- “Oh no everything will crash at the end of 1999 !”
- “Wait nothing happened… but that because it will definitely happen in fact at the end of 2000 ! Because there’s no year 0, we start at year 1, you see”
It was difficult to deal with the disappointment after all the hype 😢
Its getting uncomfortably accurate
41 years old and I’ve lived through 4 once in a lifetime economic events, one impending societal collapse (Y2K), a global pandemic, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I vote Giant Meteor 2025, just get it over with already.
I thought it was the dotcom crash and great recession, in addition to the ones you mentioned war on “terror” and pandemic.
Still better than what most of the people before us lived through. It’s just that our parents were especially lucky with the time period they lived in.
The idea that people before us lived worse lives is one often used to obscure the clinical nature of standards we attribute to quality of life such as lifespan, infant mortality, food security, and housing. This is because it allows corporations to trivialize the impact of doubling the workload by normalizing the 40 hour work week and housework and child care, what used to be two people’s worth of work, into one.
Are we living ‘better’ lives? On paper, sure. Are we living happier lives? That’s hard to say.
I dunno I prefer not being murdered for practicing (or even converting from) the wrong religion, dying of plague or famine, or being enslaved for economic convenience. But maybe that’s just me.
And squandered the shit out of it.
The rise of the middle class was definitely a historical anomaly. Most of history has been the top 1% oppressing most everyone else.
Cheer up, maybe the next “end of days” will be the real one!
If I had a dollar every time some looney came up to me saying it’s the apocalypse in X day… I dunno like 12 dollars?
Which isn’t a lot because inflation is getting out of hand.
But it’s weird that it happened twice.
Meanwhile mid-40s walking through world ending pollution:
This place is so much better without all the cigarette smoke!
I also appreciate the restoration of our ozone layer. I remember there was a time (when above a certain latitude at least) my skin would fucking burn in less than 5 minutes under direct sun, it’s a lot better now but it seems weird we all just kind of collectively forgot about that time when we all nearly ended the world to such a degree that we could feel it outside, then we all reversed course and fixed it mostly.
I wonder if we would be more motivated to fix our current issues if they caused skin burns.
The weird thing is that it worked too well. Like Y2K, it was fixed so it became a nothing burger. Now everyone thinks it was an overreaction and don’t want to keep fixing things.
I remember people talking about not curing covid as fast because then people wouldn’t take the next pandemic as seriously.
This is a great point on how regulation can work and how we, as a society, need to do better celebrating our accomplishments.
The holes in the ozone layer were over the poles. You never experienced it.
Both can be true.
The same group of Americans all worried about the anti-Christ found the one guy who matches the profile and decided to make him President. Twice.
Accelerationists and bigots make up a large chunk of that bloc, and “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” make up the rest.
(The oligarchs that bought him don’t count in the same group as the plebeians.)
Religious accelerationists are beyond my understanding. Provoke God into action? And how exactly do you plan to avoid God’s judgement? I mean religious extremists often give impression like they think their God is stupid and you just need to find a loophole in the rules.
God is omnipotent. He doesn’t need our help to sound the trumpets and bring about Revelation.
It’s like they started at Genesis, got bored in Leviticus, and skipped to the end of Revelation without bothering to read about that pesky Jesus fella in the middle.
Bold of you to assume they even opened a bible to start with
I mean, there’s literally an “actual” case in the Bible. I’m not even religious, so sorry if I can’t provide much detail, but in the story of Sodoma and Gomorrah there’s this bloke who asks God to save one soul. After God says okay, he’s like, if you could save one, couldn’t you save another? Then he proceeds to get God to save everyone in the same vein.
Yeah, God in his infinite wisdom and his mysterious ways (of being convinced by a 10 cent trick).
I hate to burst your bubble there, but actually it’s the exact opposite. Abraham hears what God is going to do to Sodom and Gomorrah (and that’s only because God chooses to tell him), and thinks to himself, “Oh shit, my cousin is there. I don’t want him to die.”
So Abraham starts out small. He says, “if I can find 50 good people, you won’t murderhobo everyone?” “Fine,” God replies. Now Abraham has something he can work with. He tries 45, God says cool. Abraham gets God to agree on 40, 30, 20, 10, each time God agrees. At 10, God up and leaves, and Abraham just chills there.
But of course, they can’t find even 10 in those cities. Oh well
God’s just trying to avoid a buffer overflow. So only one person per request.
What if you 👉
wanted to go to heaven ☁️
But God said ☝️
429 Too Many Requests
It’s a mental illness, it doesn’t make sense, and its no use trying to make sense of it.
There are a lot of us who’ve been paying close attention, though, and are doing all we can.
I was 17 when 9/11 happened and I’ve been watching and learning. Now is the time to move
You may be able to survive the shakeup. Maybe a loved one doesn’t end up in Lubbock or Alcatraz or CECOT. Maybe your neighborhood looks like it always did.
Maybe your state plays nice with the feds. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe shit gets hairy. The people pulling Trump’s strings want Christian Nationalism and they’ll get it, at least here in the South. We fought em before and we’ll fight em again. We may lose, though.
The time for action is here.
I’m tired of living through “interesting times”.
“Shouldn’t have wished to live in more interesting times” -Tav, Baldur’s Gate 3
Young me in 2012 “I want to live through interesting times” 🤔 rather than being bored. Little did I know.
That’s the point though - it wasn’t a good thing
GenX here… first time?
I mean… per the meme, very much not our first time.
We got lulled into thinking everything was going to be fine. Then we got whacked with all the tech outsourcing, dot-bomb, 9/11…etc. but at least we had cheaper college first and that gave us a foot in the door without as much of the crushing college debt that millennials never got.
As a millennial born in the Balkans: economic collapse, hyperinflation, dictatorship, economic collapse, war, revolution, y2k, global economic crisis, end of the mayan calendar, semi-dictatorship, (self-imposed) exile, brexit, covid, war v3, climate crisis getting real, revolution again? (idk I don’t live in my home country anymore), whatever the hell is happening now
Interesting times indeed
economic collapse, hyperinflation, dictatorship, economic collapse, war, revolution, y2k, global economic crisis, end of the mayan calendar, semi-dictatorship, (self-imposed) exile, brexit, covid, war v3, climate crisis getting real, revolution again?
We didn’t start the fire.
End of mayan calendar ? Now that would be interesting…
Was it really still an official calendar system? In what country?
The big end of the world in December 2012 was based on the Mayan calendar.
Among all the apocalypses in the last 30ish years, 2012 was the best one so far. Mystical end-of-the-world prophecies have really lost popularity since.
It was a really dumb one, though, all based on a misunderstanding of what that calendar represented. We basically reached the end of an era in the Mayan system. Like, we don’t usually think rolling over from 1999 to 2000 would cause the world to actually end (as long as our computer systems aren’t all l abbreviating dates).
Like, they ran out of rock, so they stopped their calendar there instead of continuing.
At this point, atomic hellfire sounds like a nice escape.
Everytime I see this I think “Gen-X would like a word.”
I mean, yes millenials, but we were alive for all that plus more, most notably a childhood filled with “the russians might nuke us tomorrow.”
And frankly the boomers get to throw in JFK assassination, etc along with all the Genx stuff.
We’re just an unfortunately stupid and murderous race, and plus also the universe is very happy to snuff us out if we let it. Not a good combo for a stable boring life.
The world ended like sixty times already this decade.
The screaming twenties just have no brakes.
Meanwhile gen-x: So have we. Plus growing up during the Cold War, Iran hostage crisis, and 9/11.
Yes it sucks.
You could afford a house and got a free or cheap education
The state has sold off everything in your lifetime to keep your taxes low, including housing. Which you bought and now own.
Millennials are generation rent with a government renting back what it sold as taxes rise.
And the cold war is still going on, what is it about Gen X that makes them think it stopped. Putin is at war in Europe right now. The cold war only ever paused.
Proxy wars didn’t stop with Vietnam, the cold war didn’t stop with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
You get to experience the events of the world while being comparatively rich.
You got to experience the only decade or so without a cold war threat while millennials experience the threat of Russia and an increasing threat from China.
And millennials were told as children the world would burn if we did nothing. Gen X and the Boomers did nothing.
Yes it sucks.
But you had it good, and politically you’ve fucked us recently. After being previously politically apathetic.
We’ve got a world to repair and it remains to be seen if Millennials will actually move past apathy into fixing it with Gen Z or continuing to fuck it up like Gen Z.
You still had to be not poor to take advantage of all that. College was cheaper, but nowhere near cheap. Homes were possible, but many lost them in the crash. It wasn’t like the boomer and earlier days where you could support a family to retirement on one job needing only a GED.
You still had to be not poor to take advantage of all that.
Yeah, randomly shitting on individuals of older generations is just not productive.
Yes, the society as a whole benefitted from better economic conditions, borrowed from tomorrow, and pulled the ladders up behind them… but we don’t know that user. Plenty of people in “the good times” did not have it good.
For all they know, that particular GenX or Boomer was destitute and desperate.
For all they know, that particular elder was in the protests and on the picket lines and fighting this shit every step of the way.
We need solidarity. Every generation, every age, everyone and anyone who is willing. Don’t blame the individuals for the groups.
At least four end of days. Y2K, Maiyan 2012, Rasputin’s 2013, and that Christian Fundie quadruple moon eclipse one.
