Older Gen Z have lived through all of those as well, but before the age of 30 😭
And we saw both Hulk Hogan’s and John Cena’s heel turns.
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
Real I’m not quite sure Y2K should be in there since it didn’t really result in anything happening.
Y2K was like the ozone.
It became a big nothing issue because of the spreading awareness, hard work, and other activities that went into preventing it.
So like I said in another post.
The problem with crisis is always the people.
If nothing happens, cause of the hard work to prevent it, people riot over it being a big waste of time cause nothing happened
if something happens, then people riot because no one worked hard to prevent it.
A theory of mine is that one of the reasons people don’t take the various crises threatening to destroy civilization seriously is that we’ve lived through so many crises that were solved without the average person suffering that much.
Y2K, overpopulation, the decay of the ozone, acid rain, all major problems, which received major attention from government, media and the scientific community…and were solved, by the scientific community through incredible efforts that were unthinkable a generation before thanks to advances in science. But things didn’t really change that much for your average schlub on the street. The change in fluorocarbons in bug spray or air conditioning units may have changed the price a bit, but not enough to really hurt the ordinary person’s wallet.
In World War II, everyone participated, everyone did something, be it as big as risking their life on the battlefield, or as small as collecting old newspaper to recycle. Nothing in the past eighty years has demanded that kind of investment or sacrifice or commitment. A great swathe of our population simply cannot believe there is or can be an existential threat to life as we know it.
I have a similar theory about politics, that most Americans thinks of the modern American democracy as inevitable and irrevocable, thus don’t take it seriously when the President’s platform seems built around totally destroying democratic norms.
Oh I know. My uncle was a big part of all of the work to make it a non-issue.
I’m just saying it was hardly scarring, unlike the other things listed. Most people didn’t really think it would be a big thing and it turned out, because of other people’s hard work, not to be a big thing.
Mostly it was just a giant waste of NASA’s time trying to explain to people why it wouldn’t result in toasters exploding no matter what anyone did or did not do, because toasters don’t care about the date.
I don’t deny there was some hysteria around the subject.
but given how stupid the average human is… its probably better to err on hysteria, than to err on common sense, when you need to build public awareness and support for something critical.
Thank software engineers for that.
The real concern for computers is the Year 2038 problem.
Oh we’re absolutely all going to die because there’s literally no way to move some businesses off software developed in the 1980s they’re addicted to it.
It’s the same problem, though. “Oh no, we need to store 4 digits instead of 2” vs “Oh no, we need to store int64 instead of int32”. Or y’know, just use RFC3999 if you can’t do 64-bit. It’s a tedious lift, but it’s not a crisis. People that need to change will do.
The problem is all the existing IoT devices etc that haven’t pre-planned for this. It’s a safe bet a lot of consumer devices with embedded systems haven’t planned for this and likely don’t have user friendly upgrade paths.
lots of cars too, probably. Its totally not unreasonable for a car to be on the road for 10/15/20 years.
I used to work at a major iot company. While, yeah, some devices will probably be left behind, most would’ve had this covered from the outset. The ones left behind were never intended to make it that long anyhow.
It was considered pretty serious at the time. I remember being at a new year’s party and everyone went outside at the ball drop to see if the world turned off.
Apparently IT people at the time had to deal with bunch of stuff and come to work at christmas just in case.
Hopefully “possible WW3” will turn out the same way.
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
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.
As a Gen Xer who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and then all of the rest of this shit, I’m so tired. Y’all millennials even got to miss there Reagan years. Nixon may have started the car, but Reagan is the asshole that shifted it into drive, tossed a brick on the pedal, and let it go off down the mountain.
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Oh yeah, 9/11. The biggest issue of this generation. I imagine millennials in Ukraine be like “war is tough, but thank God 9/11 is over”
This is very obviously a US-centric meme, as evidenced by the first word in the header, “milennials.”
I don’t know how old you were during 9/11 but it was an awful time to grow up. Out of nowhere you were being bombarded with messages of hate towards of nebulous group of “others”. The country overnight decided that unabashed Islamophobia was in vogue (previously there was still hate but not as outright). Think the Asian hate during covid but ramped up to 11. Your country was changing (at least from a young persons perspective) and all the sudden our allies were not to be trusted (remember freedom fries?). The US became embroiled in what was ostensibly a forever war for no reason.
It wasn’t the worst thing, but people were going to war again and that was very clear and very scary. The financial crashes probably take the spotlight since they affected a lot more Americans directly and it’s possible that everyone knew someone who lost or had to leave their home, but 9/11 changed the country in unmistakable ways and it was scary to watch and then have to witness the fallout without really having much understanding and certainty no agency. I don’t think the meme is saying all of these things are equally bad. Just pointing out that these were major events and possible inflection points in history that didn’t break in favor of justice.
The country overnight decided…
Your country was changing…
you do realise you’re on the World Wide Web, right? Please stop acting like there’s only one country in the world, and that’s the omnipotent, wonderful USA. That’s what the message you’re replying to refers to: 9/11 was important for the USA, but the world is much bigger.
I’m not acting like there’s only one country in the world and nothing in my comment would suggest I think the US was omnipotent and wonderful, unless you think racism and Islamophobia and turning against other countries is somehow wonderful.
If I see a post that talks about how too many parents are giving their kids tablets, my first thought is not “there are so many places where no one even owns a tablet, stop generalizing”. This is a random meme, not a manifesto on global issues. The term millennial isn’t even used globally and often different countries will have different ideas of what a generation is and what to call it. In South Africa some “millennials” would be part of the “born-free generation”, in Northern Ireland you might call them “Peace Babies”, in china “Post 90s”. Terms from the US might make their way abroad, but “baby boomers” certainly was not a phenomenon in every country. Getting upset that someone is using a US made term in a meme in English on a site where the plurality of the traffic is from the US is a weird choice. I don’t know if Ukrainians consider themselves millennials but it seems like people who did at least some sociology have made the following divisions: the Soviet generation (age 60 years and older), who were 30 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed; second, the transition generation (45–59 years old), who were educated and launched in the Soviet Union; third, the post-Soviet generation (30–44 years old), who were educated in independent Ukraine and have little memory of the USSR; and fourth, the young generation (18–29 years old), who have no memory or experience of the USSR.
Again, I don’t know what is the most popular term in Ukraine, but it’s clear that generations mean different things to different people and using millennials in a US centric way is pretty standard. It’s not our place to act like we can use our sociology names for social cohorts globally and have that be reasonable. So if anything the use of the term to describe US sentiments (or other countries that feel like their experience aligns closely enough) is a good way to honor other countries and cultures agency and autonomy.
You ever been through an airport before and after? That shit alone was so different between, say, 1999 and 2003. The othering certainly took place across a fairly broad swathe of the Western world, and the post-millennium paranoia never let up. 1999 was an amazing year to be alive. There really did seem to be a boundless optimism that, God, if you could’ve bottle it it’d sell like hotcakes
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.
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
I mean, people who were born in early 1900’s would have spanish flu + 2 WW’s just in one life time(if they reach the second one)
- in Germany there was the biggest hyper Inflation imagenable.
I for one would really like to get off this ride.
no way out, once you’re in the ring, ya gotta dance baby!
Please don’t, you’re making it better for everyone else.
Did y’all forget about the Zika, Ebola, Bird flu and Swine flus?
Thanks, but I’m totally wasted on typhoid over here, i couldn’t possibly do any more!
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!
