I entered the world in January 2008, so it was a pretty big year for me. Hard to believe it’s been 18 years already.
The housing crisis and recession was in full swing, and my wife had to close her retail business as a consequence. Shitty times, but absolute bliss compared to today.
Ah I remember this. At the time, I was part of the team at my work that was tasked to monitor the user accounts of the hundreds of people who were gonna be laid off in one day, to make sure they don’t do anything before the accounts are disabled. That was a somber day.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
A tale of two shitties
What that guy said
Oh wow! Has. It ben that long already? In 2008 I had just graduated from software engineering and started my first career job. It took me months before I found a job because of the economic crash. And when I found one, the pay was shit. Cost of living wasn’t as high though so it was ok.
Nonooonoonoonoono. People born in 2008 are NOT 18 years old! This was just a couple of years ago!
I was 18 in 2008 so this feels really weird because back then it felt like the year I was born was ages ago (it was in a different millennia though).
You think that’s bad, I got married in 2008.
Then again, I’ve done a lot in that time, 3 kids into it, including 2 teenagers…
Congratulations :)
Commiserations 👀
Nah, been great, getting married was the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
I just get so depressed because I recall that memory of that time when my father and mother were arguing about some financial decisions and mom threatened to divorce and abandon her “useless children”.
I remember feeling so scared I just hid in my room and cried.
I feel live me existing mader her so sad.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been born.
Maybe mom would be happier without me.
I hate myself.
I bring so much misery to this world.
I wasted so much of my mom’s attention, time, money.
What’s the point?
I kinda wanna die.
But then if I do, I basically burdened society for 20 years and “contributed nothing to society” and just “left this world so cowardly”
Wtf is existence? 😭
No idea what to say about this, or what it even is. But I’m sorry to hear it. I had a very similar situation as a kid, multiple divorces, used as a pawn in their fight over money. It’s rough, but I learned from their mistakes and have a strong marriage that works.
In college, watching the industry I was getting a degree in tank (and many others). I chose the field in part because of historically good job stability and 95%+ job placement after college. That all evaporated. Folks who should have been retiring were having to work longer, leaving no room for fresh college grads.
I hope this AI crap resolves down to a more stable level. I’m concerned the folks in college now will have it even worse between another generational bubble working it’s way through and now AI making things more “efficient” so fewer humans are perceived as necessary.
This is what tech is like right now. I guess we should learn from your experience.
I think the right idea is that work should be automated away because the sole reason why people work at all besides for themselves is to make the economy function and so automating the boring work of making the economy function makes a lot of sense to do so that we can be freed up to play a different economy game that is about responsibility.
The pain point for the time being is that in the inbetween stages there isnt yet a clean way to make a hand off to that system so whenever something is automated it just leaves people high and dry
There’s a way. UBI. But there’s no appetite for it because politicians and corporations don’t make mad profits off it. Line must go up faster and faster each quarter; letting the poors die in debt does this better than providing them a basic income.
That is a good point, if partial economy is automated that leaves partial money available to handout as ubi.
I had dismissed ubi because that is something that would only happen if there is enough pain on the consumers for them to give handouts, I guess this did happen when covid started up but that wasn’t seen as a similar function as ubi…which actually I read about some tests of ubi awhile back and they seemed to do what we think they do but the tests seem to make that not so obvious.
We can actually concentrate the consumer pain on 1% of the richest population and hurt no disadvantaged children.
Dealing with mercenaries and police protecting them is usually the next hangup, unless you can get someone to pull it through on a charisma check. Without getting assasinated.
I’m hungery as fuck to make this happen.
Definitely not a televisable opinion. Not on capital air time.
The problem is that LLMs aren’t actually automating away any significant amount of work, just transforming it for some unlucky few (developing -> debugging slop), and fooling c-suites into laying off people for the funds to invest in the empty promises.
For now, I think even if absolutely nothing changed with how they fundamentally worked from here on out and just kept throwing more money and data at them they could still actually automate some things away at some point, but they definitely will be also getting fundamentally better on top of this.
They’re bullshit machines. They are specifically engineered to sound confident, with zero regard for correctness. They’re inherently unsuitable for anything that doesn’t need to be purposefully unreliable.
Sounds like a politician lol
Going to assume that’s tech.
Close. Engineering. Lots of engineers hung on 5-8 years longer than originally planned because their retirement plans got hurt so badly, which meant fewer jobs for fresh grad engineers to get hired on. I’m starting to see it again with colleagues who want to retire this year but are tacking on an extra couple because their finances aren’t where they planned to have them.
Then I can get going about removal of pensions back in the day and expectation that people jump job to job to get pay increases instead of getting raises in-role that match let alone exceed inflation, incentivizing people to NOT stay with a company for long, leading to a shallow bench for the next line of leaders and experts. I’m mid-to-late 30s and am on my 4th company since college and 3rd job within current company; contrast that with my dad who worked for the same company for almost 40 years and holds as many patents for them and knew that company inside and out. I will never be as knowledgeable and efficient as he was. Where industrialization allowed specialization, it seems like we’re actively pushing to go back to generalization where workers are replaceable with minimal changeover time.
Almost every field.
Squeezing the retirement line was intentional. Every time it happens.
A lot of torches have been dropped instead of passed.
We wasted two generations.
industry I was getting a degree in tank
I was assuming tank was an autocomplete of tech. Now I really hope tank is an engineering major/discipline.
No, sadly “tank” is the action applied to "industry.
I watched the industry […] tank.
I was still a high-school student. Got baptized and confirmed in 2008. Bought an iMac from the gift money and became a bit of an Apple fanboy for a while. I’ve since left the church and no longer like Apple.
Username checks out
I was in Guangzhou, China.
I vaguely remember the hype around Bejing Olympics, but I never cared about sports so… eh… don’t remember much of the actual thing, only the hype around it.
I was… um… 6 years old?
In 1st grade, public schools didn’t allow me and my brother because we did noy not have a Guangzhou Hukou so we went to some privately-run school that my parents had to pay out of pocket, which according to mom, it was worse than public schools.
We lived in some apartment in a… kinda… “slum” part of the city.
Parents was either working all the time or was looking for work all the time. Didn’t get to see them too often.
Maternal grandmother was at home to watch us.
No internet, no sure if because of our neighborhood not having it or because of money issues…
But we did have some paid subscription cable(?) tv thingy… so that was all the entertainment there was… a lot of um… I think kids cartoons(?) memory is kinda blurry.
So I’d walk to school with… usually grandmother, but sometimes, very rarely, one of my parents that somehow had free time. Probably dad because he didn’t have a stable job… but I don’t remember much.
No free lunch in schools, so you either paid for lunch or you went home for lunch…
I remember just walking home by myself for lunch time, cuz grandma thought it was fine? Cuz nobody would kidnap me in broad daylight right? Right? (👀 mom told me about the supposed “lots of kidnappings” in China, idk how serious that actually is tho)
Its like 5 flights of stairs to the small apartment unit, I don’t think this building meets western building safety codes lol.
So I had lunch at home, then go back to school like approx 1 hour later.
Then finish the rest of the school day and go back home, for dismissal, there was always someone was there to pick me up, either grandma or dad or rarely mom. I remember mom always warning me to never trust a stranger that claims to be picking me up. Cuz apparantly there’s a lot of kidnappers. That “stranger danger” thing terrified me lol
Don’t think I ever remember hearing Cantonese (the lingua franca and “dialect” of Guangzhou) used in school, not by peers, no one. Its all jusr Mandarin
Teachers had meter sticks to “discipline” “misbehaving” students
The schools used blackboards and you write with chalk. There were no smartboards anywhere to be seen. No projectors.
All instruction just using this small student handbooks that each student had their own, and teacher wrote stuff on the blackboard to teach things.
I think summers we go back to our ancestral village? Dad and mom were from different villages and I think usually I go to my mom’s village, cuz that’s where my maternal grandmother lives.
Mom told me that my maternal grandfather took me to the stores and he’d buy ice cream for me… but I don’t remember lol
In Guangzhou, I remember sometimes, my parents took us to the McDonalds near us, but its more like a “vibe” memory, don’t remember much about the food or the taste of food, its over a decade ago. But I remember having ice cream.
I vaguely remember this one school trip… to idk where lol… all I remember was being on the bus and I think I threw up… car sickness lol… we didn’t have a car and so I don’t get used to it.
I think its either this year or 2009 that I had the incident of my older brother (5 years older than me for context, its not a fair fight due to age difference) fighting me then I ran away from home for a few hours… was so scary to be alone in the city for a few hours… still traumatized…
I remember the malls…
I remember being at that store and asking my parents to buy stuff…
this one time I ask them to buy these board games so I can play with my brother… (yes that same brother that want to fight with me all the fucking time)
I remember the metro system… the platform safety door thing was so fascinating to me…
…that’s all I remember on the top of my head right now. I think that one traumatic memory kinda casted a lot of “fog” the blurriness of the memory, and my family leaving that city and the country altogther made it so much easier for my brain to just repress most of it…
Edit: Also I had zero friends… :( So yea I basically spent my early childhood with my sort of abusive older brother… 😭
Edit2: Lol, fixed phrasing mistakes that I just realized after this comment has been up for hours
Happy Birthday.
Only one person mentioned Obama, so I’ll put it in.
2008 was only 40 years after MLK was killed, so you had a lot of people who’d seen him when he was alive. I knew people who didn’t want to watch on election night because they were so fraught. They couldn’t even believe he’d gotten as far as he had.
I was working in downtown Brooklyn, in an area with a lot of Black people. The most you saw was the occasional poster, and he was usually part of a group with MLK, Malcolm X, and other icons. I never saw any of the giant flags that Trump lovers fly.
This is another thing I noticed. In the Bush years you’d see a lot of skulls in fashion; in the Obama years there were more peace signs. That’s my personal experience in NYC, so take it with a grain of salt.
I entered undergrad. My dad had a massive accident. I turned 18 and in retrospect, I started feeling suicidal that year. Yeah, overall, it was a pretty bad year for me.
The first half of 2008 was okay. I was a year into having my own place, was dating a lot, and traveling multiple times a year. Going on your first solo vacations as a young adult is a pretty dang cool thing.
I was still new in my career and was building my adult life. I had a job lined up in Chicago, but it was with a financial company, and the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman, and the whole economy got the offer pulled that September.
I remember being very excited for the election. I actually got to go see Michelle Obama give a speech in the jazz district here in Kansas City, and the line to see Barack Obama speak at his Liberty Memorial campaign stop was so long they had to cut it off for security reasons. We sat on one of the hills and listened to the speech, and he was elected by a large margin.
In hindsight, 2008 was the last year I had any real hope for the future.
Obama was supposed to be the Anti-Dubya, but he turned out to be a conservative fascist too. The banks were rewarded with bailouts and bonuses for crashing the economy, and to this day, only one person’s gone to prison for it. I now just assume each new year will be incrementally worse than the last, which while bad for my mental health, has been great for my financial planning.
Obama was supposed to be the Anti-Dubya, but he turned out to be a conservative fascist too. The
Ha ha ha. I read all this way for a shaggy-dog both-sides meme. This is second only to the guy who trots out the story of a wrestling match at the tail of a shaggy dog story.
Well done!
I’m 16. My dad gave me his old Ranger, so I can drive my friends to Taco Bell (most of them just jumping in the bed) for our lunch break. Bean burritos cost $.89, so I eat one of those for lunch since it’s cheap enough that I can buy one almost every day as long as I keep stealing pocket change from the dish in my parents closet. My high school adopted an IB program into it in order to boost failing test scores, so I’m pulling up to the Taco Bell parking lot in the US South, and out of my bed jump 2 black kids from the hood, a chinese kid, an indian kid, and a gay guy - like some kinda after school special.
Or sometimes we would drive over to the Publix, where I would buy a loaf of bread, then walk over to the tables outside the Starbucks in the same strip mall and eat it with other friends who had got a coffee. I remember feeling like both of these things - bread that actually had some texture to it, that wasn’t pre-sliced, and buying coffee from a shop that only sold coffee - were very fancy. A taste of an exciting world that was breaking through the boring, prefabricated, and onerously corporate life I’d been cloistered in for too long.
In class, I half listen to my teachers drone on while desperately trying to do the homework for my next class which is due next period - I’m a huge procrastinator. Actually, this seems to be one of the main things my classmates and I bond over - our habits of chronic procrastination and sleep deprivation.
In a break between classes, I find a water fountain and awkwardly tilt my plastic 1L nalgene bottle to the side to fill it. I still remember people saying that buying bottled water like Dasani was dumb and weird since “you can get water for free from the tap”. Carrying a reusable water bottle around with you and refilling it is a fad that is just a few years old - but I’ve adopted it because I’ve sworn off all soda for more than two years now. This makes me weird, but I don’t care, because I’ve been slowly losing the weight that made me a fat kid in middle school. Ironically, we would find out a few years later that the plastic in that bottle might cause cancer.
After school, I head to swim practice. I don’t like swimming. I’m not good at it. I dislike how cold the water is every day, the smell of chlorine, the constant lack of air, and the boredom of staring at a black line on the floor of the pool. But I need to participate in some sport to get my IB degree, which will get me a college scholarship, and my sister was on the team so I defaulted to it. And anyway, at least it’s not the football team where I would be bullied to no end. And I get to look at girls in swim suits. And think about what if one of them could maybe, possibly, someday, impossibly, like me.
After school, I drive home. Looking back, I regret this choice, since I could have gone anywhere else and done anything else with that time - and home was always where I was most miserable. But I’d had the habit built in, so I guess it never occurred to me. Once I got home, I would play video games or fuck around on the internet (I had a desktop pc in my room) until dinner. My folks usually worked late, so dinner for me was often, say, a frozen stouffer’s meal heated up in the microwave. I might eat it while watching The Daily Show or the Colbert Report on the TV in the living room - probably my first foray into real political thought and current events.
Then it is time for bed. Or, it is the time when a reasonable person would go to bed. I spend that time endlessly scrolling the internet some more. Or playing my Xbox. Or reading fantasy novels late in the night until my mom pounds on my door and screams at me to go to sleep. So I turn out the light, wait 5 minutes, and then go right back to doing what I was doing.
Around 2 or 3 am, I get tired enough to want to sleep. And I lay down in bed and think about shit. About how I can stop being miserable all the time. About getting the fuck out of this house and this town. About how I can get girls to like me. And then I pass out, only to feel like I’ve been punched in the face a few hours later by the piercing bleet of my digital alarm clock.
So, yaknow. Some good, some bad
Shit the sub 1$ drive through meals were the shit. I remember being hungry and being able to crape through my floors and center console for a handful of quarters and cheffing up a mcgangbang off the mcdanks 1$ menu. When fast food was actually cheap instead of costing what a real meal at a burger shop would be. We didn’t know how good we had it when Obama was in office.
That month I left active duty military after 11 years, moved my family, and got licensed in my home state to do my job. I had prepared quite a bit and had family help, but it was still a rough life transition for all of us.
By that spring when everything started to settle down and go a bit smoother, the housing crisis set in. Everything got more expensive quickly. I remember worrying I wouldn’t be able to afford fuel for my long commute. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to support my family.
Somehow we held it all together, but it was a stressful fucking year. Despite all I never regretted leaving the military…it was either that or go back (again) to secure Halliburton’s oil interests in Iraq.
My first child was born that year. 🥲
Dad?!
Have they moved out yet ?
No, not yet. He’s still in school, he did decide on an education/career path (no longer robotics, turns out math, physics, and programming are hard), so he’ll be around for a few more years, at least until he’s done with his FOS (we’re in Germany).
We decided that as long as the kids are in school, they can stay with us. And with rent prices these days…
ok that’s probably wise. I did get that chance too. Good fortune to him on his studies
I was in 8th grade, so it was much better than 2007. My 7th grade teacher liked the popular kids more and absolutely couldn’t stand me, but my 8th grade teacher liked our outcast group more and vibed with me. She was an older teacher, so more skilled, but also I think their generation had a different perspective on weirdness. That was the first year I made online friends. My parents got through the crisis unscathed. Both rented, so no house lost, and neither lost their job. It definitely instilled the belief that I would graduate high school and fail to get a job, which never faded through high school. I would say that time reinforced the messages I received from the Iraq War era, that America was in decline and the old narratives are now false.
I remember being very confident and optimistic. I had just started college, and nerd shit had just become the dominant force in our culture.
People were joining the internet and connecting via Facebook which I thought would lead to world peace.
Bush was out of office and Obama had won.
The iPhone meant I could use the internet and apps whenever I was.
Everything was becoming higher quality. The fast food restaurants were all remodeled to look like actual buildings. TVs in waiting rooms became all flatscreen, something I associated with the very wealthy.
Every brand was trying to copy apple so everything became a lot more white and clean. Simplified.
I had discovered reddit which felt like cheat codes for knowledge, especially since I was the only person I knew in real life who knew it existed.
That first time seeing iron man. Def right on nerd culture becoming popular.
Ding ding, except Android instead of iOS and I was just in Highschool
Happy birthday!
I was in high school and honestly having a great time. My friend group was pretty solid, I remember having a decent bunch of fun classes, and that was the first year I had a cell phone. Having a phone and a friend with a car meant that I was granted a lot more freedom.
My friend with the car would pick me up at 6am on the weekends and sometimes on school days and we’d go snowboarding, pushing each other to be better and to have fun. We did a lot together besides just that, and I spent a lot of time at her place, which was nice to get away from mine.
It was a good time :) I hope your teen years haven’t been too fraught with all that is happening in the world and you’re able to have your own freedoms and fun
