"That's Not Something That Happens Anymore": As A Millennial, I Genuinely Forgot Some Of These Things That Happened In The Early 2000s
If you're someone who lived through the early aughts, you may remember a lot of wild things about that time period. So when Reddit user u/1dfk000 asked: "Older millennials of Reddit: what was life like in the 2000s?" so many people provided their perspectives. Here's what they said below:
1."We used to go over to someone's house after school and just sit on the computer. Like four to five people just playing flash games or going to weird, random sites they heard of and watching terrible content. Nowadays, I don't know; maybe kids do something similar with their phones and send each other media. But I'll always remember those days, and knowing when that mother fucker Adam got on the computer that I was about to see some weird shit."
"Now, THIS comment specifically really unlocked a memory for me. That's not something that happens anymore. Now, we find something on our phone and send it to each other. But sitting around at a computer, looking up obscure websites, even the early days of YouTube, and just wandering about. Seeing what the internet was all about and what you could do because it was so new and fun. My stepsister and I used to share a chair and run wild on the internet. Ugh, the memories are coming back. Switching back and forth on our Neopets accounts, her helping me with my MySpace profile and alllllll the old-school Flash games!"
2."16/f/cali u?"
"My whole life changed when I experienced MSN Messenger for the first time. And getting the screen name from a girl you had a crush on? Man, there was nothing like it for 13-year-old me."
3."It was a simpler time. We hung out at the mall and played video games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto. Social media wasn’t as big, so we actually called our friends on the phone to make plans. Napster and LimeWire were the go-to for downloading music."
"The '90s and 2000s were a perfect blend of comfortable analog life and the tantalizing promise of a digital future."
4."The push notification wasn’t until 2009. Before that, you’d need to log on somewhere to see if you got a message from anyone. No group chats, etc. In many ways, that’s when everything changed, in terms of communication, at least."
5."Music was huge. We had pop-punk bands like Blink-182 and Green Day. TV shows like Friends and The Sopranos were at their peak. We didn’t have YouTube yet, so we’d watch music videos on MTV or VH1. Kids today don’t know the joy of getting a new CD on release day."
"In high school, my best friend and I had a sleepover the night before an album release from our favorite band. Then we got McDonald’s on the way to Best Buy to be there right when they opened to get it. Now, you can just stream it instantly at midnight. But man, I have some nostalgia for the exciting days of making that trek to the music store on album drop day."
6."We had dial-up internet at first, which was super slow. Kids today don’t know the struggle of waiting for a page to load. We used to rent movies from Blockbuster. And if you missed an episode of your favorite show, you’d have to wait for the rerun."
7."I worked at a cellphone store from 2006-2008. It was a wild time as we had like 60 different phone models with like 12 different operating systems. It was actually a difficult job because you had to know a lot about each individual product. Does anyone remember BlackBerry? The Motorola Razer? Nokias? The T-Mobile Sidekick? Those hundreds of similar candy bar phones? Ringtones? When low-rez camera phones became a thing? T9 texting?"
8."As someone who has now lived through four decades, the 2000s by far had the worst fashion. I see you younger generations trying to bring some of it back, and you all need to stop it."
9."Hip-hop, rap, and R&B all dominated popular culture for most of the decade. It was a massive transition from the grunge styles of the '90s. There was a lot of color and a lot of very big collars on shirts. I think because of the war on terror, there was a general weirdness with movies and TV. Everything felt oddly sanitized but filled with little meta jokes. That all started changing when the superhero craze took off around the turn of the decade, and pop media became almost standardized."
10."I got in trouble with my parents for racking up $40 on our cell phone bill because I was texting my crush too much. I couldn't call her until after 7 p.m. either because that's when free minutes on Sprint started. Speaking of cell phones, it was actually really controversial in my parent's social circle when they gave me a cell phone when I was 12. It was still almost unheard of at that point, and I even got in trouble for bringing it to school, even though I kept it in my backpack."
"I look at it with nostalgia, but the events in the 2000s also set up millennials to have a hard time in their adult years. 9/11 flipped the world upside down. I graduated from high school into the 2008 Great Recession. And for a lot of us trying to make financial progress through the 2010s, we had that progress wiped away in 2020 during the pandemic. So a lot of people in our generation has become justifiably bitter and pessimistic."
11."Everyone had a fuck ton of DVDs, but people also burned music CDs. If you had money, you had an iPod. Gas became expensive during the 2007 crash, but in the early 2000s, it was close to a dollar per gallon. Cash for clunkers hadn't happened yet, so cars were ridiculously cheap. You could pick up a crappy one for a few hundred dollars, and a lot of the time, if you were mechanically inclined, you could work on it yourself to keep it running. The Internet started off crappy but quickly got better. As that happened, online gaming took off. Prior to that, if you wanted to game with your friends, one of you had to haul your PC over to the other's place for a LAN party. Teen movies glorified drinking and partying, so a lot of cheap beer was consumed."
"Rent was pretty cheap, though. So that was nice — like $250 for a room in a shared house or $500 for a smaller one-bedroom. Meeting someone from the internet sounded like meeting a serial killer to older generations.
The idea that you might talk to someone you don't know on the computer and then actually meet them in real life sounded crazy to them."
12."Obama's campaign is hard to describe. People were so sick of Bush and so excited for Obama. He was such an incredible, inspiring speaker, the prospect of a Black president was so thrilling. In today's cynical environment, it's really hard to capture that feeling."
13."MySpace was THE platform between 2005-2007, and then Facebook started taking over. MySpace had a lot of bugs, and the fake profiles were overwhelming. However, I loved how I could design my own MySpace page and got really into it. Facebook didn’t have those options. Facebook did have a thing called 'apps' that you could decorate your page with to an extent (like one was a corkboard with little buttons you could choose from called pieces of flair like Office Space), but it wasn’t the same."
Older millennials, is there something you remember from the 2000s that wasn't listed above? Let us know in the comments below.
