A lot of us are 40+ but I appreciate your meaning.
We need to include the Cold War and the nuclear crisis to the list.
Does it really count if they were babies?
Gen X has entered the chat
Inappropriately as always ;)
Indeed, it’s never about you.
I was 1-11 in the 80s. Was super aware of nuclear fallout and the Cold War. But my dad had also been gassed in protests against the Vietnam War and used to joke about running toward the blast of the nuclear war ever happened.
I’m technically the last year of Gen X, but definitely fit more with millennials, and couldn’t drink until the year 2000.
Op also forgot the dot com bubble which burst when I graduated high school.
I’m 1 year older than you and feel the same about fitting with millennials.
The most non millennial thing about me is really important though. I was already in my career when 9/11 happened. Having my foot in that door was huge.
I was still in college. I also went part time for 2 years so I was in school with all millennials when I graduated college. I got a good job after, but just as I qualified for 401k contributions 2007 happened and I got canned when the whole company went under.
And you aren’t a millennial.
Eh, 3 months before the cutoff doesn’t really count.
Then what’s the point of a cutoff?
Honestly, anything before 1985 doesn’t feel millennialish.
The cutoff is currently 1980, but generations are just weird retrospective categories anyway. They sorta shift a bit as new divisions become noticeable.
I can be Gen x if you want, it’s just financially and experientially I’ve lived much more of a millennial’s life.
This is a pretty gatekeepy take.
Generations are about your social cohort and shared experiences, not a calendar.
I think late X folks who got the internet in their teen years mostly fit in better with millennials than X. Being able to anonymously talk about anything with people from all over the world while still in your adolescence is something that most Gen X didn’t get, and I think that particular experience is critical for understanding the differences between X and millenial.
The boundary is nebulous enough that social scientists even came up with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
I was born in 78, and I definitely have a lot of X characteristics, but when I talk to other people my own age about things like the futility of working hard for recognition from society/employers it becomes really clear that I understand millenials a hell of a lot better than most gen X do…
And gen-x has lived through everything listed and more. Boomers even more. Think gen-x gets to retire? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA good one!
Whenever I meet a fellow Gen X in the wild, they seem to fall into one of two categories. If they were born before the end of the Vietnam War, they are upper middle-class douchebags who film anti-woke TokTok videos in their Dodge Rams. If they were born after the end of the Vietnam War, they are solidly working-class and just quietly depressed about everything.
I’m obviously generalizing here, but older Gen X does seem to be far more Boomerish, and younger Gen X is just… Lost.
You should talk to those Catholic dudes who have been around since 1840. They have seen some things.
Yeah I was going to say, I’m 41 and while I seem more like gen X since I mainly hang around with them and basically grew up around them, I am sadly gen Y.
On a side note, millennial has such a bad connotation around it I prefer to say gen Y. Most people don’t associate their negative feelings about millennials with the term gen Y and it just makes life easier during the rare occasions that it comes up.
I think a lot of it is bullshit. I am 45, early 1980. My mom was 17 when she had me. Her parents were Silent Generation, early 1936 and late 1939. Mom and Dad were cusp boomers born in late 1961. Her parents raised me with my cousins who were all 1970-1975 kids. I have two brothers who are cusp gen Y&Z, born in early 1995 and late 1996.
I am firmly Gen X in my upbringing and socialization but when my cousins went off to College I got a bunch of Gen Y friends and my experiences changed. I introduced them to The Meat Puppets and Husker Du and they introduced me to Blink 182 and Green Day.
My little brothers are Gen Z stereotypes raised by a couple of Gen X stereotypes but technically they are Gen Y and Boomers
My point is the dates don’t mean shit, it’s the environment and the influence. When I talk Generations with people I just tell them I am a Xeinal 1977-1983. It saves me from having to listen to someone tell me I am Gen Y when I have almost nothing in common with Gen Y.
This long unsolicited rant is over lol
Looking at the pixels and layers upon layers of compression artifacts in this photo, it wouldn’t surprise me if the original was created at least 5 - 10 years ago, meaning it would have accurately included all millennials at the time it was made.
It’s missing working 3 jobs to survive and still being called entitled and lazy
What idiot was calling you entitled and lazy?
Pre-MAGAts
All of Fox News
“Maybe Millenials should save money instead of spending it on avocado toast” was a very common sentiment at the time.
Fox News was attacking avocado toast? Why don’t they just report the news??
Fox News legally can’t call themselves a news station anymore because of how little of their programming is actually news. It’s always been an opinion broadcast, at best.
Haha nobody directly although my parent has alluded to me being lazy at points but moreso I meant like all those “opinion” pieces and articles talking about these new generations blah blah etcetc
Y2K wasn’t that bad compared to the rest
In hindsight. There was some degree of hysteria at the time, which prompted ended at the turn of the millenia when planes did not fall out of the sky and computer systems did not all fail in unison.
Nothing personal, I try to correct this view everywhere I see it.
Y2K didn’t happen because a lot of talented engineers worked their asses off to prevent it from happening. It is the bane of IT people everywhere that the working state of the systems they create and maintain is being taken for granted by the public, with barely a thought givem to those who fight bugs, spam, cyber attacks and pure entropy every day. It is in fact a minor miracle of engineering that we’re even having this conversation.
Thank you. I was on the Y2K team.
Thank you for your service. I mean it.
And thank you! I merely followed directions, my first real IT job. But I’m proud to say I was there! As a private if not a general.
God(or whatever metaphysical force you subscribe to) guard the engineers. Of all types.
Couldn’t agree more and do not in any way intend to diminish the hard work of those that prevented a widespread systems failure.
Reminds me of this funny bit from Louis C.K. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBdwNP7xk_6/ (profanity)
That’s true, but it is also true that there was a lot of hysteria… A lot of well designed systems were built without the y2k flaw in the first place…
The public should take it for granted, it’s corpo culture that shouldn’t. If IT people had the freedom and option to do the right things early there’s so many situations that would never happen, but oh no profits must increase by 10% yoy or else CEO is replaced.
A-men
And A-women too 😁
the Dot Com bubble burst + World Trade Center in 2001 was another animal
Y2k was a non event because a lot of time, effort, and money was spent fixing it before the deadline.
The estimated cost of fixing the bug was between 300-850 billion dollars in 2000 - adjusted for inflation that’s about 0.5-1.5 trillion dollars
The estimated worldwide cost of fixing the Y2K bug, according to analysts: Cap Gemini America Inc. — $858 billion; Gartner Group Inc. — $600 billion; International Data Corp. — $300 billion.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1372100/some-key-facts-and-events-in-y2k-history.html
There was that one guy who got charged $60k in late fees at blockbuster though.
Y2K wasn’t that bad because a billion engineers saw it coming and prepared accordingly. If everyone hadn’t been freaking out about it for years beforehand things could have gone very differently.
Not really as it would just be another Crowd Strike
Comparatively, sure it’s small potatoes.
If anything it was a misdirect.
When the world/news goes crazy, it’s probably not actually that bad. Surprise mothetfucker!
Whenever I hear a new term I have to figure out if it’s really that bad, or just made up nonsense.
Pretty sure we are in a “unofficial world war 3” considering how there’s like 6 countries at war
Russia vs Ukraine
Israel vs Palestine
India vs Pakistan
Americans vs America.
Does US vs the world in economic war count?
That too economic warfare.
Didn’t you hear? God emperor Trump made that whole silly India/Pakistan thing go away /s
An Indian Pakistan conflict would kill lots of people and create millions of refugees. (And that’s ignoring the nuclear risk)
If the US can stabilize the situation let them
US can’t stabilize itself. And we all know how “good” US is at resolving conflicts.
You are probably right. However, it is always to good to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Trump is more like to stir up trouble on the thought he could come in and annex the land after everyones dead/weakened.
Nah let them pop off. Push the red button.
The dot-com burst was a recession too.
Oh, and you are ignoring the entire thing where every currency except the dollar was destroyed in the 90s.
Also, history ended in 1986. It seems you didn’t get the memo. It would have been typed and nailed into your local clipboard.
Also, history ended in 1986.
Imagine thinking neoliberal Western Democracy was the final and ultimate expression of ideology.
They did though! These idiots thought exactly that.
Downvote away, I’ve been having these conversations for 20+ years. I remember what yall said.
To be fair, it were the Marxists that started with the entire “end of history” bullshit.
I am not religious, but I like the substance of this quote by C.S. Lewis: “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things —praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
There are always wars, rumours of wars, plagues, natural disasters, but the work remains the same as it has been for much of human history.
well said, thank you for this
Bird flu is scheduled before WW3 so plural plagues
We already had bird flu check your records
We’ve had one bird flu, yes, but what about second bird flu?
I don’t have that in my calendar for some reason. Fucking Google.
Add a housing crisis, the construction of a corporate surveillance state, a fascist takeover and the impending employment apocalypse of AI implementation.
Aint it great!
We’re also closing in on a potential second plague here with bird flu since there’s been a concerning surge of infections in cats and the current regime is refusing to act on it.
Don’t forget the return of measles, as well as even more e-coli and salmonella outbreaks as food safety is curtailed.
“Anthrax - snort! - alright!”
To a nearby cockroach: “I smoked your uncle, you know that?”
“Fuckin’ crazy!”
Seems like we got a bit of a party going on in the us rn lol
Gen X checking in. Here’s a list of world crises just in my lifetime. This is by no means a comprehensive list:
1975 - 1990: Lebanese Civil War
1976: Tangshan earthquake (China) - 242,000+ deaths
1979 - 1989: Soviet-Afghan War
1979: Three Mile Island nuclear accident
1980 - 1988: Iran-Iraq War
1981 - Present: HIV/AIDS pandemic
1983 - 1985: Ethiopian famine - 1 million+ deaths
1984: Bhopal gas disaster (India) - 15,000+ deaths
1986: Chernobyl nuclear disaster (USSR)
1987: Black Monday stock market crash
1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill
Late 80s - early 90s: Recession 1990 - 1991: Desert Storm
1991 - 2002: Somali Civil War & famine
1992 - 1995: Bosnian War & Srebrenica massacre
1994: Rwandan genocide - 800,000+ deaths
1999: Columbine High School massacre (the beginning of a trend)
2000: Y2K
2000: Recession (Dot Com Bubble, etc)
2001: 9/11
Early 2000s: Recession (Fallout from 9/11) 2001 - 2021: Afghanistan War
2003 - 2011: Iraq War
2004: Indian Ocean Tsunami - 230,000+ deaths
2005: Hurricane Katrina - 1,800+ deaths
2007 - 2008: Global Financial Crisis
2008 - 2009: Great Recession
2009: H1N1 swine flu pandemic
2010: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
2010: Haiti earthquake - 160,000+ deaths
2011: Tōhoku Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster
2011: Arab Spring uprisings & Syrian Civil War begins
2014: Ebola outbreak (West Africa) - 11,000+ deaths
2014: Russian annexation of Crimea
2015: European migrant crisis
2017: Hurricane Maria (Puerto Rico) - 3,000+ deaths
2019 - Present: Covid19
2020: Australian bushfires - 3 billion animals affected
2020: George Floyd protests & global BLM movement
2021: January 6th US Capitol riot
2022: Russian invasion of Ukraine
2022: Pakistan floods - 1,700+ deaths, 33 million displaced
2023: Turkey-Syria earthquakes - 50,000+ deaths
2023 - Present: Hamas-Israel war and open genocide
2025: Global Trade WarThe first third of this list took place during the Cold War, when WWIII and nuclear attacks were a real fear. Add in climate change, the discovery of microplastics in everything, the world seemingly embracing Fascism again, and a whole slew of other shit, and it’s no surprise that suicide rates have increased almost 40% over the past 25 years.
We didn’t start the fire.
It was always burning, since the world’s been turningNo we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it…
Did we fuck
Another one for the list in early 1980 when US tried to start a nuclear war with Russia and that’s when the doomsday clock was born. They told kids ‘just roll under a desk if a bomb drops’
Yes, a nuclear bomb. The same as the one in Hiroshima.
My high school had a fallout shelter. I had English classes down there.
lol hot damn. Gen X started off with some bangers. They just on going for millennials.
Guess what? I was born 1995. So my life as a newborn was spent in a shelter. Same again as a 4 year old toddler. Now that’s fate.
Yeah, but I think we’re going to get a participation trophy. I’ve been raised to believe this is the case, but that we should not be proud of it, because we’re actually garbage.
Do people not remember that they didn’t have cars until like 1920? Do people not understand that most roads weren’t paved until like the 50s? It’s foolish to think we’re the only generation living through lifetime events. Motherfuckers they were people that went through World War I and World War II. They were veterans of World War 1 that enlisted in World War II. There are people born in the fifties that lived through the computer Revolution. Do people not understand that the internet is only 30 years old?
Yes. They do understand. Its just that These events get closer to each other more and more.
I know he is a fictional character but Colonel Potter in Mash served in ww1, ww2 and Korea… There are real people that had that experience.
And climate change
as a gen Z I still don’t get why Y2K was such a big deal
Computers were not designed to roll over the year. This would have caused the dates to roll back to 1900 or some day in the past, breaking any logic doing math on dates.
The programming community made huge efforts to fix this problem, and they did across many sectors.
The fact that people don’t understand how big of a deal this was is due to the efforts of those that did and were able to correct it.
The media talking about power outages and nukes launching due to Y2K was standard news hype/fear mongering during a crisis with rather boring (to the layman) causes and fixes.
the people problem of any crisis.
If you did nothing, and it becomes a big problem, everyone riots over why you did nothing about it.
If you raised awareness, busted ass, and prevented the issue from happening… then everyone riots over how much of a “waste” it all was since nothing happened.
Computers were not designed to roll over the year.
I get that, but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems? Didn’t programmers in the 80s want to make sure that their code would last for more than 20 years? And people knew Y2K would be a problem so they had plenty of time to fix the issues right?
but I would assume that this only applied to a few old systems?
You might be shocked at how much of our infrastructure ran on those old systems. But thankfully, yes, the rest of your comment is exactly what happened. Programmers knew what was up, and jumped on the problem early enough to avoid any major issues. However, this didn’t stop the media from selling panic for ratings, which became the worst part of the entire Y2K experience. If you’ve ever seen the 1995 movie ‘Strange Days’ with Ralph Fiennes (and a great cast overall), it’s only a slight exaggeration of what the media was hyping for Y2K.
It had to do with memory and storage limitations on computers back then. It didn’t make sense to store two extra digits for the date when that space could be used for other data. It affected pretty much every system made before a certain date. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
It was actually a bit of a big deal. Luckily it got figured out with enough time to fix it before it really effected anything. They were pulling cobalt programmers out of retirement to fix old systems and auditing anything important for years before 2000.
cobalt programmers
I now classify anyone who knows how to program cobol as a cobalt programmer. XD.
Autocorrect “helping out”
The panic it caused was the worst part of it, which was largely overblown by the media who kept predicting major crashes that would cause riots.
I was 18 in 1999, there wasn’t that much actual panic. At the time people already generally knew the media was overreacting.
There was a pretty awesome shoe commercial a few minutes after midnight. It had a guy jogging down the street, presumably on Jan 1st, while in the background ATMs are spewing cash, planes are falling out of the sky, traffic lights are flashing randomly, and other chaos. Then it had a tag about new years resolutions. That commercial made it all worth it
I was 24. People started panic-purchasing guns and ammunition the minute the whole Y2K story broke. Here’s a CBS News segment from 1999 about it. Here’s a DOJ paper about it. Background checks shot up 15% from the previous year, with over a million background checks in December 1999 alone.
It turned out to be a huge nothingburger with no riots, no looting, no violence… But there was definitely panic, at least in the sense that a lot of people were prepping for some kind of apocalyptic outcome “just in case”. Once the clocks rolled over and people saw that planes weren’t falling out of the sky and nukes weren’t auto-launching, they realized it was a bunch of over-hyped media nonsense.
Because all software at that point was unable to handle the new date format. Imagine if today, all computer systems had widespread issues at the same time, on the same day. The only reason nothing happened is because people did their jobs.
Hope this helps.
Not even close to all software. There was a broad mix of stuff that used 2-digit years that would have had problems with it, stuff that used 2-digit years where it wouldn’t really impact anything, and stuff that used 4-digit years and so wasn’t a problem.
However, if it drove any sort of critical infrastructure, it had to be audited just in case it fit in the first category.
Fair enough. I was exaggerating a bit. Just trying to emphasize the point of how big of a deal it could have been. Especially since we see issues like crowd strike, y2k38, etc.
Don’t worry. The one happening in 2038 should be worse.
Thanks for bringing this up; I hadn’t heard of this issue. I just looked into it and the Year 2038 problem is similar to the Y2K issue, for anyone else curious.
The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038, Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug or the Epochalypse) is a time computing problem that leaves some computer systems unable to represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
It’s less about the y2k bug itself and more about the cultural phenomenon. It was everywhere, and it was huge, and then absolutely nothing happened. It was the best possible outcome AND the funniest possible outcome.
With stuff like that, it hits different when you live through it and it’s part of popular culture for years. It leaves grooves in the ole neurons.
In contrast I could think about how terrifying the Cuban missile crisis must have been. The fiery end of the world could happen at any moment and everybody knows it. And we even find out afterward that the world was basically saved by one Soviet service member. I can empathize with living through that, but since it happened long before I was born, I don’t have the vivid memories of the actual emotions invading my normal day to day.
What year comes after “99”? People would way “00” meaning 2000 but a computer might say “00” meaning 1900 potentially breaking a lot of data systems/bases
It honestly wasn’t. Like yes, it was a real problem, there was a lot of bad, often legacy, code that had to be reviewed and maybe patched. Industrial control code tends to be notoriously bad, and so you never know if this traffic light or that power station is going to glitch out until you dive in
But even as a kid who just knew how to take things apart, I knew it was a nothing burger. Real work went into it, but the fact people in the industry were taking it seriously means there was little actual danger
There was A LOT of doom predictions… from airplanes dropping out of the sky to power being shut off, to possible missile launches… it was a good time to be a shit talker in those days. Businesses made a butt ton of money selling snake oil “Y2K” checkers for your computer… crazy time
I still remember watching the news as a child right after the tsunami of 2004 and seeing the death toll rising day by day.
It is only going to get worse with climate catastrophy barely being addresed. Hunger and water shortage is only going to increasr the frequencies of wars and pandemics. Which will result in more and more extremism.
