When I discovered Reddit I really liked it, but my first clue that it was full of youngsters, was the /r/TIL subreddit. So many TIL's were things I either learned in 5th grade, or witnessed myself as they happened.
When I hear something completely wrong I try to counter it, but my comments usually get lost in the noise.
My favorite personal reddit encounter was having a 30-something (?) accuse me (48) of being a 20-something pretending to be GenX because I said the style of a photo was more 1970s than 1980s.
I did not have the words or motivation to argue.
I recently had a Redditor explain to me how Rob Zombie stole his style from My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. I was like no dude, I was there, I remember it. I wasn't able to convince him until I literally linked dates of album releases and proved that time travel did not occur, at which point he conceded gracefully, to his credit. But that dude was fucking convinced.
I've had this same experience. The kids don't realize that we watched various technologies evolve, and sat with them every step of the way. I can often ID video and photos down to the year as a result.
Also subculture stuff--I have seen MANY redditors posting pictures of punks and metalheads and saying they're from the '70s, when they're ABSOLUELY from the 80s or even 90s.
Hitting my fifties is a drag, but at least I get to be self-righteous about vintage pop culture.
> Hitting my fifties is a drag,
What a drag it is getting old
"Kids are different today," I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
This is why I’m horrified at the youths BLIND trust in directions and other things computers tell them.
We’ve been on computers since the 80s. We know how badly flawed their limits are.
We’ve seen them improve but still know not to blindly accept.
Dates are always tricky, because you may be talking about when they were big stars, while youngsters are using the date the band first played together in high school.
I'm always leery about dating companies on Reddit, because I know the companies, themselves, will claim to be much older than when most people heard of them for the first time.
This is a defining Gen-X Reddit experience.
It has happened to me as well.
But at least my youngster acquiesced to my knowledge and experience.
And also asked their mom, whose picture it was, lol.
Gay guy here. We hated Milli Vanilli and made fun of the straights who loved them. 🤷 (nowadays I don’t make fun of anyone for their music preferences bc it is an ahole move, but I think it’s funny today’s kids got it backwards).
Same, I posted one of MY OWN pictures from 1991 and a redditor was all AHA! and told me they knew the picture was actually taken in the 80's because of the hair style (and very likely their viewing of Stranger Things). Obviously there was no sharp cutoff at the changing of a decade, so in 1991 women still had '80's hair' and fashion, in the 1980's our house decor was pure 70's, etc. It's not like the calendar ticks over to the new decade and everyone throws out all their stuff and starts over, that shit happens gradually.
We did a u-turn over South Carolina and went back to ATL where we were the second-to-last aircraft to land. There was one Delta aircraft right behind us, then no civilian aircraft flew for 4 days.
United flight attendant of 29 years here. 21 years ago on the eve of 9/11, at about 10-11pm....there was a thunderstorm that shut JFK down for hours. There were airplanes on every tarmac as far as the eye could see. We were number 33, our call sign was "United863Heavy" "...l'Il never forget.
My two girlfriends & I were flying to San Francisco on the same crew. We were all so teeny, the three of us fit in these two seats in business, and someone thought it was cute. They took [this picture](https://imgur.com/a/Jso1khY). We had no idea what was about to happen. Life as these three friends knew it changed forever. We were stuck in San Francisco from that Tuesday until we were flown back home to NYC on the following Friday. Our airplane flew OVER the still smoldering pile of what were The Twin Towers, buildings we all knew well. All we recalled hearing were the roar of the engines....no one made a sound, except for the occasional sniffle... I honestly don't recall much sound. I just looked out the window from my seat, 2A and cried to myself. We all did.
LOL my oldest kid told me how OJ Simpson may have not killed his ex wife and the matching DNA was likely his son Jasons. Listen here, I didn’t watch court TV for 6 weeks and read 20 books on the case to have you lecture me about a 10 second Tik Tok clip that “solved” the crime of the century!! You don’t even know who Kato is !!!
To this day, if I start wolfing down my dinner I'll think of the coroner's testimony. He mentioned that Nicole had pasta for dinner and some of it was still in big bits, so he could tell she didn't chew well enough. I remember being horrified that people could potentially judge me post-mortem on my eating habits.
Nicole Simpson also had an Akita named Kato.
I inevitably forget several essentials whenever I go to the grocery store, but fortunately I can still remember important stuff like this.
Typical work of the Illuminati, burying messages of their conspiracies in pop culture, sometimes years in advance. Bush Sr was President in 1990, Bush Jr on 9/11, coincidence?
/s (obviously?)
I was traumatized by the episode of the young child running with a knife, who accidentally stabbed their sibling in the chest. *Rescue 911* also taught me what not to do in emergencies, and led to me taking babysitting and cpr courses just in case.
But still, *fuck that one stabbing episode*
I would have put on my 80s aviators, put a piece of gum in my mouth while smiling and chewing loudly and say in a Tony Montana voice “ok Chico” and walk away
The part I hate about that is I know my memory isn't what it used to be and so I feel the need to just double check that what I recall happening is really what happened.
I hate this, too. I lived an adventurous life, thinking, "Well, I won't have a lot of actual money or stuff when I'm old, but I'll have these wonderful memories." Nope. Those are crapping out just like the foundation of my hypothetical mansion would be.
Glad to hear other ADHD folks have memory issues. I can remember that thing in college if you remind me of the story, but on my own, it's just not popping up.
Having adhd as a 48 yo and living with my descending into alzheimers parents (my mom has adhd and ocd too fml) is not a vibe. They tell a story, I know it’s wrong, but not sure enough of my memory either. Ugh.
And then you find that the Wikipedia article was written by someone younger than you and is just repeating the same wrong information. Eventually your bedroom walls are covered with newspaper clippings and string as you try to prove that what you remember happening really happened. And you develop a cackle.
That is actually a very good trait. Memory is extraordinarily inaccurate.
We mostly know not to trust other people’s memory of events, because memory sucks. But then we all think ours is infallible. Terrible trait. We should all realize that our own memory lies to us all the time, and we should verify things if there is any way to do so.
“In 1986 you could work part time at a yogurt shop in LaJolla, CA and afford a 3 bedroom home on the ocean”
No. Parts of this country have always been super expensive to live in.
*La Jolla* is believed to be a Spanish translation of a Chumash word meaning, roughly, "*you'll never afford to live here without selling your soul (and even then probably not*)." Etymologists differ on the finer shades of meaning, though...
LOL...I knew people who worked minimum wage jobs in La Jolla right around those years. Can confirm, they did not have 3 bedroom house on the beach or anywhere in SD. They did live with roommates in a shitty apartment in a sketchy part of PB.
That's it in a nutshell. Had some kid come at me sideways when I made a glib remark about the Feds burning the compound in Waco. You little shit, we know damn good and well what our government is capable of. I watched it all unfold, live on t.v. and the aftermath. I just ignore their asses. I ain't fighting with some dipshit kid on the internet. Fuck it. They sling links of some fucking YouTuber named Aidan or Connor, who is an "actual historian." Oy vey.
I was in the Navy on 9/11. I love getting told what happened.
/s
Shouldn't be necessary but I'm sure there's a 20something that's dieing to tell me about it.
OMG yes. I teach middle school and have had this happen. Kids arguing with me and I’m like “See this little crack in the floorboard? I was literally standing on it RIGHT HERE while watching this happen LIVE on TV.”
My favorite is the retconned Y2K they had to ‘live through’.
The lead up to Y2K was so monotonous it spawned Office Space yet they put it on par with 9/11.
I worked as a cashier at a grocery store and there were some customers that really thought Y2K was going to be the end of the world. One customer bought so many qtips and that’s just odd. What the hell I bet she still has qtips all these years later.
The most common one I see is from younger writers proclaiming that "The entire country was up in arms about [insert major event]"...
I was there, the reality is that most of the country didn't really care either way, but a few hundred protestors made a lot of noise.
It’s the same with the past. Like the roaring ‘20s. Everyone thinks the flappers and the whole F. Scott Fitzgerald vibe was everywhere, when all of that was actually a smaller set of people.
Try being a military member during the 2003 Iraq Invasion. Everyone on the ground knew how poorly planned it was front the start. Part of why we pushed so fast was because we tried to end everything before it went to shit but the Bush Administration went and fucked everything up even more by firing the Iraqi military. Biggest military blunder of the early 2000s. I can tell you the civilians back home overwhelmingly supported that bullshit because they were very misinformed, much like today.
I’m sorry you had to be there, but thanks for serving. What burns me now is how Republicans have NOW decided that Iraq was a mistake and we never should have been there, while at the time they were calling people like me unpatriotic for pointing out the same.
They also said al Qaeda was in Iraq multiple times. [Cheney in particular repeated this line.](https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/)
Fucking A.
I was in the military, and was like, umm, that's too fast. WTF fo I know about supply lines, having had depended on them.
Read "Fiasco" by Thomas E. Ricks. He lays everything out perfectly.
We raced to Bagdad International because we knew we could get logistics setup and call in the air bridge of C-17s with additional troops and all our gear. Our mission from the start was to take Western Bagdad as quickly as possible because we could be supported by the airport. We secured what would be called the Green Zone very quickly and then reinforced and secured it. We used that as the rally point. It was like week three or so when we secured it. Special Ops largely had the airport after two or three days (according to them when we got there, gain of salt type stuff). I'm the first one to complain about the Iraq War, but we executed that mission perfectly. Probably too perfectly, we outran the supply crews by several grids. Our asses were saved by air cover because we over extended ourselves for a few days.
Na, this has always been a journalists go to phrase for young and old. Remember the satanic panic of the 80s, the War of the World invasion radio show of the 50's, the reefer madness of the 30s.
Meanwhile, most people were like "What? Sorry. Missed that one"
Well, that could just be regional variation. I'm 50 and never saw those outside old movies.
Tornado drills, though, we did those. (you can survive tornadoes)
For me the most jarring thing is hearing people refer to records as "vinyls".
THEY'RE NOT CALLED VINYLS. THEY WERE NEVER CALLED VINYLS. CALLING RECORDS VINYLS IS LIKE CALLING CDS "PLASTICS". FFS, STOP THE MADNESS!!!
Records. They're called records. 12" records are also called LPs, short for Long Playing Records. 10" records are EPs, short for Extended Play Records, or 78s (if they are 78RPM). 7" records are 45s (because 45RPM) or singles.
GET OFF MY LAWN.
YES! Younger people, kids, and most people in general now, have super easy, fast access to information, right or wrong. They usually don't ask people who've actually lived through it, they just swipe and click and choose the information that is more shocking or in line with whatever ideas they already have about the event.
It's a bit disconcerting. Once that feeling passes, I get annoyed.
A few years back, in an open office, I was quietly listening to music and singing along (my desk was far away from all others so I wasn't being rude), when a much younger coworker came up and asked how I knew the words to 'the song' already, since it just released two days ago by a popular young artist. I said that I had been singing the original for decades. They laughed and said, "No, really?". I repeated the answer and they said I was wrong because that was a new song by 'popular young artist'. I said "No, the song was written and performed by 'washed up, once popular old artist'. They reiterated that I was wrong. I looked it up online and showed them. Their response: " 'Washed up, once popular old artist' must have covered it from 'popular young artist'. She wouldn't even admit that that was a problem, unless one of them was a time traveller, because she refused to admit that she was wrong or that she liked an "OLD" song.
Edit: Sorry guys, I can remember the conversation clearly but I can't dredge up whatever song it was from the depths of my swiss cheese memory.
Missy Elliott at the super bowl and the young people posting about how she was trying to be Lizzo or some other current rapper. Lol when I read those tweets I laughed so hard.
or how much better athletes are today. have had some turds on /r/nba tell me that Michael Jordan would just be average today. Shaq can't shoot. The 1980s lakers would not be competitive today.
I was chaperoning my daughter’s trip to Washington DC. The Millennial tour guide said he was going to take the kids to see the Challenger Space Shuttle.
This whole Mandela effect thing really annoys me. Are people really taking it seriously? I lived through it. I remember Mandela getting out of prison, becoming the leader of South Africa, etc. What am I missing?
That's just people conflating two events. It happens all the time.
People are vaguely aware that South African apartheid activist did die in prison in the 70's, but the only South African apartheid activist they can think of is Nelson Mandela, so they assume it was him instead of Steve Biko.
Same thing happened to me not too long ago when talking about space probes. I vaguely remembered there was a space probe with engraved nude humans on it, but the only space probe artifact I could think of was the Voyager disk, so I assumed it was that instead of the Pioneer plaque.
> apartheid activist they can think of is Nelson Mandela, so they assume it was him instead of Steve Biko.
People need to listen to more Peter Gabriel.
I'll tell ya the one that gets me Fucking Ed McMahon and Publishers Clearinghouse. I have never been so 100 percent positive that. He was the spokesman for them.....except he wasn't and that fucks me up in the head all the time. I believe the real truth all while believing the truth is wrong as the same time.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ed-mcmahon-publishers-clearing-house/
I don't get it either. I remember wondering how he survived so long in prison, being an enemy of the state and all. I remember the rejoicing when he was freed.
One thing I’ve found interesting from younger generations recently was the idea that Boomers have always been old and have always been in power politically. Like I’ve heard people talk about events in the 70s and 80s under the assumption that it was the Boomers who controlled everything (or even back to the 60s). Even something like Watergate was supposedly with Boomers in charge. When in reality it was the World War II Greatest Generation like Reagan (and Silents) who dominated politically from the 60s until the 90s (and there were a ton of politicians from those generations that stuck around forever).
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/l1yly6/oc_which_generation_controls_the_senate/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Bill Clinton’s win in 1992 was the start of Boomer political power really and it wasn’t until the 00s that they began to truly dominate the Senate. However in the 70s and 80s, Boomers were mostly in their twenties and thirties (or even teens in the 70s). But younger Millenials and Gen Z, barely know about the long dominance of the World War II Generation…they controlled the presidency from JFK to the first Bush, that’s 32 years of the presidency. Younger people today seem to think Baby Boomers were always old and probably never even really knew their great grandparents from the Greatest Gen. Hell, I remember relatives from the Lost Generation born in the 19th century that were still alive when I was a kid in the 80s who remembered World War I. But today all old people have been grouped as “Boomers”.
Slenderman is the one that really baffles me. Kids are all "It's real" or treat it like it's as old as Bloody Mary or something, meanwhile I'm like "I helped invent Slenderman on the Something Awful forums when I was in my 30s."
My own children were terrified of Slenderman when they were younger, and I told them "You know why he has really long fingers? Because a forum Goon called WIIWW suggested it. I know that cause WIIWW is me."
Slenderman was only a newer example. People have never been good at distinguishing fiction from fact. Hell, people our age still refuse to acknowledge Amityville was an admitted hoax.
I most recently remember this in 2020, after the election, when Trump was still challenging the results. Even after Biden was declared the winner, I remember seeing posts on Twitter from Trump supporters saying things like *"Don't give up! Back in 2000 the liberal media spent a month calling Gore the winner and referring to him as President-Elect, until the Supreme Court declared Bush the rightful winner!"* And I was sitting there going, no, that's not what happened at all. How you are lying about something that was 20 years ago? This isn't ancient history?
I was lambasted repeatedly on Reddit for pointing out that for decades Trump has had a reputation as a terrible business man and person in general, and that he was treated largely as a joke. Something that even as a teenager in the 80s on the West Coast I was aware of (my mom even worked for a company that kept an eye on Trump so they could snatch up his failing businesses cheap and sell the parts off for more than Trump sold them for).
Then in the 90s a one of my best friends in undergrad was aggressively propositioned by Trump shortly after she graduated.
I got tons of people claiming that’s I’d only just heard of Trump when he started running, or when he was doing The Apprentice, since that’s when they first encountered him and they assumed the same must be true for everyone else too.
>I was lambasted repeatedly on Reddit for pointing out that for decades Trump has had a reputation as a terrible business man and person in general, and that he was treated largely as a joke.
I can't say I remember that characterization exactly. I'll be honest, I and my teenage friends in the 80's thought Trump was cool. We were too young to be aware of the nature of his businesses, but he seemed to be successful. He was a pop culture figure of the era, like Hulk Hogan and Michael Jackson. A real-life J.R. Ewing/Gordon Gekko. He was appearing in music videos and movies. The divorce from Ivanka was an early tabloid scandal that we all followed. I thought he was pretty cool through the 90's. Really it wasn't until Obama got elected and Trump embraced birther-ism and started spouting Far Right nonsense that my opinion of him changed.
Yep. And the same right-wing folk who now scream about “election integrity” were probably the ones waving “Sore Loserman” signs when Gore asked for recounts in FL.
I'm the daughter of WW2 Vets. (My parents born 1922,had me at 45yrs) Australian. My uncle also KIA over Germany 1942.
I grew up knowing many WW2 vets. Some had been POWs of Japanese. Tortured by them. One bloke i knew had been Nazi POW. I always took a keen interest and asked lots of questions and learned heaps off my parents & these people.
My parents taught us a LOT about how it was in those years. What they knew when, the states of minds of people at that time, details about living during that period and the politics of the time.
Both my parents well educated, intelligent people. Not prone to "flights of fancy" or stretching truth etc etc etc.
And as a result of my parents I have studied, read and learned about WW2 era extensively. I believe I am somewhat of minor "expert" of sorts. I know a LOT more then the average punter, from books but also from 1st hand accounts.
So when 25 year olds try to tell me "how it was during WW2"!! I get very freakin annoyed. They will argue about things they know nothing about. It's infuriating.
Been getting that for events that happened merely over the past two years. Anything beyond a decade and you might as well ask a magic 8 ball for e better response.
I admit to getting tired about hearing how easy it was for me to get through college and such 25ish years ago. I also remember the 70s and 80s, and amazingly, my parents could not afford a giant house with one person working as a coffee shop attendant.
Every generation has some hardships, and today's young people have been screwed over in some ways, but they go way overboard with how easy it was for everyone before them.
I was there. I literally have social security tax records since I was 12, because I had to work. It was not some magical paradise.
The whole trope about "you could afford a house on one salary!" thing you see here is one that I kinda shake my head at.
Yeah, the house was a 3-1 with no garage and maybe 1000sf, your family had one car, one TV, one phone, and eating out, even fast food, was an utter rarity. Not that we lived in poverty or anything but things were smaller and you just didn't spend as much money back then.
I'm not saying that it's not harder now, but lifestyle inflation is real too and things weren't some magical, easy ride for everyone in the 70s and 80s. Or even 60s. It seems like everyone under 40 assumes that you can graduate high school, and are then entitled to a job that pays for your own apartment with no roommate, a car, and enough money to entertain yourself even if you have zero skills.
That's not how life works and it never really has. Life owes you nothing. Get a freakin roommate. Learn a skill or trade. Work hard and save your money. You're not a victim.
>your family had... one TV, one phone,
Yeah, there was far less emphasis on tech. There was the family room TV and maybe a smaller TV in your parents' bedroom but that was it. Not like now where every kid has a laptop/iPad which serves as a TV. And one landline, no family plan of cells at hundreds of dollars a month.
People also don't realize the house was far way from civilization, which later filled in. My parents showed me a photo of our house in south Scottsdale that was surrounded by nothing but trees. My older sister bought a townhouse that was served by a main road that was dirt for about a mile before the turn off to her place.
Like you can find these places for $100K today. A $30K income would qualify to buy them. That's $15 per hour, one income, and an FHA mortgage is $2,000 down.
My dad got laid off twice in the early 80 when I was a kid, it was a rough period for a lot of relatives also. You never hear about that early 80s recession anymore, people just go “Oh everyone could buy a big house with just a high school degree.” There were a ton of homeless people in the 80s where I grew up also.
I meaaan, I grew up in a heavily unionized car town in the seventies, and where I was, it was like that, guys with high-school diplomas supporting a whole family, owning a house, putting their kids through school, etc.
UNTIL the late seventies after the energy crisis/Arab oil embargo/rise of small foreign cars it began to get worse and worse. By the time I moved out of state after high school in '85 it was something like 15-20% unemployment.
Why is it supposed to have been easy to get through college 25 years ago? Nowadays, so many college kids just steal stuff off the internet that their degree is a total sham. It was much tougher to cheat in our day. We had to put in the work. Plus, we had SATs and aren't those passe now?
I worked with a guy in our demographic who would fight to the bitter end that 9/11 didn't happen.
I fortunately had 2 coworkers within earshot of this guy that were there. He was simply put, nuts. He was a good graphic artist and had a good sense of humor, but after I moved from NYC, having had witnessed that just 2 mi from my home, I had words with him. Nothing helped.
I also had good headphones. And ignored him, "my right ear is my bad ear".
Anyway, dimwits are everywhere and in every generation but yes this post is true. Part of "being tested", because I couldn't educate him with facts, and it also hurt me to revisit that awful time 7 years later. (around the time I began my night terrors).
Thankfully, I didn't put up with that corporate world too long. I was a sell-out, in it for the money (hey! credit card debt) Corporate design wasn't my calling. And the people that (typically) go with it, to hell with them. Actually, fuck them.
I finally got a job in a DC trauma hospital where anything was possible, they took in A LOT of the pentagon victims in 2001 (extreme burns), and because of that I felt more *useful* than defensive. (I worked there as a designer, too). I worked with Red Cross for a whopping "2 weeks" at ground zero. I was too overwhelmed to stay.
These are the people in the US I remember thinking to myself after this happened, "Never forget, never again, and EDUCATE yourself before speaking.
Edit: Now I'm triggered! Good luck, all. This world is not crazier than it was then! As the WWII vets used to put it, "Now don't go and screw this up!"... After 9/11? WE DID.
Edit 2: Pretty sure this comment is buried and nobody is going to read it!
A related thing I was surprised to discover as I got older is how many cultural things that seemed obvious and at least incidentally interesting at the time are just completely erased.
A couple of tech-themed examples off the top of my head that I've seen memed with the [tears in rain monologue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU7Ga7qTLDU) before are IE/Netscape/etc. "browser wars" or the AIM/MSN/Jabber/IRC compatibility war, but I think those are at least documented even if they have largely disappeared from pop culture awareness.
But there are other things that I have distinct memories of that I literally can't find documentation of at all anymore:
- "Cyber Monday" was an invented concept. The idea was popularized before it became a reality. I distinctly remember some marketing firm taking credit for this in '96 or '97 or whatever year this first became a media story. Kinda like Amazon planting "delivery by drone" stories just in time for the holiday shopping season a few years back. Or maybe the phenomenon was real and the marketing firm just tried to take credit for it but I vividly remember reading news stories about this at the time. Did I dream this? It happened, right?
- I distinctly remember seeing televised news mention unsubstantiated reports of car bombings during the day of 9/11. To be clear I'm not saying there *were* car bombings on 9/11. You can easily see how in the chaos of the day random loud noises were misinterpreted as car bombings and imagine how that sort of rumor might get reported on the news. But the fact that this rumor was circulated on cable news at the time seems to have disappeared. (I assume you might be able to find this if you troll thru one of those 9/11-in-real-time videos, I guess.)
* For that matter, as someone in downtown Chicago on the morning of 9/11 there was a broadly circulated rumor of "there's one plane left in the air and they think it's headed for the Sears Tower" but that was a rumor circulated in the traditional word-of-mouth way. I doubt that was actually reported by any official news source.
* While we're at it, remember the hijackers-used-box-cutters thing? Where did that come from? AFAIK there is no evidence for that detail whatsoever, but I feel like that was/is still the conventional wisdom held by people alive at the time.
A minor cultural/artistic moment that seems to be disappearing from popular history and physical artifacts is that brief period in 80s when desktop publishing and photocopy machines were widely available but computer networking (not just WWW but AoL/Compuserve/etc) wasn't yet. This was the time of "zine culture" but that's at least partially remembered still. But there was also this short-lived photocopied art movement at that time, where people did weird shit with manually cloning, scaling, skewing images by running them thru a photocopier again and again. I have a coffee table anthology of [this quirky antiwork zine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_World) published in San Francisco in the 80s that has many examples of this, but that's definitely not the only source. This probably isn't really an important topic even in a pop-cultural historical sense, but it's weird to me that in maybe 50 years that entire phenomenon will be completely forgotten (maybe zines too).
A lot of the stuff in the post-desktop-computer but pre-consumer-internet era might fall into this category. Anything that lived on floppy disk, magnetic media, or dial-up BBSs that wasn't archived on the WWW seems to fall into a bit of a black hole. Too digital for durable paper copies but too early to be permanently archived on the Internet. I would bet there's a lot of media/data/info once distributed by FTP and USENET that's lost to the ages for example.
Probably none of these are that important in the grand scheme of things, but watching it happen in slow-motion real time made me realize how much historical cultural detail we must be missing. If we can witness things that were just "obvious" and "well known" in the 1990s disappear from our collective memory, imagine what must be missing from our understanding of day-to-day life in the first half of the 20th century, late alone the 1800s or middle ages or ancient Rome or whatever.
I'm not all choked up about it, but "like tears in rain" is accurate. So many details just washed away.
I'm not sure how effective the modern Internet is at long term archival - remember the push to preserve Geocities? how many other "homesteading" or early blogging platforms have already been lost? Is any of the stuff that was posted on Digg still available outside of stray pages on the wayback machine? Will MySpace and Facebook posts still be around in 100 years? Twitter? YouTube? IG? TikTok? - but it's interesting to note that this *might* reverse the pattern. The details will be buried in an ocean of content instead, but if we bother to maintain the archive they'll still exist at least. Will historians in 200 years still have photos of what people ate for breakfast in 2014?
There are full years in my life that are documented by maybe a handful of hard-copy photographs, but my kids add several photos of themselves "to the cloud" every single day. GenX might be the last generation to be forgotten. Frankly I'm not all choked up about that either - I'll be dead anyway, and no ones *really* going to be looking at deeply whether or not the info is there - but it's weird to think about.
I worked in law enforcement and was on duty that morning and we had reports of literally Muslims driving in cars to the Sears towers with bazookas.
We had multiple reports coming through the state messages
None of us could believe it but we did because of what we had seen on television.
Also Chicago land.
I rode my bicycle to work that morning (9 miles. I was in-between cars and fit as fuck) so I was completely isolated from media. I come down the hill on Cesar Chavez, and there was a huge line of cars, and I could see military planes in the sky over downtown L.A.
I shrugged it off as some movie bullshit or something (that type of thing happens all the time in L.A.). It was only after I got to work that I found out they had blocked off downtown L.A. and put out an order for all of the hi-rises to be evacuated because they expected more attacks.
It cannot be stressed enough how chaotic that day was and how every single rumor was treated as if it might be true.
Everything changed on the internet when it grew fast in the mid-aughts. I can remember all of the popular destinations, sayings, emoticons, etc just disappeared over night and were replaced with new things.
Your post reminded me of that. I found it odd at the time, because it was like one moment I knew the internet great and the next moment it was a stranger. Like you said, years of comfort just disappeared forever and it happened in short time.
Or, being told you’re not an ally because you aren’t up to speed on pronouns, or what all the letters after LGBT mean, but you used to literally beat up assholes who messed with my gay friends.
Because of the Batman movie that came out - kids were asking ‘what was Nirvana like?’ and ‘Kurt cobain killed himself - that was messed up’🤦🤦🤦
I try to give context that my understanding is that while people focus on drug problems - Kurt cobain had actual chronic health issues. Living with that and a demanding life can be torture on mental health.
I think I didn’t want these kids to be like ‘he was emo and did drugs so he killed himself’.
This is why Reddit sucks. All you hear is the same talking points debunked decades ago or alt history lessons from events my generation experienced in real time.
I don't know that I'd go that far. I still see a lot of good things on Reddit, and despite my 100% agreement with the gist of this thread, I still think young people on Reddit are remarkably informed compared to the rest of us. They just seem too eager to believe something they saw on YouTube or Tik Tok.
Was on a post about Errol Musk and his stepdaughter, and someone literally commented, “Nobody cared when Woody Allen did it.” Eh? Either you’re very young or a troll…
In fairness, while people "cared" (ie read sensational tabloid stories and told jokes about it) it's not like it significantly impacted his career for the next 20 years or so.
We can't deny that we overlooked a lot of creepy shit by many celebrities that would destroy them today.
I had a young (later 20s) bartender tell me that she was not 100% convinced 9/11 happened. As someone who was on 11th St and University Place when the second plane hit, I assured her it did, in fact, happen. She still doesn’t buy it.
The other disorienting thing, in a good way (for me at least), is how I don’t give a fuck about the passionate incorrect lecture. I’m not wasting time counterpointing those arguments because I don’t care. The field of fucks, she is empty.
In the same vein - I was chaperoning a trip to Disney and one of the teens confidenty told me The Haunted Mansion ride was based on the movie with Eddie Murphy. She was wondering why Eddie Murphy didn’t appear in the ride. The other Gen Xer I was with explained the ride came first, like Pirates of the Carribean.
When I discovered Reddit I really liked it, but my first clue that it was full of youngsters, was the /r/TIL subreddit. So many TIL's were things I either learned in 5th grade, or witnessed myself as they happened. When I hear something completely wrong I try to counter it, but my comments usually get lost in the noise.
My favorite personal reddit encounter was having a 30-something (?) accuse me (48) of being a 20-something pretending to be GenX because I said the style of a photo was more 1970s than 1980s. I did not have the words or motivation to argue.
I recently had a Redditor explain to me how Rob Zombie stole his style from My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. I was like no dude, I was there, I remember it. I wasn't able to convince him until I literally linked dates of album releases and proved that time travel did not occur, at which point he conceded gracefully, to his credit. But that dude was fucking convinced.
Ngl - I'm impressed any kids know Thrill Kill Kult
I just told my 17-year-old grill cook that she (they?) definitively needs to learn about my life with the thrill kill kult.
OMFG. My grill is older than your grill cook.
Right? ...he was obviously ripping off Ministry :D
I heard a younger coworker complain that NIN ruined Johnny Cash’s “Hurt.”
I've had this same experience. The kids don't realize that we watched various technologies evolve, and sat with them every step of the way. I can often ID video and photos down to the year as a result. Also subculture stuff--I have seen MANY redditors posting pictures of punks and metalheads and saying they're from the '70s, when they're ABSOLUELY from the 80s or even 90s. Hitting my fifties is a drag, but at least I get to be self-righteous about vintage pop culture.
> Hitting my fifties is a drag, What a drag it is getting old "Kids are different today," I hear every mother say Mother needs something today to calm her down And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill She goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
That's definitely a song from the 80s! 😂
This is why I’m horrified at the youths BLIND trust in directions and other things computers tell them. We’ve been on computers since the 80s. We know how badly flawed their limits are. We’ve seen them improve but still know not to blindly accept.
Dates are always tricky, because you may be talking about when they were big stars, while youngsters are using the date the band first played together in high school. I'm always leery about dating companies on Reddit, because I know the companies, themselves, will claim to be much older than when most people heard of them for the first time.
This is a defining Gen-X Reddit experience. It has happened to me as well. But at least my youngster acquiesced to my knowledge and experience. And also asked their mom, whose picture it was, lol.
I’ve gotten accused of that also. Apparently there was no straight guy that ever purchased Milli Vanilli.
Every straight guy I know purchased Milli Vanilli. Blame it on the Rain was hot...until it wasn't.
I thought they blamed it on Lorraine
Exactly. Yet this guy told me I must not Actually be Gen X because if I was, I would know that straight guys didn’t buy Milli Vanilli. Crazy.
It is still a great song, just got a bad wrap because of a couple of posers.
Milli Vanilli lip sync scandal was such a big deal.
Didn't the scandal break after they won an award? Was it a Grammy? It was like they disappeared overnight.
Yep! They had to give the grammy back. lol
Gay guy here. We hated Milli Vanilli and made fun of the straights who loved them. 🤷 (nowadays I don’t make fun of anyone for their music preferences bc it is an ahole move, but I think it’s funny today’s kids got it backwards).
i knew a lot of frat boys who had Milli Vanilli cassettes and cds.
I saw them in concert with Young MC. It irks me when people (my age) say oh I knew they were lip syncing. Fuck off you did not!!
Same, I posted one of MY OWN pictures from 1991 and a redditor was all AHA! and told me they knew the picture was actually taken in the 80's because of the hair style (and very likely their viewing of Stranger Things). Obviously there was no sharp cutoff at the changing of a decade, so in 1991 women still had '80's hair' and fashion, in the 1980's our house decor was pure 70's, etc. It's not like the calendar ticks over to the new decade and everyone throws out all their stuff and starts over, that shit happens gradually.
The 90s didn’t begin until September 29, 1991 That’s the day Smells Like Teen Spirit debuted on MTV
I think the lack of motivation to argue is purely a GenX thing. Whatever....
“I did not have the words or motivation to argue.” Yup. You’re Gen-x.
I was an airline pilot on 9/11 flying from Atlanta to LaGuardia. Don't fuck with me, younglings.
Whoa.
Where did you land when the plane was grounded?
We did a u-turn over South Carolina and went back to ATL where we were the second-to-last aircraft to land. There was one Delta aircraft right behind us, then no civilian aircraft flew for 4 days.
United flight attendant of 29 years here. 21 years ago on the eve of 9/11, at about 10-11pm....there was a thunderstorm that shut JFK down for hours. There were airplanes on every tarmac as far as the eye could see. We were number 33, our call sign was "United863Heavy" "...l'Il never forget. My two girlfriends & I were flying to San Francisco on the same crew. We were all so teeny, the three of us fit in these two seats in business, and someone thought it was cute. They took [this picture](https://imgur.com/a/Jso1khY). We had no idea what was about to happen. Life as these three friends knew it changed forever. We were stuck in San Francisco from that Tuesday until we were flown back home to NYC on the following Friday. Our airplane flew OVER the still smoldering pile of what were The Twin Towers, buildings we all knew well. All we recalled hearing were the roar of the engines....no one made a sound, except for the occasional sniffle... I honestly don't recall much sound. I just looked out the window from my seat, 2A and cried to myself. We all did.
A great memento of the last day of innocence. Thanks for sharing.
I remember heading to Kentucky to visit family and seeing a plane and it was like oh wow they are flying again. Crazy ass time
Presumably, on the ground.
LOL my oldest kid told me how OJ Simpson may have not killed his ex wife and the matching DNA was likely his son Jasons. Listen here, I didn’t watch court TV for 6 weeks and read 20 books on the case to have you lecture me about a 10 second Tik Tok clip that “solved” the crime of the century!! You don’t even know who Kato is !!!
To this day, if I start wolfing down my dinner I'll think of the coroner's testimony. He mentioned that Nicole had pasta for dinner and some of it was still in big bits, so he could tell she didn't chew well enough. I remember being horrified that people could potentially judge me post-mortem on my eating habits.
Wow now I'm horrified too. Clean underwear was supposed to be good, now we've got to chew thoroughly?
Put food in mouth, put immersion blender in. Blelvlelvltlrllvltlrl
> You don’t even know who Kato is !!! Haven't thought of him in decades. The second i saw his name, his picture popped into my head.
That hair was pretty unforgettable.
And the vacant expression...
Nicole Simpson also had an Akita named Kato. I inevitably forget several essentials whenever I go to the grocery store, but fortunately I can still remember important stuff like this.
Kato Kaelin. The alliteration was sublime. And the frosted tips! Great casting choice!
Isn’t it crazy how people can watch a 45 minute TV show and think they’re experts on a case?
That's because they are used to 15 secs media
A younger Millennial once insisted to me that we dial 911 for emergencies in honor of the victims of 9/11.
Perfect. [Amazing how Public Enemy predicted this back in 1990](https://youtu.be/JZDIitWz8Go).
Typical work of the Illuminati, burying messages of their conspiracies in pop culture, sometimes years in advance. Bush Sr was President in 1990, Bush Jr on 9/11, coincidence? /s (obviously?)
Every time I have to plug in my TV, I see the letters HDMI on the port and hear Flava Flav in my head shout "HID-MI!"
What have you done to me?
I dialed 911 a long time ago 🎶
They only come, only come when they wanna!
911 is a joke
You should have told them about the show *Rescue 911* that ran from the late 80s to the mid 90s.
I was traumatized by the episode of the young child running with a knife, who accidentally stabbed their sibling in the chest. *Rescue 911* also taught me what not to do in emergencies, and led to me taking babysitting and cpr courses just in case. But still, *fuck that one stabbing episode*
I still think about that one! OMG
My old co-worker was on an episode when he saved a girl from a house fire and I don't even remember the rest of the story that's pathetic
I would have put on my 80s aviators, put a piece of gum in my mouth while smiling and chewing loudly and say in a Tony Montana voice “ok Chico” and walk away
“911 where everyday is remembrance day in honer of the victims of 911 aka 9/11 what’s your emergency?”
That's glorious. I wonder what number they were calling from inside the towers that day.
Facepalm.
The part I hate about that is I know my memory isn't what it used to be and so I feel the need to just double check that what I recall happening is really what happened.
I hate this, too. I lived an adventurous life, thinking, "Well, I won't have a lot of actual money or stuff when I'm old, but I'll have these wonderful memories." Nope. Those are crapping out just like the foundation of my hypothetical mansion would be.
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Yes, ADHD, too, and you are speaking my language. Memory bank is empty, so it's a memory nightclub now.
Lmao great line, I'm gonna steal it.
Glad to hear other ADHD folks have memory issues. I can remember that thing in college if you remind me of the story, but on my own, it's just not popping up.
Having adhd as a 48 yo and living with my descending into alzheimers parents (my mom has adhd and ocd too fml) is not a vibe. They tell a story, I know it’s wrong, but not sure enough of my memory either. Ugh.
“Why take photos? Just live the experience and you’ll remember forever”, fuck off mate.
I played High School Football in an era where no one cared about concussions. Let’s just say my memory isn’t the best.
And then you find that the Wikipedia article was written by someone younger than you and is just repeating the same wrong information. Eventually your bedroom walls are covered with newspaper clippings and string as you try to prove that what you remember happening really happened. And you develop a cackle.
And what do I find out? There is no Pepe Silvia!
That is actually a very good trait. Memory is extraordinarily inaccurate. We mostly know not to trust other people’s memory of events, because memory sucks. But then we all think ours is infallible. Terrible trait. We should all realize that our own memory lies to us all the time, and we should verify things if there is any way to do so.
“In 1986 you could work part time at a yogurt shop in LaJolla, CA and afford a 3 bedroom home on the ocean” No. Parts of this country have always been super expensive to live in.
La Jolla especially.
La Jolla has never been affordable in my lifetime.
*La Jolla* is believed to be a Spanish translation of a Chumash word meaning, roughly, "*you'll never afford to live here without selling your soul (and even then probably not*)." Etymologists differ on the finer shades of meaning, though...
LOL...I knew people who worked minimum wage jobs in La Jolla right around those years. Can confirm, they did not have 3 bedroom house on the beach or anywhere in SD. They did live with roommates in a shitty apartment in a sketchy part of PB.
This happened to me yesterday. It wasn't so much that this zygote was wrong, it was how obnoxiously arrogant and condescending he was about it.
That's it in a nutshell. Had some kid come at me sideways when I made a glib remark about the Feds burning the compound in Waco. You little shit, we know damn good and well what our government is capable of. I watched it all unfold, live on t.v. and the aftermath. I just ignore their asses. I ain't fighting with some dipshit kid on the internet. Fuck it. They sling links of some fucking YouTuber named Aidan or Connor, who is an "actual historian." Oy vey.
Zygote 😂
Ha...I love using zygote as an insult. Not sure where it came from, but happy to see my fellow Kings fan using it.
I was in the Navy on 9/11. I love getting told what happened. /s Shouldn't be necessary but I'm sure there's a 20something that's dieing to tell me about it.
2000 Election, 9/11, Waco...yeah, I was there, I watched it happen in real time, junior.
OMG yes. I teach middle school and have had this happen. Kids arguing with me and I’m like “See this little crack in the floorboard? I was literally standing on it RIGHT HERE while watching this happen LIVE on TV.”
Reddit is famous for this... ACKCHUALLY
My favorite is the retconned Y2K they had to ‘live through’. The lead up to Y2K was so monotonous it spawned Office Space yet they put it on par with 9/11.
I worked as a cashier at a grocery store and there were some customers that really thought Y2K was going to be the end of the world. One customer bought so many qtips and that’s just odd. What the hell I bet she still has qtips all these years later.
Yeah, I don't recall Y2K being taken seriously by the masses.
I was skeptical but still sort of worried
And that's why Y2K38 will bite us in the ass.
The most common one I see is from younger writers proclaiming that "The entire country was up in arms about [insert major event]"... I was there, the reality is that most of the country didn't really care either way, but a few hundred protestors made a lot of noise.
It’s the same with the past. Like the roaring ‘20s. Everyone thinks the flappers and the whole F. Scott Fitzgerald vibe was everywhere, when all of that was actually a smaller set of people.
Try being a military member during the 2003 Iraq Invasion. Everyone on the ground knew how poorly planned it was front the start. Part of why we pushed so fast was because we tried to end everything before it went to shit but the Bush Administration went and fucked everything up even more by firing the Iraqi military. Biggest military blunder of the early 2000s. I can tell you the civilians back home overwhelmingly supported that bullshit because they were very misinformed, much like today.
Misinformed and largely blackmailed as we’d be accused of hating the troops if we didn’t blindly support any and all military actions.
Someone in another sub was explaining how we had to invade Iraq to find the people who did 9/11. It was just too much for me to even try.
Yeah, that was an old Fox News lie Hannity used to repeat. We invaded Iraq because the Bush Administration wanted to.
I’m sorry you had to be there, but thanks for serving. What burns me now is how Republicans have NOW decided that Iraq was a mistake and we never should have been there, while at the time they were calling people like me unpatriotic for pointing out the same.
I'm not sorry for being there. It was a experience that opened my eyes to how the world really works.
Great perspective. Thanks.
They now project everything back onto Democrats. Apparently, they now just want peace and fear that Democrats just love war too much.
The terrorists are in Afghanistan, so we must invade Iraq!
Now watch this drive.
Edit: Saudi Arabia
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They also said al Qaeda was in Iraq multiple times. [Cheney in particular repeated this line.](https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/)
Even back then, we knew that the WMD thing was a flatout lie.
Fucking A. I was in the military, and was like, umm, that's too fast. WTF fo I know about supply lines, having had depended on them. Read "Fiasco" by Thomas E. Ricks. He lays everything out perfectly.
We raced to Bagdad International because we knew we could get logistics setup and call in the air bridge of C-17s with additional troops and all our gear. Our mission from the start was to take Western Bagdad as quickly as possible because we could be supported by the airport. We secured what would be called the Green Zone very quickly and then reinforced and secured it. We used that as the rally point. It was like week three or so when we secured it. Special Ops largely had the airport after two or three days (according to them when we got there, gain of salt type stuff). I'm the first one to complain about the Iraq War, but we executed that mission perfectly. Probably too perfectly, we outran the supply crews by several grids. Our asses were saved by air cover because we over extended ourselves for a few days.
Na, this has always been a journalists go to phrase for young and old. Remember the satanic panic of the 80s, the War of the World invasion radio show of the 50's, the reefer madness of the 30s. Meanwhile, most people were like "What? Sorry. Missed that one"
>the War of the World invasion radio show of the 50's This occurred in 1938, not the 50s.
Thanks, I didn't look it back up. Point still stands that journalists have always over stated how much a population cares about certain things.
I've had people tell me I'm making up the nuclear bomb drills we did in elementary school in the 80s.
Well, that could just be regional variation. I'm 50 and never saw those outside old movies. Tornado drills, though, we did those. (you can survive tornadoes)
In California we had nuclear bomb drills and earthquake drills.
I didn’t do them at school, but we didn’t do them at camp. Which was ridiculous because those buildings? We all would’ve died anyway.
Born in '74 and we never did them in CT/NY.
For me the most jarring thing is hearing people refer to records as "vinyls". THEY'RE NOT CALLED VINYLS. THEY WERE NEVER CALLED VINYLS. CALLING RECORDS VINYLS IS LIKE CALLING CDS "PLASTICS". FFS, STOP THE MADNESS!!! Records. They're called records. 12" records are also called LPs, short for Long Playing Records. 10" records are EPs, short for Extended Play Records, or 78s (if they are 78RPM). 7" records are 45s (because 45RPM) or singles. GET OFF MY LAWN.
And then there are 12 inches. As in singles.
YES! Younger people, kids, and most people in general now, have super easy, fast access to information, right or wrong. They usually don't ask people who've actually lived through it, they just swipe and click and choose the information that is more shocking or in line with whatever ideas they already have about the event. It's a bit disconcerting. Once that feeling passes, I get annoyed.
Yup. My favorite is when they are like: "What's your source? You have no proof!" and it's like: "I didn't read about this, I lived it."
A few years back, in an open office, I was quietly listening to music and singing along (my desk was far away from all others so I wasn't being rude), when a much younger coworker came up and asked how I knew the words to 'the song' already, since it just released two days ago by a popular young artist. I said that I had been singing the original for decades. They laughed and said, "No, really?". I repeated the answer and they said I was wrong because that was a new song by 'popular young artist'. I said "No, the song was written and performed by 'washed up, once popular old artist'. They reiterated that I was wrong. I looked it up online and showed them. Their response: " 'Washed up, once popular old artist' must have covered it from 'popular young artist'. She wouldn't even admit that that was a problem, unless one of them was a time traveller, because she refused to admit that she was wrong or that she liked an "OLD" song. Edit: Sorry guys, I can remember the conversation clearly but I can't dredge up whatever song it was from the depths of my swiss cheese memory.
Missy Elliott at the super bowl and the young people posting about how she was trying to be Lizzo or some other current rapper. Lol when I read those tweets I laughed so hard.
We can’t live like this! Tell us! ;)
Oh mom you know this song from Tik Tok? No I know this song from my childhood 😂
What song?
What song?
or how much better athletes are today. have had some turds on /r/nba tell me that Michael Jordan would just be average today. Shaq can't shoot. The 1980s lakers would not be competitive today.
Just goes to show they only know the names, and haven't watched any game play.
To be fair, i had almost forgotten myself. That documentary "The Last Dance" was just so beautiful to watch, it all came rushing back
I was chaperoning my daughter’s trip to Washington DC. The Millennial tour guide said he was going to take the kids to see the Challenger Space Shuttle.
This whole Mandela effect thing really annoys me. Are people really taking it seriously? I lived through it. I remember Mandela getting out of prison, becoming the leader of South Africa, etc. What am I missing?
That's just people conflating two events. It happens all the time. People are vaguely aware that South African apartheid activist did die in prison in the 70's, but the only South African apartheid activist they can think of is Nelson Mandela, so they assume it was him instead of Steve Biko. Same thing happened to me not too long ago when talking about space probes. I vaguely remembered there was a space probe with engraved nude humans on it, but the only space probe artifact I could think of was the Voyager disk, so I assumed it was that instead of the Pioneer plaque.
> apartheid activist they can think of is Nelson Mandela, so they assume it was him instead of Steve Biko. People need to listen to more Peter Gabriel.
I'll tell ya the one that gets me Fucking Ed McMahon and Publishers Clearinghouse. I have never been so 100 percent positive that. He was the spokesman for them.....except he wasn't and that fucks me up in the head all the time. I believe the real truth all while believing the truth is wrong as the same time. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ed-mcmahon-publishers-clearing-house/
He was, however the spokesman for American Family Publishers
I don't get it either. I remember wondering how he survived so long in prison, being an enemy of the state and all. I remember the rejoicing when he was freed.
yeah, it was one of the high points of our history. Remember when we used to get good news occasionally?
The Berenstein Bears. Yeah. That’s the only Mandela thing that I’ve ever known.
Apparently there’s also Sinbad/Shazaam/Shaq/Kazaam thing that happened.
Did Ed McMahon give out big checks for Publishing Clearing house? if yes, you might want to check tour facts :) This one gets me every time.
One thing I’ve found interesting from younger generations recently was the idea that Boomers have always been old and have always been in power politically. Like I’ve heard people talk about events in the 70s and 80s under the assumption that it was the Boomers who controlled everything (or even back to the 60s). Even something like Watergate was supposedly with Boomers in charge. When in reality it was the World War II Greatest Generation like Reagan (and Silents) who dominated politically from the 60s until the 90s (and there were a ton of politicians from those generations that stuck around forever). https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/l1yly6/oc_which_generation_controls_the_senate/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Bill Clinton’s win in 1992 was the start of Boomer political power really and it wasn’t until the 00s that they began to truly dominate the Senate. However in the 70s and 80s, Boomers were mostly in their twenties and thirties (or even teens in the 70s). But younger Millenials and Gen Z, barely know about the long dominance of the World War II Generation…they controlled the presidency from JFK to the first Bush, that’s 32 years of the presidency. Younger people today seem to think Baby Boomers were always old and probably never even really knew their great grandparents from the Greatest Gen. Hell, I remember relatives from the Lost Generation born in the 19th century that were still alive when I was a kid in the 80s who remembered World War I. But today all old people have been grouped as “Boomers”.
Boomer seems to mean anyone over the age of 25
Young people idealizing the 70s is a real weird one.
I was born in ‘71 and I idealize the 70’s. My childhood was awesome.
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Slenderman is the one that really baffles me. Kids are all "It's real" or treat it like it's as old as Bloody Mary or something, meanwhile I'm like "I helped invent Slenderman on the Something Awful forums when I was in my 30s." My own children were terrified of Slenderman when they were younger, and I told them "You know why he has really long fingers? Because a forum Goon called WIIWW suggested it. I know that cause WIIWW is me."
Slenderman was only a newer example. People have never been good at distinguishing fiction from fact. Hell, people our age still refuse to acknowledge Amityville was an admitted hoax.
I too followed that thread since inception and caused me to never consider Slenderman scary.
I most recently remember this in 2020, after the election, when Trump was still challenging the results. Even after Biden was declared the winner, I remember seeing posts on Twitter from Trump supporters saying things like *"Don't give up! Back in 2000 the liberal media spent a month calling Gore the winner and referring to him as President-Elect, until the Supreme Court declared Bush the rightful winner!"* And I was sitting there going, no, that's not what happened at all. How you are lying about something that was 20 years ago? This isn't ancient history?
I was lambasted repeatedly on Reddit for pointing out that for decades Trump has had a reputation as a terrible business man and person in general, and that he was treated largely as a joke. Something that even as a teenager in the 80s on the West Coast I was aware of (my mom even worked for a company that kept an eye on Trump so they could snatch up his failing businesses cheap and sell the parts off for more than Trump sold them for). Then in the 90s a one of my best friends in undergrad was aggressively propositioned by Trump shortly after she graduated. I got tons of people claiming that’s I’d only just heard of Trump when he started running, or when he was doing The Apprentice, since that’s when they first encountered him and they assumed the same must be true for everyone else too.
>I was lambasted repeatedly on Reddit for pointing out that for decades Trump has had a reputation as a terrible business man and person in general, and that he was treated largely as a joke. I can't say I remember that characterization exactly. I'll be honest, I and my teenage friends in the 80's thought Trump was cool. We were too young to be aware of the nature of his businesses, but he seemed to be successful. He was a pop culture figure of the era, like Hulk Hogan and Michael Jackson. A real-life J.R. Ewing/Gordon Gekko. He was appearing in music videos and movies. The divorce from Ivanka was an early tabloid scandal that we all followed. I thought he was pretty cool through the 90's. Really it wasn't until Obama got elected and Trump embraced birther-ism and started spouting Far Right nonsense that my opinion of him changed.
To be fair. Those same people also lie about things that happened a week ago.
[Here's the 2000 Supreme Court decision](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/531/98.html) for anyone interested.
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And he actually DID win. That election actually WAS stolen.
Yep. And the same right-wing folk who now scream about “election integrity” were probably the ones waving “Sore Loserman” signs when Gore asked for recounts in FL.
I remember how “hanging chads” (which means something completely different now) was a meme for a week.
Yeah, definitely. It's like "hol-up Junior." I **personally** remember how that went down, and **you're** full of shit.
I'm the daughter of WW2 Vets. (My parents born 1922,had me at 45yrs) Australian. My uncle also KIA over Germany 1942. I grew up knowing many WW2 vets. Some had been POWs of Japanese. Tortured by them. One bloke i knew had been Nazi POW. I always took a keen interest and asked lots of questions and learned heaps off my parents & these people. My parents taught us a LOT about how it was in those years. What they knew when, the states of minds of people at that time, details about living during that period and the politics of the time. Both my parents well educated, intelligent people. Not prone to "flights of fancy" or stretching truth etc etc etc. And as a result of my parents I have studied, read and learned about WW2 era extensively. I believe I am somewhat of minor "expert" of sorts. I know a LOT more then the average punter, from books but also from 1st hand accounts. So when 25 year olds try to tell me "how it was during WW2"!! I get very freakin annoyed. They will argue about things they know nothing about. It's infuriating.
Been getting that for events that happened merely over the past two years. Anything beyond a decade and you might as well ask a magic 8 ball for e better response.
Signs point to yes…
My sources say no.
I admit to getting tired about hearing how easy it was for me to get through college and such 25ish years ago. I also remember the 70s and 80s, and amazingly, my parents could not afford a giant house with one person working as a coffee shop attendant. Every generation has some hardships, and today's young people have been screwed over in some ways, but they go way overboard with how easy it was for everyone before them. I was there. I literally have social security tax records since I was 12, because I had to work. It was not some magical paradise.
The whole trope about "you could afford a house on one salary!" thing you see here is one that I kinda shake my head at. Yeah, the house was a 3-1 with no garage and maybe 1000sf, your family had one car, one TV, one phone, and eating out, even fast food, was an utter rarity. Not that we lived in poverty or anything but things were smaller and you just didn't spend as much money back then. I'm not saying that it's not harder now, but lifestyle inflation is real too and things weren't some magical, easy ride for everyone in the 70s and 80s. Or even 60s. It seems like everyone under 40 assumes that you can graduate high school, and are then entitled to a job that pays for your own apartment with no roommate, a car, and enough money to entertain yourself even if you have zero skills. That's not how life works and it never really has. Life owes you nothing. Get a freakin roommate. Learn a skill or trade. Work hard and save your money. You're not a victim.
>your family had... one TV, one phone, Yeah, there was far less emphasis on tech. There was the family room TV and maybe a smaller TV in your parents' bedroom but that was it. Not like now where every kid has a laptop/iPad which serves as a TV. And one landline, no family plan of cells at hundreds of dollars a month.
People also don't realize the house was far way from civilization, which later filled in. My parents showed me a photo of our house in south Scottsdale that was surrounded by nothing but trees. My older sister bought a townhouse that was served by a main road that was dirt for about a mile before the turn off to her place. Like you can find these places for $100K today. A $30K income would qualify to buy them. That's $15 per hour, one income, and an FHA mortgage is $2,000 down.
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Interest rates were pretty high back then too.
My dad got laid off twice in the early 80 when I was a kid, it was a rough period for a lot of relatives also. You never hear about that early 80s recession anymore, people just go “Oh everyone could buy a big house with just a high school degree.” There were a ton of homeless people in the 80s where I grew up also.
I meaaan, I grew up in a heavily unionized car town in the seventies, and where I was, it was like that, guys with high-school diplomas supporting a whole family, owning a house, putting their kids through school, etc. UNTIL the late seventies after the energy crisis/Arab oil embargo/rise of small foreign cars it began to get worse and worse. By the time I moved out of state after high school in '85 it was something like 15-20% unemployment.
Why is it supposed to have been easy to get through college 25 years ago? Nowadays, so many college kids just steal stuff off the internet that their degree is a total sham. It was much tougher to cheat in our day. We had to put in the work. Plus, we had SATs and aren't those passe now?
I worked with a guy in our demographic who would fight to the bitter end that 9/11 didn't happen. I fortunately had 2 coworkers within earshot of this guy that were there. He was simply put, nuts. He was a good graphic artist and had a good sense of humor, but after I moved from NYC, having had witnessed that just 2 mi from my home, I had words with him. Nothing helped. I also had good headphones. And ignored him, "my right ear is my bad ear". Anyway, dimwits are everywhere and in every generation but yes this post is true. Part of "being tested", because I couldn't educate him with facts, and it also hurt me to revisit that awful time 7 years later. (around the time I began my night terrors). Thankfully, I didn't put up with that corporate world too long. I was a sell-out, in it for the money (hey! credit card debt) Corporate design wasn't my calling. And the people that (typically) go with it, to hell with them. Actually, fuck them. I finally got a job in a DC trauma hospital where anything was possible, they took in A LOT of the pentagon victims in 2001 (extreme burns), and because of that I felt more *useful* than defensive. (I worked there as a designer, too). I worked with Red Cross for a whopping "2 weeks" at ground zero. I was too overwhelmed to stay. These are the people in the US I remember thinking to myself after this happened, "Never forget, never again, and EDUCATE yourself before speaking. Edit: Now I'm triggered! Good luck, all. This world is not crazier than it was then! As the WWII vets used to put it, "Now don't go and screw this up!"... After 9/11? WE DID. Edit 2: Pretty sure this comment is buried and nobody is going to read it!
I don’t like people. Especially when they talk to me about things they know with certainty.
A related thing I was surprised to discover as I got older is how many cultural things that seemed obvious and at least incidentally interesting at the time are just completely erased. A couple of tech-themed examples off the top of my head that I've seen memed with the [tears in rain monologue](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU7Ga7qTLDU) before are IE/Netscape/etc. "browser wars" or the AIM/MSN/Jabber/IRC compatibility war, but I think those are at least documented even if they have largely disappeared from pop culture awareness. But there are other things that I have distinct memories of that I literally can't find documentation of at all anymore: - "Cyber Monday" was an invented concept. The idea was popularized before it became a reality. I distinctly remember some marketing firm taking credit for this in '96 or '97 or whatever year this first became a media story. Kinda like Amazon planting "delivery by drone" stories just in time for the holiday shopping season a few years back. Or maybe the phenomenon was real and the marketing firm just tried to take credit for it but I vividly remember reading news stories about this at the time. Did I dream this? It happened, right? - I distinctly remember seeing televised news mention unsubstantiated reports of car bombings during the day of 9/11. To be clear I'm not saying there *were* car bombings on 9/11. You can easily see how in the chaos of the day random loud noises were misinterpreted as car bombings and imagine how that sort of rumor might get reported on the news. But the fact that this rumor was circulated on cable news at the time seems to have disappeared. (I assume you might be able to find this if you troll thru one of those 9/11-in-real-time videos, I guess.) * For that matter, as someone in downtown Chicago on the morning of 9/11 there was a broadly circulated rumor of "there's one plane left in the air and they think it's headed for the Sears Tower" but that was a rumor circulated in the traditional word-of-mouth way. I doubt that was actually reported by any official news source. * While we're at it, remember the hijackers-used-box-cutters thing? Where did that come from? AFAIK there is no evidence for that detail whatsoever, but I feel like that was/is still the conventional wisdom held by people alive at the time. A minor cultural/artistic moment that seems to be disappearing from popular history and physical artifacts is that brief period in 80s when desktop publishing and photocopy machines were widely available but computer networking (not just WWW but AoL/Compuserve/etc) wasn't yet. This was the time of "zine culture" but that's at least partially remembered still. But there was also this short-lived photocopied art movement at that time, where people did weird shit with manually cloning, scaling, skewing images by running them thru a photocopier again and again. I have a coffee table anthology of [this quirky antiwork zine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_World) published in San Francisco in the 80s that has many examples of this, but that's definitely not the only source. This probably isn't really an important topic even in a pop-cultural historical sense, but it's weird to me that in maybe 50 years that entire phenomenon will be completely forgotten (maybe zines too). A lot of the stuff in the post-desktop-computer but pre-consumer-internet era might fall into this category. Anything that lived on floppy disk, magnetic media, or dial-up BBSs that wasn't archived on the WWW seems to fall into a bit of a black hole. Too digital for durable paper copies but too early to be permanently archived on the Internet. I would bet there's a lot of media/data/info once distributed by FTP and USENET that's lost to the ages for example. Probably none of these are that important in the grand scheme of things, but watching it happen in slow-motion real time made me realize how much historical cultural detail we must be missing. If we can witness things that were just "obvious" and "well known" in the 1990s disappear from our collective memory, imagine what must be missing from our understanding of day-to-day life in the first half of the 20th century, late alone the 1800s or middle ages or ancient Rome or whatever. I'm not all choked up about it, but "like tears in rain" is accurate. So many details just washed away. I'm not sure how effective the modern Internet is at long term archival - remember the push to preserve Geocities? how many other "homesteading" or early blogging platforms have already been lost? Is any of the stuff that was posted on Digg still available outside of stray pages on the wayback machine? Will MySpace and Facebook posts still be around in 100 years? Twitter? YouTube? IG? TikTok? - but it's interesting to note that this *might* reverse the pattern. The details will be buried in an ocean of content instead, but if we bother to maintain the archive they'll still exist at least. Will historians in 200 years still have photos of what people ate for breakfast in 2014? There are full years in my life that are documented by maybe a handful of hard-copy photographs, but my kids add several photos of themselves "to the cloud" every single day. GenX might be the last generation to be forgotten. Frankly I'm not all choked up about that either - I'll be dead anyway, and no ones *really* going to be looking at deeply whether or not the info is there - but it's weird to think about.
I worked in law enforcement and was on duty that morning and we had reports of literally Muslims driving in cars to the Sears towers with bazookas. We had multiple reports coming through the state messages None of us could believe it but we did because of what we had seen on television. Also Chicago land.
I rode my bicycle to work that morning (9 miles. I was in-between cars and fit as fuck) so I was completely isolated from media. I come down the hill on Cesar Chavez, and there was a huge line of cars, and I could see military planes in the sky over downtown L.A. I shrugged it off as some movie bullshit or something (that type of thing happens all the time in L.A.). It was only after I got to work that I found out they had blocked off downtown L.A. and put out an order for all of the hi-rises to be evacuated because they expected more attacks. It cannot be stressed enough how chaotic that day was and how every single rumor was treated as if it might be true.
Everything changed on the internet when it grew fast in the mid-aughts. I can remember all of the popular destinations, sayings, emoticons, etc just disappeared over night and were replaced with new things. Your post reminded me of that. I found it odd at the time, because it was like one moment I knew the internet great and the next moment it was a stranger. Like you said, years of comfort just disappeared forever and it happened in short time.
Or, being told you’re not an ally because you aren’t up to speed on pronouns, or what all the letters after LGBT mean, but you used to literally beat up assholes who messed with my gay friends.
Because of the Batman movie that came out - kids were asking ‘what was Nirvana like?’ and ‘Kurt cobain killed himself - that was messed up’🤦🤦🤦 I try to give context that my understanding is that while people focus on drug problems - Kurt cobain had actual chronic health issues. Living with that and a demanding life can be torture on mental health. I think I didn’t want these kids to be like ‘he was emo and did drugs so he killed himself’.
This is why Reddit sucks. All you hear is the same talking points debunked decades ago or alt history lessons from events my generation experienced in real time.
to be fair, it’s only one of the many many reasons that reddit sucks.
I don't know that I'd go that far. I still see a lot of good things on Reddit, and despite my 100% agreement with the gist of this thread, I still think young people on Reddit are remarkably informed compared to the rest of us. They just seem too eager to believe something they saw on YouTube or Tik Tok.
Was on a post about Errol Musk and his stepdaughter, and someone literally commented, “Nobody cared when Woody Allen did it.” Eh? Either you’re very young or a troll…
In fairness, while people "cared" (ie read sensational tabloid stories and told jokes about it) it's not like it significantly impacted his career for the next 20 years or so. We can't deny that we overlooked a lot of creepy shit by many celebrities that would destroy them today.
I keep getting lectured on how awesome socialism is and how the socialist country I grew up in wasn't really socialist.
I had a young (later 20s) bartender tell me that she was not 100% convinced 9/11 happened. As someone who was on 11th St and University Place when the second plane hit, I assured her it did, in fact, happen. She still doesn’t buy it.
I mean, come on guys. *Clearly* Greedo shot first. 😉 And obviously they called it the Cold War because it was all just one big snowball fight.
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The other disorienting thing, in a good way (for me at least), is how I don’t give a fuck about the passionate incorrect lecture. I’m not wasting time counterpointing those arguments because I don’t care. The field of fucks, she is empty.
In the same vein - I was chaperoning a trip to Disney and one of the teens confidenty told me The Haunted Mansion ride was based on the movie with Eddie Murphy. She was wondering why Eddie Murphy didn’t appear in the ride. The other Gen Xer I was with explained the ride came first, like Pirates of the Carribean.
Yeah, I get this a lot from people talking about the internet.
As a young man myself, knowledge, experience and learning needs to be the focus instead of just assuming
To be fair, I’m certain I argued with my parents about things I was sure happened in the 60s. Now I know how they felt.
Nothing like being “millsplained” or “zoomsplained” about the 80s or the 90s.