A lot of us are 40+ but I appreciate your meaning.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
To be fair, it were the Marxists that started with the entire “end of history” bullshit.
They did though! These idiots thought exactly that.
Downvote away, I’ve been having these conversations for 20+ years. I remember what yall said.
Bird flu is scheduled before WW3 so plural plagues
I don’t have that in my calendar for some reason. Fucking Google.
We already had bird flu check your records
We’ve had one bird flu, yes, but what about second bird flu?
And climate change
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.
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.
lol hot damn. Gen X started off with some bangers. They just on going for millennials.
I’ve become convinced after the recent India/Pakistan conflict that WW3 is near impossible under current conditions just due to the fact that you start losing your very expensive airforce really really quickly.
It seems the Ukraine conflict and the U.S’s plans to counter China’s push on Taiwan indicate that the future of warfare is:
…Just…a gazillion, never-ending swarms of coordinated, “cheap”, militarized drones…
I remember reading somewhere that one of the reasons the War in Ukraine has gone on as long as it has is because of how much of the conflict has been taken up by the use of militarized drones, cutting down on (but not eliminating by any means) the amount of people getting killed.
Which is good in that it means fewer people dying in a pointless war for Putin’s ego, but bad in that in that it dulls the human cost that has been known to really kill war efforts, even in dictatorships.
Before Ukraine, I’d read that idea quite a few times.
Previous wars were run on logistics and manufacturing - can you keep your guys supplied longer than the other side? But now you goto war with what you have, you lose ridiculously expensive and very lethal equipment very quickly. Modern equipment is so complex and expensive that you can never sufficiently speed up manufacturing, so once you’re out, you’re out. Your equipment may not last long enough to institute a draft and call up more people, so once you’re out, you’re out. War over. Very quickly.
That was the expectation. Then there’s Ukraine, which defied all expectations. Somehow it kept going, it turned into a logistics battle again. The modern lethality didn’t happen as expected
The losses for the Russian airforce has been huge, i feel like the war would be over now if not for the massive minefields they laid down sort of freezing the conflict
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just like y2k, the irony is the problem is already solved but that won’t help us.
Datetime types have long since converted to longer data types that will not have such a problem for thousands of years. APIs have long since converted to return those longer data types. The problem is solved.
But the backward compatible 32bit datetime types are still there. Too many programs still use them. Too many embedded devices don’t include “extra features that waste space “, industrial devices are far more widespread but don’t get updates for many years. Worst of all, we have no idea what works and what doesn’t. We’re doomed to repeat the same crisis as y2k, where we’ll need to evaluate all our software, roll out patches, worry about everything falling down.
Modern software development has made it easier than ever to keep everything up to date, to prevent so many issues from ever happening. Year 2038 is an unnecessary problem. But human nature is to let it fester until the problem erupts. We’re doomed
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.
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.
lots of cars too, probably. Its totally not unreasonable for a car to be on the road for 10/15/20 years.
You might read up on the everlasting prevalence of ancient COBOL still running too much of our banking and government. the same software that caused y2k is still there
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.
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.
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
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!
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?
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.
Yes. They do understand. Its just that These events get closer to each other more and 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!
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
as a gen Z I still don’t get why Y2K was such a big deal
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.
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.
cobalt programmers
I now classify anyone who knows how to program cobol as a cobalt programmer. XD.
Autocorrect “helping out”
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
They also missed the stranger danger years. (Which is a huge reason why we got all the helicopter parents now)
One of the biggest reasons Genx are the invisible generation. So many went missing
I think that is one tragedy that was exclusively genx. Things like colds and flus killed the generations before but the Genx were just basically getting wiped out as children by adults. It was also the surge of mass murderers on the heels of the vietnam war in which they had used experimental drugs which I’m sure there is a connection
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.
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
the Dot Com bubble burst + World Trade Center in 2001 was another animal
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.
Couldn’t agree more and do not in any way intend to diminish the hard work of those that prevented a widespread systems failure.
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.
God(or whatever metaphysical force you subscribe to) guard the engineers. Of all types.
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…
Reminds me of this funny bit from Louis C.K. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBdwNP7xk_6/ (profanity)
A-men
And A-women too 😁
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.
