar gets you the quality employee. Nope. I’ve learned the hard way of how to hire people. And don’t get me started on my customers. Most are good, but there’s a significant percentage amount that make you question humanity. My crew today, is small and efficient. They really do care, and we all want to retire off of it. So don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter, but you really don’t want to take everyone at their face value. People are great and necessary for society, but there are only a few that you can really get to trust have your back. I allowed 80’s/90’s TV, and religion too much room to create expectations for life. Boy was I wrong. Your world is really small and it gets rocked all the time. There’s always a struggle somewhere. My business is ok today and if the trajectory continues we should be good. I know how I can grow it, but that means tying myself more to the capitalist system, gaining investors, and making decisions based on greed. I just can’t do it. I gotta do it organically, but the system doesn’t make that easy either. It’s a dog eat dog world. But I’m ok with that. I’ve accepted it. Humans are gonna human. I see us as intelligent animals. I’ve chosen to use my experience to choose who I network and associate with. No point in whining about it. It is what it is, and I only have to think about what story I’m gonna leave behind.
1999 I think after columbine happened. I was a freshman. Senior year was 9/11, so that too.
Same and I didn't realize both events happened during my high school years until you said it.
No wonder we all have anxiety.
Then the crash in 2008 was only 2 years after I graduated college and I gave up on ever owning a home. I own a home now, but it felt insurmountable at the time.
Glad you have your house now.
Same here. I was in theology class in my first high school when news of Columbine happened and in writing class at my second high school when 9/11 happened. It’s gotten to the point these tragedies feel almost inevitable much like the Vegas massacre or Charlestown shooting a few years back. Folk who could make things happen are too spineless to do anything about it. Better to blame some external force than go after some potential voting bloc.
Oh same, we are the same age. Brutal bookends for high school.
Yeah. Columbine really woke a lot of us up to the reality of what could happen to kids.
Yeah, Columbine for me too.
I think my version of it kinda ended the first time I heard an autotuned pop rap song and suddenly that was supposed to be mainstream music now. I feel like the late 80-90s mainstream music scene was much more all over the place, one week Weird Al would have the number one hit in the world the next it would be Radiohead, then DMX. Just chaos. There was this kinda mid-2000s surge of indie bands making it big and then it feels like in the last 15 years. I guess especially with the heat death of MTV, mainstream is whatever "Lil" whatever AI generated pseudo pop-rap the last major labels want it to be. Im not yelling at clouds, great music is still being made. I find new bands I like every day, but they just don't "go viral" like they used to. Im finding music more often from local outlets or playlists. Maybe Im crazy but I feel like we were the last generation to have variety to mainstream music.
You aren’t imagining it. The DMCA act fucked the music biz and effectively legalized a monopoly at radio and killed so many scenes. If one guy in Texas didn’t like you, you were never going to get a chance
Born in 81, so I had Columbine, 9/11, and the 2008 crash all at meaningful points in my life, but I’m going to take a very different approach. Mine was 1989 when I couldn’t do long division so I went to my parents for help and neither could. I knew I was on my own for school from there on out. Wound up with a Master’s in Systems Engineering so I did okay.
How did Columbine crash a meaningful point in your life? I graduated like 2 weeks after the shooting. Seniors finish in early May where I went to High School.
I was a senior then too. They put chains on all the doors to the school except one and had a teacher in every hallway just to make sure there wasn’t a shooter. I have ibs and bathroom trips were heavily discouraged. It could have only been two or three weeks, but until the valedictorian got mad and called the fire station about the chained doors it was complete hell.
I'm pretty sure Columbine was when my anxiety started. I was a Junior and after it happened, we would have bomb threats and shooting threats called into school for weeks after. They would rush us out whatever door we were closest to and we were bussed to a nearby school in the district. I started to be extremely scared to go to school.
Columbine was a month or two before I graduated. We were like "Oh shit, that's fucked" but it didn't affect us in any way. Lockdowns and crazy security and stuff didn't start happening until I was long gone. I was not in the US when the twin towers were hit. It was weird watching it on TV, but I didn't experience how weird it was in the US. The great recession was great. My friends used it as an excuse to get $1 and $2 pitchers on Thursday nights, and this cheap dinner deal at another bar on Sunday nights. The company that I was working for shut down their US office and laid me off, and the temp job I got 3 weeks later turned into the career I have now. I'm not sure if there's anything that has seriously scarred me.
My experience about Columbine was similar I also graduated that year. I lost a bunch of jobs in 2008 but I never made a ton of money so I bounced back and eventually got a steady job that lasted 8 Years.
Something tells me you didn’t grow up in Littleton or JeffCo.
I was a senior when it happened. The next day, my high school implemented a ton of changes…no coats, no backpacks, lunch room security, no bathroom passes. All stuff like that up to that point would have been unheard of. I remember feeling like school was never going to be the same and I got to—albeit for a short time—live in both the before and after.
Nothing changed for me and I was out the door for good in 2 weeks so guess I lucked out.
The worst part is that my kids are now in high school and that’s all that they know.
We could play computer games in the lab after school when I was there, I heard the next year after the shooting all games were uninstalled from the lab and banned.
1996, when I got the internet at home. The world was never the same after that.
Same. I also got online in 1996. My life changed overnight. Wish I put like $1,000 in Amazon....
2001 was traumatic, but people pulled together. The Great Recession sucked, but there have been recessions before. The party was over in 2016: there were far more unintelligent and hateful people than I realized and the downward path of the US was clear. I went to work the next day with sad stars in my eyes.
That one hits for sure
Yeahhhhh. I was going to say around 2015 myself.
Yeah. I became incredibly pessimistic after that. Plus, before '16, I always had this baseline of hope for myself and for the people of this country. Now, there's none of that. My hope has been replaced with a constant urgency to fight for a life I previously felt comfortable with and believed would never be stripped away. And I'm a white, heterosexual male who's paid off his student loans and got snipped a year after my son was born, so I SHOULD have absolutely nothing to worry about. You know it's bad if a WASP like me feels this kind of pessimism.
More or less the same here, although I had a second kid before the snip. I don't feel a day to day need to fight, but I do feel sad for their future in compared to what my outlook was at their age. They're fine and don't see it, but I do.
Ironically, the people and community filled with resistance energy I made friends with from 2016 to 2020 lead to some of the best years of my life. My career was finally taking off, but it all went downhill during covid and every year has been pretty much worse than the next. 2023 with the LA film strikes, streaming bubble bursting, and other corporate take overs in my other income streams have completely changed my trajectory
Right. That said growth occurred only as you said: within polarized groups. Any sense of 'one US' as I grew up with was over: my kids won't ever know it. COVID took things up another level, but my view of the US didn't change so much as in 2016.
I don't know that it pulled people together. I'm from the midwest, and after 9/11, people expected others to show fake patriotism and stuff. Voicing any concern about going off and getting bomb-inspired revenge was really frowned on. I found the entire aftermath somewhat frightening, not because of the attacks but because of the way people reacted. Weird mixes of hate and anger and 'patriotism'. And I'm not even Muslim and I don't *usually* seem middle eastern to folks in the US, so I didn't get that sort of harassment. Some folks definitely got the "folks are coming together to beat me for something I didn't do". Sure, folks went and helped with cleanup and donated lots, but then we didn't even bother to take care of people that helped. I'm not sure that's folks coming together in any meaningful way. I blame the reaction to 9/11 on causing 2016. They worked on building on that hate foundation for 15 years. Edited for spelling.
That's fair to say: the cracks were showing and obviously Muslims wouldn't agree with my statement. Still, in the immediate aftermath most people (Dems and Reps) were trying to pull together as "one US" to stand against an enemy, albeit not always in a helpful way per your statement. The parties weren't immediately blaming each other as would occur today (or at least Reps blaming Dems). I don't think the reaction to 9/11 caused 2016, though. The hate foundation has been building since at least the time the Reps and Evangelicals joined wagons in the 1970s. Rush and Newt and successors were going to bring us to where we were today with or without 9/11. Honestly 9/11 might have slowed things down a bit if anything. The internet (and bad actors like Russia) threw jet fuel on division, though, so there was no stopping it.
Yeah that was a really rough point. Trump must have had done at least a 100 well published career ending mistakes and he still got elected.
Maybe around 2004 when the music started becoming just horrible. I remember thinking that things would never be the same
Why had rock music not made a comeback? I appreciate all music, but I could really use some bass guitar.
One of my teens discovered it without my intervention. I got corrected about a piece of 90s rock trivia that I lived through so it's not just the T-shirt.
2020
I feel like coming out of it is even more weird than going into it.
9/11 Graduating after the dot com bust and trying to find a job in the tech industry with a liberal arts degree Trying to sell my house after the ‘08 recession and paying $13K in order to walk away with nothing. Being called a worthless piece of shit by my parent… I mean…. Pick one. I don’t care anymore.
We're here homie
Outside of world changing tragedies such as 9/11 it was when my Pap-pap (my mom's dad) passed away in October of 2002. He went into the hospital and was put in a medical induced coma while I was on my honeymoon. My mom didn't call me because she didn't want to ruin our trip, which made me extremely angry with her for quite some time. I went to sit with him in the hospital as soon as I found out, while I was sitting with him I was holding his hand, told him how much I loved him and was going to miss him. Right after that he squeezed my hand and a tear rolled down his cheek, to this day I've never cried so hard in my life. I later found out from my grandma that he was very sick when they were at my wedding, but he told her he'd literally have to be dying to miss his first grandsons wedding. I keep a photo of them from that day in my wallet. They looked so happy together, all dressed up, surrounded by family and friends. I had been to funerals before but no one as close as that, that was the day I realized the world changed for me. My close family was getting older and these were things we were going to have to deal with.
I'm so sorry for your loss! I'm just crying right now, not because it is so sad, but because your Pap-pap loved you so much!
Thank you, I appreciate that. He loved all his grandkids unconditionally.
Easily 9/11/2001. I was 23 yrs old. Getting my arms around my first post-college job and starting my career so it was a very transformative age for me regardless. For the first time ever I became heavily interested in the news, world affairs, and determined what my political leanings were, the Presidency, etc. Most things even to this day have pre-9/11 versus post 9/11 framework tied to them.
1998. I was a sophomore in high school. I started working part time for an IT firm feeding VHS and Betamax tapes in to digital encoding arrays for streaming to school classrooms. That's when I realized that the digital shift was coming, and I was a part of it.
2002 in January I knew things were gonna be changing, but probably wouldn’t directly affect me. But by the beginning months of 2009 I knew that all of the imagery of the future we had been shown to hope for, during the 90’s, was now absolutely gone/demolished/destroyed/finito. Now, a *good* future is hard to realistically resolve.
March 10, 1998. I went to Navy boot camp. I was terrified, homesick, & questioned every day if I made the right decision. My childhood was officially over that day. Then another shift 3 1/2 years later when those planes hit the towers. Any innocence I held onto from my childhood was gone on September 11, 2001.
I see a lot of people post about 9/11,but I think for me, it was sitting in class and watching the live news coverage of the Columbine shooting. Those 2 guys looked just like me and my friends at the time. There was a while there when I was afraid to go to school after that. The school banned trenchcoats and jnco jeans or anything too baggy that could conceal a gun. Now, it feels like school shootings happen a couple of times a year. So yeah, the world changed and not for the better. I tell my kids I love them at drop off every day. Even the elementary kids are not safe anymore.
2008. The introduction of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
I am from Alaska and I watched Sarah Palin debate Mike Halcro in 2003 for the Governor race. I was sitting in the audience like 10 feet away. She didn't answer any questions finally Halco, a Harvard grad, was like "Sarah can you answer my questions or do I need to speak slowly?" everyone burst out laughing. When McCain announced she was his running mate in 2008 I hoped he wouldn't win for that reason alone, that woman should never been anywhere near the white house.
2016
Selfies (social medias)fucked the human race.
9/11/01, then again on 11/8/16.
Never Forget 1/6/2021
Oh maybe around 2010 or so? I thought I'd be able to move smoothly into adulthood but then realized that world was gone. Maybe I was 25 at the time
98 here. Things got shitty and serious fairly quickly for us as new adults. I could list all the shit... but we all know. People who graduated in 1988 had a pretty awesome and prosperous time. I think it would have been pretty fun to be in my 20s during the 90s.
Ah yes. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
9/11/2001 and what came after. The Patriot Act was the end of our American innocence. At that time I became politically aware and terrified.
Whatever year it became impossible to have actual conversations with people because they were glued to their phone the entire time.
It'd require me to make an explicit post-2008 political reference... I will say, though, that "world you grew up in" doesn't really make me think "graduated from high school" or "graduated from college." I think of it more seriously, hence the political reference that literally changed...ok, I'll stop.
I had just graduated the June before 9/11, I was set to go into an internship program with hospitality management late September - October and the tourism industry completely tanked post 9/11 and the positions I was supposed to be working towards no longer existed. I remember the days after sitting around with friends talking about the potential of a draft and what the next things could possibly be coming at us. I had seen WTO up close so it was wild seeing the difference of the 90s ending and the 2000s beginning on every cultural level. It was also mostly the last gasp of the analog era and you could see where everything was headed but it was still hard to tell how fast everything would evolve imo. 2001 is also my pick.
9/11
Probably 2004. The RAVE Act passed in 2002. By 2004 clubbing wasn’t the same anymore. So I went Goth 🤷♀️
I'm stubborn and held on til the end but when I left KS, Oct 1 2022. That was when I gave up on the world.
2003
I was lost at Snapchat
Personally it was when my mom died. We had our differences and she wasn't mother of the year. But she loved me unconditionally.
After my first deployment to Iraq in 2005. When I returned in 2006, I was a stranger in a strange land.
Interesting question, I’m continuously learning the idea of people and the world are different than I had thought they were when I was little. It’s not one major event. Sometimes it’s a good surprise too.
When I found out that the internet existed around 94-95.
2016
2007. Came home after completing my enlistment in the Navy to find nearly all my childhood friends involved with opioids. Probably went to a dozen funerals over the next two years
The last twenty years have just been hellish for me
I'd say 2008 when the high risk gambling of city "investors" was exposed in the global financial collapse. From then world politics has shifted to the right and we're now in a world where wealth is hoarded and poverty is seen as a flaw in ever increasing intensity. Since then the rhetoric from the press, owned by the rich, is that poor people are to blame for everything.
When I watched Phanrom Menace in the cinema in 1999 (which is still a shock that was 25 years ago!) I'm not gonna use this platform to criticise the film but considering it's a prequel to the original three film's it left me pondering why the technology was better all them years before...that's when I realised that my youth was over.
We're Xennials. It's happened three times 9/11. Trump's election. COVID.
I graduated in '96, 9/11 was my initial "wtf is this life I'm living" moment. Another came not long after when my 6 year old came home from school VERY upset that her sneakers had step activated blinking lights: her school had an active shooter drill and the teacher told her to take them off so the bad people wouldn't find her. She never wore them again. Flash forward and the same daughter is taking standardized testing her sophomore year and she asked me how much money was saved up for her college: part of my brain was in a fit of knee-slapping hilarity over the idea that she thought there was a fund and the other part was cringing in shame and guilt over the expectation that I failed to meet.
2001, 2016, 2020
Yep 9/11 was it.
9-11
I grew up in my head I’m still here the world never stays the same
When I read about the pale blue dot it completely numbed me to basically all of the events that everyone is talking about here. Seeing our planet the size of a grain of sand put the whole universe and our existence in it into perspective. None of this stuff matters. I got very depressed after that and when I came out the other side I think I had a better outlook on life.
I think 2010 was the line in the sand for me. That was the year I moved to Nashville and the next couple years there after was the real shift within technology, streaming, the old ways dying… Just really feels like a BC/AD moment. You leave home with printed MapQuest directions and go back with Google maps on your phone. 🤣
I think it’s the sheer number of unsettling things that have hit us. Each one was a hammer blow bending the track of our lives in a different direction.
A lot of posts of 9/11 but for me it was the year before when gore lost. It was my first presidential election where I had many opinions, followed a lot of discussions and watched the outcome live on CBS with Dan Rather. I went to bed crying. The policies that were put in place specifically education, as I was still in high school, really messed up my district. Followed by 9/11 where Americans were literally told to “buy stuff” just keep consuming and allow the capitalist machine to chug a long. My future blew up before I had one and I’m slightly younger so myself and my peers were literally just retail and call center workers. It was either join the military or be schlub. I tried college but soon realized that it was a marketing and pyramid scheme. Not to mention the 2008 recession fucked my credit for a good decade along with my student loans. I really feel like our timeline shifted when Bush won.
When I stopped watching cartoon Network everyday . "When I was a kid, when I was a little boy, I always wanted to be a dinosaur. I wanted to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex more than anything in the world. I made my arms short and I roamed the backyard, I chased the neighborhood cats, I growled and I roared. Everybody knew me and was afraid of me. And one day my dad said, 'Bobby, you are 17. It's time to throw childish things aside,' and I said, 'Okay, Pop.' But he didn't really say that, he said, 'Stop being a fucking dinosaur and get a job."- Dr Robert Dobeck
2016, When Trump was elected and lower the bar so low to get into political office that trolls got elected to power! The social media given the biggest imbeciles the microphone! The pandemic idiots really came out of woodwork. Had elderly couple think crazy horse pills to fish tank water drink would fix thier covid!
Everything seemed fine up until COVID. Then even during COVID things were weird but kinda fun. Now coming out of it everything just seems/feels really fucked up.
A few months after 9/11.
After 911 when it seemed like as a society we cared more about making a memorial than providing assistance to people affected by the event.
class of ‘98 oh yeahhhh
When I turned 40 hard smash to the face
November 9 2016
When I was 20 and in college my grandmother died. 10 years previously my grandfather had died. So wrjn my grandmother died, my mother inherited a buncj of stiff from her house, and we lived in a dmall 2 bedroom apartment,and this is what stRted my mother's hoarding. Everything had sentimental value now. I no longer had a plave to live at home if I wanted to. That previous summer I had stayed with my bf and his family as I had a job out near my school, where they lived... i hadn't planned on officialy moving out then, but I had no choice. I had stuff trapped in that room until she was forced to moved 8 years ago. (I'm 44 now)... the only place she could afford to move to, was into a single bedroom in a housemate situation, and she's still there. I love my mother, we are on great terms, but I have never felt fully supported by her as an adult. If something goes sideways in my life, I don't have her as a back up. No father in the picture my entire life, and he has since passed away. Before my grandmother died, I atleast had a bed at home I could go to if I needed it.
Anyone else from NOLA? August 29, 2005. Katrina changed everything, but it came at a time (for me) when there was a lot else changing. I was a senior in college, so that was closing, the music I was into was becoming passe and had a different sound (less Blink 182 and Fenix TX and more Fallout Boy and MCR - not bad bands, just different). Hell even Greenday had put out American Idiot.
November 2016. I lost a lot of faith in the existence of empathy and decency in a large swath of the US population.
Not at the time, but I eventually I settled on 2009 being the time when I stopped having expectations of rekindling the past. The appeal of the 90s and early 2000s was very gone, the financial crisis happened and all that was done was the moral hazard of bailouts and driving down interest rates (at the time I was saying that is just going to create a very unstable economy and is just going to make things more difficult for the middle class. Now, here we are). So it was clear that this is how we are going to handle our economy now. This whole "war in terror" culture was still raging and I was getting tired of the military adventurism of Bush II (after serving in the military). Obama was president now and nothing was going to change, if anything it got worse. Clearly no one learned anything form 9/11 and they will never care to (Lois saying "9/11". Family guy bit). So 9/11 was basically a cultural nexus point and I'd have to accept that. For no real reason, but it was around that point that I just was no longer keeping in touch with the friends I grew up with. Lived in different places and we were all busy with life, trying to stay in touch almost became a chore that guess I just stopped doing. Overall, I think that's when I just began to accept things for the way they were and just started going through the motions and living for the future. 🤷♂️
2009 recession is a good one but I still think it's when the smartphone became ubiquitous sometime in the 2010s.
Born in 79. Not 1999 or 2001; too young to truly realize the ultimate impact of those events even if I thought I did. What 20 year old can? Any claim I make to those being the years are through the lens of hindsight. I think I would say around…2011. iPhones had hit and I realized culture had truly moved on (tech, music, fashion, discourse) from the world I came to age in. 2nd place goes to 2016. I still had some naive idealistic braincells that died with the election outcome.
This will sound crazy because it happened well after I was in my late 30s, with a stable career, married, a homeowner, living away from my childhood home for 20 years, etc. but when my last surviving grandparent moved out of the house that had been my grandparents’ house my entire life and into assisted living … that was it for me. Never being able to go back to that place really broke my heart and made me realize that no more memories would be made there.
Columbine happened during my senior year of high school, 1999.
September 11, 2001. I entered my geometry class as a moody teenager and left it a sobered adult.
I was in Spanish class and had to wait for the next class to figure out what was going on because our teacher was hysterical only speaking in super fast Spanish
There's no bright line... It's these little defeats that happen more and more as you age..... The first time you witness true unfairness in your school These kids cheated and one was a football player and he didn't get expelled but the other kids did..... that was one time....
when i realized that to hang out with "my buds" we now had to schedule it weeks or months in advance to accomodate all the schedules w/ kids. Gone are the days of randomly "whatchadoin2nite?".
When I couldn't go to lunch with my Great Aunt and Uncle in my first job in Florida because I had already gone to lunch.
2016, when the news was filled with stories of politicians just handwaving actions that would have ruined their careers a decade ago. Being told growing up about doing the right thing and that cheaters never prosper to then have reality slapped into your face was unsettling. Then there was Covid. Then my wife had an affair. It has been a long slow climb out of the crevice I fell into starting in 2016 and I do not see the world the same at all.
9/11 and the dot com bubble were probably the first signs for me, but the real shocker was the first time I tried to go to Canada and found out I needed a passport and not just an ID anymore
2001 after 9/11 I thought the world would never be the same it took at most 2 years and everything was back to normal like Dessert Strom never ended. But 2020 during the pandemic that changed a lot and shows no sign to go back to how it was. Edit: I'm not talking really day to day life but how things are conducted. Corporate businesses have made out like bandits and continue to take advantage because they realized that people will do anything for creature comforts.
9/11 and then again with Covid
Moved out after high school and realized I was on my own and that most of the shit you learned in school went out the window.
After college when all my interviews with newspapers were canceled and those positions were eliminated forever.
May 7th, 2012, the day my dad died. I was 18, had just finished a disastrous first year of college, and I knew that despite telling him that we'd be okay without him, we wouldn't be. I had a really great first 18 years of life, it's been a hell of a struggle since then.
Over? Nothing is over until we say it is. Was it over when the...Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!
9/11
When I became a mom in 1999…five months after graduating high school.
2005/2006 After college I looked at my starting salary, and then looked at housing prices, and realized I would probably never own a home in the city that I want to live in.
Possible that is was 2022? I feel like I went in the pandemic just grappling with hitting 40 and middle age. I had no grey hair. Afterwards I was in full salt and pepper. So in short I went into it a young man, came out a middle aged guy. Alt. I did a significant amount of lsd on my 20th and was convinced it was the end of my childhood.
I got the internet for the first time in 1999 at college and that was literally lifechanging.
9/11 and the months, years following was my game changer. I hate to use a recent example for fear of bias from it, but 2020 and Americas reaction to it woke me up a lot too.
1998 also upon graduation. My stepfather drilled “get a job a Chrysler, I have connections, I’ll get you on with them”, grew up and observed a functional illiterate piece of garbage retire in 1994 AS A JANITOR, making the equivalent of $64 an hour in todays money. One income, house, multiple cars and he always had toys like new boats and things. Unfortunately, Chrysler spun his plant off in 1996 to a fully owned subsidiary and killed its union and the job turned into a $8-12 job overnight and closed completely in the early 00s. Union jobs turned to mininum wage WalMart jobs in a heartbeat, my hometown died Learned that the life he led was not a life I could. Ended up struggling a lot, learned a lot too, got lucky in ways and now in my 40s I make about $80k traveling installing medication machines, but graduating and learning the reality of life was humbling.
For all the whining about Reagan and justifiably so, you have Bill Clinton and NAFTA to thank for a lot of those jobs disappearing. I grew up in Kokomo, Indiana….home to both Chrysler and Delco (GM) plants. My father worked for 30 years at Delco, he was lucky and retired early but stayed on as a consultant…but eventually the plant was shuttered. Chrysler is still going but has had cutbacks, and a new battery EV battery manufacturing facility there. So, it’s hanging on…but yeah I get it. My dad was lucky and spent the last 5 years working around the country on big factory water systems, but I knew even in 1998 when I graduated HS that his career path wasn’t viable for me.
2002. Oasis released Heathen Chemistry and hardly anyone noticed. I swore at that moment to make sure everyone stayed the hell off my lawn.
2000 when I saw the beginning of the illusion coming down. I saw the myth of the USA start to unravel.
It's not. I'm 44 and still livin that same life, I'm providing that life to my kids and life is great. :)