Thoughts on Millenials being obsessed with the past

[Pissmaster]

Something I've thought about for a while is this theory I've had about millenials being obsessed with the past. In essence, if you're my age, you grew up seeing and learning about so many tiny little things that you figured you'd learn about later on, but that just never came to be. Let me try to explain:

I was born right at the end of the 1980s. I grew up seeing a whoooooooooooooooole lotta things that would soon vanish, as the end of the 20th century brought forth advancements in technology that came at a breakneck pace. Common practices like using a rolodex to keep up with business contacts, dealing with long distance fees for even short distances, picking up the phone with no caller ID, snail mailing photos and greetings, having to catch TV shows (and tape them) when they're scheduled, all that kind of stuff went obsolete with the advent of the internet and smartphones.

Redditors love to be smug about teachers saying "You won't always have a calculator on you!" and then they smugly present their faggot telephones, but the expectation that you should be on-call and accessible 24/7 because smartphones are expected wasn't a thing way back when, either. They've brought forth a particular layer of modern hell that you couldn't have seen coming, especially as a child of the 90s. In ancient times, you'd be a hell of a lot more prepared due to things not really changing. The rake your dad hands you at age 6 is the same kind of thing you'll be using at age 60. The food you grow, the livestock you raise, and the meals you prepare will be the same throughout your entire life. Nowadays though, your parents grew up without a microwave, and suddenly that revolutionized cooking, and the same thing seems to be happening with air fryers. It's a nice modern convenience, but still a change from what you grew up with. Even nice little conveniences like that draw a line in the sand and reminds us of before-and-after times.

And then you've got other things you saw as a kid, but never got to fulfill your curiosity as an adult. I remember seeing a Suncoast store at the mall when I was little, but I never got to go inside one. Seeing the logo takes me back quite a ways, giving me a sense of unfulfilled planning, something I'll just never get to do.


Apparently there are still four open in a few states, but at this point, I don't think it'd be the same. What would even be there for me? I haven't paid for a home video in over a decade, and I absolutely do not want Funko Pop-type crap. I want a dude with a demeanor like @Just A Butt to be behind the counter, recommending me cool things to watch on VHS, because that's what I'd have imagined the experience would be like. VHS, you know, what I grew up with, where I had to learn all about the importance of rewinding a tape before I return it to the rental store, another extinct thing. I never had my own rental store membership card. I think my mom might still have her old one for a local place somewhere. She'd rent a Nintendo 64 game for me and then I'd laugh because someone named Link "SHIT".

Then we probably went to the photo developing store and had a roll of film developed. I've never used a film-based camera in my life, and I'm not even sure if I could get it developed anywhere locally. I have a scant idea of how to use one, but if I absolutely had to right now, I'd lean heavily on the instruction manual.

If you're around my age, there's just so much of this kinda stuff that we saw only as children. Stuff that shaped our worldview, molded our expectations for what being an adult would be like, and it's all just gone. We've all ended up in an alien world that's vastly different from the one in which we were born. Even demographic shifts have brought forth a lot of job market competition that simply wasn't there before, along with incentives to hire foreigners over domestically-born citizens, making life needlessly harder for us. And speaking of malevolent foreigners, stink bugs have now been a thing in the 21st century, and Wikipedia even has a nice gif showing their spread:


This world has become alien in so many ways, both big and little, and even the little stuff contributes to modern hell. And now, I'm sure a lot of kids growing up today are seeing similar changes with how much the world changed at a breakneck pace during the COVID years, leading to even more seeds of anxiety and listlessness in their adult years. Times always change, especially since the industrial revolution, but seemingly more than ever with the advent of the internet.

---

Fast food restaurants that heavily marketed themselves towards children had ashtrays on every single table with their logo and everything and that was just A-OK at one time and I miss it.

 

[Negrate]

Millenials in youtube comments on videos are so fucking anonying i hate​

Millenials gen Z kneels on​

Millenials no im not changing the formatting​

 

[Shidoen]

My belief is they're trying to grasp a straw of relief for the pain they feel they're going through. The generations before fucked up, their generation fucked up, and honestly my generation will probably fuck up. They just want the pain of existing and discomfort to go away which is why they attach themselves to what I say are false idols of comfort.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

This thread made me realize stinkbugs weren't always a thing in my area. I lived in a world without them for ten years and didn't notice until now. Thanks for the mindfuck. At least they're kinda cute in a stinkbug way.

 

[Betonhaus]

I suppose the alternative for them is to look at the future and have a psychotic breakdown. Another one.

I remember bits and pieces of my childhood, but not a lot (which is a bit suspicious tbh). I do remember technology changing so quickly i I used to have a cheapo LG flip phone then a Blackberry Pearl, I remember being amazed by the announcement of the iPhone then swore off Apple products when I learned it won't come to my country for a year. I was one of the first adopters of the Blackberry Storm and I basically followed Blackberry as it declined into nothingness. I remember playing with a couple friends when i was little but now I don't remember their face or name.

 

[JULAY]

I'm a Xer, and if you think Millennials have nostalgia bad, you have no fucking idea what it's like with my generation. The difference is, we were all at least young adults before the world went to hell, so we actually have a pretty fucking good idea of what was taken from us.

Even the oldest Millennials didn't grow up with the Evil Empire being an actual thing, they were kids at best during the 90s when all that was erased from the pages of time (or so we thought then), and they had no idea what it was like to feel the unbridled optimism of the 90s and just watch things seemingly get better with every passing year.

Now in retrospect, the 1990s is when the seeds that Reaganomics planted really started to bear fruit, and millions of good paying manufacturing jobs were disappearing to China year after year, so it's not like the era didn't have its flaws, but still, all things considered, it was a great time to be alive.

After 9/11 everything changed, and its only gotten progressively worse since then. The world has so many intractable problems now that it will take decades to unravel all of the last 50 years of fuckery, if it's even possible at this point.

Redditors love to be smug about teachers saying "You won't always have a calculator on you!"

I have Millennial cousins that I've heard that exact thing from, and my answer is always the same, "Only a retard can't do math in their head."

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

Maybe it's a normal thing. The oldest millenials are entering middle age. Most of us have some memory of what our parents were like at that age, didn't they talk a lot about the past? I would imagine the nostalgia really starts hitting hard when you realize half of your life is now behind you. Granted, those of us who remember the pre-9/11 era have a little more to be nostalgic for, especially if you were coming of age right as it became the post-9/11 era.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

have Millennial cousins that I've heard that exact thing from, and my answer is always the same, "Only a retard can't do math in their head."

Try solving the Riemann Hypothesis in your head, Mr. Mathypants.

 

[JULAY]

Try solving the Riemann Hypothesis in your head, Mr. Mathypants.

I'll use my 10 digit max pocket calculator instead, thank you very much.

And you can use yours to start with Fermat's Last Theorem by calculating 3987^12 + 4365^12 = 4472^12

 

[Hepativore]

I am an older millennial, as I think the generally agreed upon start of the millennial generation were people born in 1982 and after, and I was born in the mid-1980's. I can actually remember the last three years of the 80's pretty well, and many of my relatives in my extended family are Gen Xers.

I think for a lot of people who have boomer parents like I do, we grew up hearing the recommendations and advice of our teachers and parents, only to find out that a lot of it has been useless because the nature of education and the economy as well as things like the cost of college tuition, housing, healthcare, and vehicles have skyrocketed since when boomers were our age. We grew up wanting and expecting the same things that our parents wanted and had, only to find out that it will probably be forever out of reach, often through no fault of our own.

We were told the adage of busting your ass at school, going to college, and working hard will land you a good career and financial stability, when the last two are more dependent on luck more than anything else, now. Plus, boomers never had to contend with the same degree of student loan debt that millennials and onward had because they lived in a time when a part-time summer job could cover the cost of school for a semester.

I am not trying to hate on boomers, as they had their own issues to contend with, as every generation does. However, people have realized that the boomer generation was able to take advantage of a unique era of sociopolitical prosperity that will probably never happen again for future generations, and so a lot of people have grown envious of the opportunities that boomers had.

So, with all of that being said, many millennials are often nostalgic for times past, such as the 80's/90's of our childhoods when our lives were relatively stable and we thought that our parents' advice was going to be applicable to our future. Also, the internet has made it much easier to find and archive things from years ago, so many people who are nostalgic about the past have the ability to find what they are looking for, where in the days before the internet, it made the cultural remnants of yesteryear much harder to find.

 

[Chongqing]

Could we ever go back?

 

[WolfeTone]

Is this any different from Gen X'ers being nostalgic for the 80s and the synthy disco vibes or Boomers being nostalgic for the rock & roll of the 60s?

Probably not, it's just getting old, nothing complicated about it.

 

[JULAY]

We were told the adage of busting your ass at school, going to college, and working hard will land you a good career and financial stability, when the last two are more dependent on luck more than anything else, now. Plus, boomers never had to contend with the same degree of student loan debt that millennials and onward had because they lived in a time when a part-time summer job could cover the cost of school for a semester.

2000 for you kids: You better go to college or you'll end up flipping burgers! The same faggots in 2008/9: What, you're too good to flip burgers?! Also, I paid for college with my summer job! Summer job paid $1000, and tuition was $400. Shit back in the 1980s you could lose a job on Friday and have another one on Monday, no joke.

So, with all of that being said, many millennials are often nostalgic for times past, such as the 80's/90's of our childhoods when our lives were relatively stable and we thought that our parents' advice was going to be applicable to our future. Also, the internet has made it much easier to find and archive things from years ago, so many people who are nostalgic about the past have the ability to find what they are looking for, where in the days before the internet, it made the cultural remnants of yesteryear much harder to find.

Your parents were deluded faggots who deliberately ruined your future. To be fair, so were mine. You were promised a world that never came. And oh, how I utterly wish all of the Boomers' transgressions with blackface and using the word "nigger" were permanent for all the world to see and judge. We'd have taken over from them a decade ago if that were the case.

We all got fucked by the children of the Greatest Generation, that's for goddamn sure.

 

[CuzinEd]

I would be one of those people using a smartphone with a calculator app to make my teachers look like the Boomers that they were. I never got the obsession with being able to do math mentally. Even people that are good at math can make mistakes. But calculators have a very low error rate. It's better to just use the calculator. Especially when it's really important. It's why we have technology. It's meant to be used and make life easier. calculators have been around since the 70's. Even before that they had other stuff. But the digital calculator was a real game changer. But Boomers and their fear of technology held people back. A person using a calculator isn't going to destroy the world. Like I said calculators have low error rates. Much lower than human error rates. The only time a calculator will give you a wrong answer is from some kind of interference. Something that messes with the electronics inside. Yes, everyone has a calculator in their pocket now. Even before smartphones people should have used calculators. They should have had calculators within reach. especially those people who don't do math well. A calculator should have been a tool in their daily life. That's what its meant for. A tool to be used to assist you in life. I see these video on YouTube where some guys asks these random people on the street questions about history geography and math. These people can't answer the math questions but they never pull out their phones. They have a calculator right there. Being able to seek out information and knowing where to get it is a sign of intelligence. Answering questions just proves you are well trained.

Technology isn't the real problem. It's what people do with it that is the problem. TV was supposed to be educational. That's what the guy who invented TV wanted it to be used for. To an extent it was but it was also used for other things that weren't educational. Smartphones have their positives and negatives just like everything else. Cellphones definitely aren't new though. They have been around since the 80's. Though they were nothing like the cellphones we have had in the last 20+ years. You can use guns as example. Guns are technology people use to do good and bad things with. The same idea applies to guns. Guns don't kill people people kill people. Has the smartphone ruined society or have the people that use the smartphone for certain things ruined society? If the smartphone is just left on a desk it does nothing just like a gun. It just sits there. People are what makes these things bad. But not everyone who uses these things are involved.

Millennials have an obsession with the past or nostalgia for the past because the world is pretty awful. Certain people have made the world so awful that adults wish they could go back to being kids again. Millennials sat around and couldn't wait to become adults. When we become adults it's going to be so great. Turns out it's not. They made life too hard for people with the low wages inflation and increased cost of living. A lack of decent paying jobs doesn't help either. When you are in 20's 30's and 40's still having to stock shelves and live with roommates it's not surprising that people don't want to be adults. They want to remember when times were good when they were kids and their parents had to worry about all of that stuff. But here is the thing the Boomers were the first generation of people to see their lives improve over their lives of their own parents. Meaning they had better lives than their parents. They made more money had more job opportunities and could afford more. This started to come to an end with Gen X and it's only gotten worse for Millennials. So much so that most Millennials are expected to have lives worse than their parents. This is why Millennials obsess over the past.

I remember when people used to be able to smoke in malls. There would be trashcans near the benches in malls and they had ashtrays filled with sand on the tops of them. I remember when malls were a thing. People would go to these big building full of stores and places to buy food and they would shop. This was back when people had money to spend. Before 50% of peoples monthly income was going to housing. You could rent VHS tapes in video rental stores. You could also rent video games. Most video games came on cartridges and later on optical discs. Amazon would not bring your stuff to the door. There was no internet shopping in the 90's. If there was its wasn't a mainstream thing yet. I don't think eBay even existed till the mid or late 90's. I didn't even make my first eBay purchase till 2007. I remember when Amazon was just an online bookstore. But back in the 90's you had to go to an actual bookstore or library to get a book. Even online Bookstore Amazon wasn't around. I remember seeing Suncoast stores. Funcoland EB Games Toys R Us I might even have seen a few Sam Good stores as well. I ate cheese and pretzel sticks at an actual Hot Sam's. The only time you hear of them now is in some Hipster's video on YouTube when they talk about malls or the past.

I have seen things Zoomers wouldn't believe.

Maybe it's a normal thing. The oldest millenials are entering middle age. Most of us have some memory of what our parents were like at that age, didn't they talk a lot about the past? I would imagine the nostalgia really starts hitting hard when you realize half of your life is now behind you. Granted, those of us who remember the pre-9/11 era have a little more to be nostalgic for, especially if you were coming of age right as it became the post-9/11 era.

Middle age is 45. If they are entering middle age they are Gen X and not Millennials. The oldest Millennials would be in their late 30's. The years for Millennials use to be 84-95 or 96. They keep changing the years that are considered birth years of Millennials. The new years for Millennials have some of them in their early 40's. I go by the old years.

 

[Jomi]

2000 for you kids: You better go to college or you'll end up flipping burgers! The same faggots in 2008/9: What, you're too good to flip burgers?! Also, I paid for college with my summer job! Summer job paid $1000, and tuition was $400. Shit back in the 1980s you could lose a job on Friday and have another one on Monday, no joke.

Your parents were deluded faggots who deliberately ruined your future. To be fair, so were mine. You were promised a world that never came. And oh, how I utterly wish all of the Boomers' transgressions with blackface and using the word "nigger" were permanent for all the world to see and judge. We'd have taken over from them a decade ago if that were the case.

We all got fucked by the children of the Greatest Generation, that's for goddamn sure.

My parents (also Boomers), on the other hand, are pretty great and did a good job for me an my siblings. I think you should focus your accusations a bit more narrowly because the way I see it, it's millenials and X'ers that are a worse blight (all imo ofc).

 

[Rei is Shit.]

Normally adults get to relive childhood through having children. But what happens to people who know they'll never have children?

 

[Mewtwo_Rain]

There's two answers to this question from my own perspective:

The first is general humanity. People often like to relive a bygone era of their existence. Even past generations have done this. Whether it be movies, books, etc. To my belief, all humans feel to have a future one must also recognize their past. A loss of either is a loss of sense of self and or one's very own existence to a degree. Since many people have been converted to modernity-worship we see this lack of self-awareness and mindless adaptation taking over large swaths of the population so maybe it's true to an extent. Also I'd argue we let progress of technology faze out the world around us too quickly instead of slowly adapting. Our grasp for a "Jetsons future" has in a sense created a loss of cultural understanding and created a existential crisis in many, where many now try to fill the gap or hole created by it with all manner of substances. There are also those who fill to live in the fantasy world that never truly existed that they believed did from their "dead" childhood.

In my case, I'm not obsessed but I do fill my life with many things from my past to recognize what engineered or created the personality or person I have become. Whether it be comics, books, movies, games, soundtracks, etc. If I have children I would hope to have them influenced in the same way than becoming a mindless modernity hedonistic drone, or lunatic. It also over many years driven me to seek how my personality adopted from certain aspects, some pretty obvious like my belief in revenge and eye for an eye mentality such as the earliest comics I read: "The Punisher" from my childhood, while other samples of my personality I'm unsure of, I'm not sure how many people have similar mindsets of trying to solve the puzzle of themselves but that's my "obsession" with my own past. The nostalgia and melancholy memories are great but the comfort and ability to seek some of these answers I question.

Though to be fair I like dwelling into other people's development puzzle concept as well, seeing if any patterns or parts of their personality align with others who shared a similar past or development.

 

[Safir]

I never got the obsession with being able to do math mentally. Even people that are good at math can make mistakes. But calculators have a very low error rate. It's better to just use the calculator. Especially when it's really important.

Mental math is needed for a sense of scale. You don't have to calculate things precisely like a pajeet autistic, but someone who can't deal with orders of magnitude can't think. They see a number and read, "one zero zero zero zero ...." But how much is it? They don't know. It's how you get "elongated muskrat is rich enough to give every American a million dollaridoos" or "a thousand unarmed niggers per year are killed by US police". Thoughts get shuttled into an innumerate direction, based on fee-fees and The Narrative.

Math is important, too bad the teachers are retarded. Consider:

The "old way" is for proper written arithmetics. The common core method is for mental arithmetics, but (1) they get it wrong, it should be r = 568 - 300 + 2 + 5, and (2) it's something to do when it's easy. Writing out the steps of common core is designed to create demand for worksheets and turn kids into innumerate faggots (like whole word reading is a conspiracy against literacy designed to sell picture books).

Answering questions just proves you are well trained.

It's the same principle here: it's not about being able (or not) to remember a fact when you're forced to (and can choose whether to google bing duckduckgo eh?eh? or not), it's about being able to recall a relevant fact unprompted and follow a line of reasoning that'd be unavailable otherwise. Answering questions from rote memory is retarded, but even though such questions can't differentiate between rote memory and actual knowledge, they can differentiate between either and total niggerdom.

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(not a millennial)
I miss:

• NO FUCKING ADS
• absence of cell phones
  • intercity phone booths
• Saturday morning cartoons
• watching (good) movies on the tv from 1/3 into the movie, most of them were more fun that way and ended up a disappointment when watched properly
  • (I never got into video rentals, pirate VHSes were cheap)
• bookstores with interesting books (now it's wokeshit and ugly hardcover toiler-paper reprints of "classics")
• local home improvement stores
• repairable electronics
• durable and repairable clothes
• toy stores that don't suck (I'm Russian and I'm comparing [assume pre-SMO, it makes no difference] stores to those of the Yeltsin era; the suckage of modern toy stores knows no bounds)
• videogames as toys (I think Minecraft is one? unfortunately it gives me 3d sickness)

 

[Tequila Jong]

I was born in the late 80s too, and to be fair, the world has changed a whole lot in the last ten/fifteen years. There wasn't too much of a difference between the 1990s and the 2000s, but there is (to me) a definable "world that was" and "world we're in now", and the world we're in now feels alien to me. It's like a feeling of one day I must have woken up in a different reality or something. My parents never had that problem at my age, they just worked and got on with raising us kids - I don't think I ever heard them pining over the past.



I wish we could go back, not in an old-man-yells-at-cloud kind of way, but just because growing up in the 90s where I grew up fucking owned. I think those of us that were there for that era have just cause to miss it.

 

[TruffleSpark]

I think a big problem with millenials is this sort of weird self infantilisation where they want to be treated like children forever. A big part of this is that we didn't hit a lot of the milestones of adulthood that we expected to because the economy went to shit in 2008 and now we have gig economy hell. idk that zoomers are going to go through the same thing. They seem to be plenty fucked up in their own way. But I don't think things like not owning a home are going to bother them as much 20 years from now because they never expected that stuff in the first place.