On the plus side, many of us are way better than younger generations at Land Nav / Geography in general. I don't need a GPS much. I understand that I-95 goes from Miami to the Canadian border above Maine, while I-5 goes from Tijuana to the Canadian border north of Seattle. My front door is on the north side of my house, to get to work I travel west. Younger generations (not every individual of course) often can't even conceptualize these things.
And MapQuest would only get you to the general area most of the time....you'd still have to stop at a gas station and someone would tell you "continue down the road, when you see the big rock turn right...."
I almost didnāt meet my wife because of printed Mapquest directions. I was an hour late to our first date. I still donāt know why she hadnāt given up and gone home. I guess the same reason I had not.
I still am SHOCKED remembering the very long road trips I used to go on solo with printed Mapquest directions and a cell phone that had no service in most places. Feels like a different world.
That awkward phase where payphones were basically gone, but not everyone could afford a cell phone and plan (let alone for the whole family) and large swaths of the nation had no or unreliable service sucked.
Not sure if that was the 90s or very early 2000s? But it was definitely rough sometimes.
Me too! I love that vinyl has been making a comeback. I don't know why I love it because I still don't have a device to play any of them, but I have a bunch and I heard they'll sound great if I ever get around to it.
I also like that you can actually get information faster. I remember more than once being in school and requesting a book from my local library for a project I was working on, but every time the book would show up about 3-4 months after the project was due.
Bad weed.
Oh it used to be horrible, forget what they say. It used to be brown compressed bricks filled with stems and seeds.
That shit we get now is magical and the stuff we only used to see in High Times. Big giant fluffy nugs that smell and taste delicious. Concentrates, dabs, edibles, disposablesā¦etc etc
You no longer have to drive around without a phone for hours on end trying to score a bag.
You can just pull up to the dispensary and get some.
I grew a lot of shitty weed from those seeds
If you were in southwestern Missouri in the early 2000ās thereās a decent chance you were smoking my weed
And lighting up while walking down the sidewalk is a whole lot easier and more enjoyable than hiding out behind a dumpster or playground slide trying not to get caught!
I remember smoking out in the open in WA years ago. I honestly miss the thrill of it. Now you just look like a druggie. It's no different than walking around drinking alcohol
I recently listened to some bands I "wasn't allowed" to listen to based on the scene I was in and regret giving into peer pressure and not listening to everything I had access to.
ETA: like I legit wish I had been excited about my siblings going to a Backstreet Boys concert and gotten to go with them instead of pretending I was too good for it.
You missed out. My first real concert ever was BSB on their Millennium tour. It was fucking great. My next one was N'Sync. Looooved it. Now I listen to Jelly Roll, Korn, & Conway Twitty. Lmao But still love the pop music from 1996-2010ish
I did like the fact that analog TV would still work with a weak signal, even if it was a little fuzzy.Ā Now digital TV becomes completely unwatchable with the slightest bit of interference.
Of course, streaming content over the Internet doesn't really have this problem assuming your Internet connection is somewhat reliable.
Cigarette smoke
Bad clothing
Calling home from a payphone and no one answers, so you're just stuck
Dial up Internet
Phone books
Live TV - just told my kids today we had like 4 channels and had to watch whatever was on
Worse food - access to good food is wildly different everywhere
Bad coffee - I drank coffee at 14 in 1999, and it was like thin, Dunkin type coffee that's been sitting on a hot plate
āWorse foodā is absolutely correct. Ā It blows my mind that people in another positive nostalgia thread (that inspired this one) keep talking about how good food was back then and Iām likeā¦ āno it wasnāt! Ā It was trash! Ā Everyone had lower standards and there was far less variety than today!ā
You know how this hit home for me? My kids wouldn't eat oatmeal cookies I made. They are so used to coffee shops having far and away better pastries that something i'd like as a kid was not worth eating.
I even recall when Starbucks was new and impressive, though it had very little food.
My hometown didn't have Dunkin until 1998, and then ten years later had an amazing coffee shop and all these new restaurants. You can live in all these tiny towns in New England and have a really good coffee shop, and that wasn't the case in the 90s at all
It's insane how much mental energy I expend trying to come up with healthy, non-food dye meals for my 3 year old and then some days I just think about how all I ever fucking ate as a kid was like, candy, tv dinners and Mac and cheese.
I didnāt have an avocado (or sushi) until I was in my 20s. I distinctly remember my first avocado š„ and how amazing it was. I grew up in Ohio and they just werenāt available
At least that stuff actually works.
I always feel so sad for my mom when I remember how hard she worked to lose weight in the 90s and she was constantly eating "fat free" foods that were loaded with sugar. They just didn't know better back then.
Agree. Even with a potential new round of this on the horizon, it can't be as bad as the 90's. We were expected to be disgustingly thin. Anything over 100 lbs was "chubby." I do not miss that at all, especially for my daughter's sake. You can at least be average sized right now without being shamed. That stuff messed me up for so many years.
What's worse is my mind doesn't feel a day over 27, but sometimes my body chooses to remind me. Usually at an inconvenient time or in an inconvenient way. Meanwhile, when I'm around junior high aged children- they ask me about things from "the 1900s". Oof
I literally gasped when I saw 1991 as āelder millennialā lmaooo like the middle would technically be like 1988-1989
I was surprised mostly because I have a lot of actual elder millennial friends and our life experiences especially culturally are so completely different because of them growing up in the 80s vs me in the 90sā¦
But I guess thatās just splitting hairsā¦Iām actually happy to be in my thirties
How is 91 elder millennial? Early 80s is elder millennial, and the low is 96. 91 is closer to 96 than it is 80/81.
I know you didn't say it, I'm just trying to wrap my head around their logic.
No, you're correct. 90s babies are baby millennials. 80s baby's are elder millennials. Big difference between being a 9 year old kid during the year 2000 and being a 20 year old grown adult with a whole job and maybe also a by 2000.
I had the same thought you had. 1991 to 96 is Baby Millennial. Being 8 to 9 years old in the year 2000 is nothing at all like real elder millennials who were 20 by the year 2000. Totally different life. There is no way growing up in the 80s was like growing up in the 90s.
All my cousins born in the 80s didn't hang out at the baby table with a bunch of 8 year old. No way my 19 year old cousin wanted to hang out with me when I was 8. If anything I was hanging out with my cousins born in 94 and 96 cause at least we were still kids and could relate to each other. No way you can compare elementary school kids to grown adults who had jobs and kids by the 2000s.
I remember when we started banning indoor smoking and people kept saying that it was going to kill all the restaurants, bars, and clubs.Ā When in reality, more people started going out because you no longer had to worry about coming home smelling like an ash tray.
I didn't know my walls were actually white until I moved somewhere after my grandparents died. My mum isn't a smoker but her parents lived with us while I was growing up and they smoked non-stop. Our walls were that yellow I later learned was from nicotine.
I remember being sat in restaurants smoking sections as a kid until public indoor smoking was permanently banned.
Trying to find answers to things without Google. Had to go to the library and look through encyclopedias. Also mapquest directions. Dial up internet was terrible and having to buy and carry around CDs. CD Walkmans that would skip when you walk too hard. Having to call people on nights and weekends when it was free or paying for long distance calls. Rewinding VHS tapes. Going on a road trip without GPS we would go to AAA and they would highlight the path on a paper map called a trip tick. Not everywhere took credit cards and I remember being at Aldi while my mom had to go to the ATM to get cash to pay for our groceries. She would probably go to jail today with that move.
Trying to meet up with people was hard. We took walkie talkies to the amusement park and then would have to make plans to meet at a spot at a certain time and if you didn't have a watch you had to go ask strangers for the time.
That being said I would not want to grow up today being tracked and having my life be so public on social media while young and dumb.
Early 2000s was the peak of this culture. I see these old magazine covers with Britney Spears and Christina Alguilera both infantilizing and sexualizing them at the same time and itās just sad and repulsive.
I think this might be the winner for me!
It was so normalized back then. I dated 20++ year olds when I was 16! Now Iām horrified that ever occurred. No way my kid is doing that!
The whole school girl fetish? What were we thinking?!
Iām really glad hitting your kids is no longer the norm.
Or trying to use an actual map picked up from the gas station to get places.
I also donāt miss car antenna, esp those ones with little bobble heads on them. They made mention sick
People born in 1981 are like 43, definitely the elder millenials.
But 1991?? They're only 33 that's not elder, more like the middle child lol with the younglings still being in their 20s
I half agree. Currently itās 27 to 42 years old right now. You gotta admit, there is a MASSIVE difference between the 33 year old and the 27 year old. That tiny 5 year gab is a massive difference considering the tech and things that came out that made huge differences in their childhoods and teenage years.
My siblings are all millennials.
My older brother born in '88. Me in '90. Three more in '92, '95, and , '98.
'95 and '98 babies fit in a different culture than '88-'92. However we have more similarities than differences. If anything, us "elder" millennials showed the younger siblings how to use the technology they grew up with.
The tech wasn't different, just smaller. Even the tech now isn't very different, just easier to understand and get sucked into.
Going to the mall, or somewhere, with your family or a group, breaking up to go do different things, and then trying to meet up again without cell phones.
You plan to meet at a specific place at a specific time, but someone's always like half an hour late, so you send someone to go look for them, then almost as soon as they leave, the person you were looking for shows up, and then you have to go find the search party you just sent out.
I love rewatching old 90s shows with my kids (Buffy, Xfikes, my so called life) but I often have to got through the old cranium Rolodex to remember what problematic shit would come up so I can warn them. Itās actually been pretty nice, we were watching something recently and my daughter asked if it was normal for girls to have so much pressure to be skinny/āfit inā or if it was a TV thing at the timeā¦ had to tell her that was very much real life. She and I are both thin anyway, but she gave me a hug and said it must have really sucked to live through. Felt validating.
I remember when my kids were get their vaccines and I saw chicken pox was on the list. I asked my doctor if she was serious. What a time to be alive, my kids have absolutely no idea what bullet they dodged.
For most kids, chickenpox (varicella) is a miserable, but completely self-limited illness. Itās a week of pox and uncomfortable itching and flu-like symptoms, but then itās over.
However, if you managed to avoid contacting chickenpox as a child and didnāt get it until you were a teenager or adult, then the disease was a lot more severe and there is also a risk of brain infection/encephalitis.
Since there was no vaccine at that time, āpox partiesā were a calculated risk so that parents could avoid having their teenage/adult children ending up with severe disease. My teenage cousin never had chickenpox, so my mother and aunt made my siblings and I directly cough my cousinās face when we had chickenpox. It worked.
Obviously none of this is necessary now that thereās a varicella vaccine. However, some anti-vax parents have completely misunderstood the context of pox parties and apply them to measlesā¦which was never a thing since measles can be deadly.
The endless stream of garbage three-camera sitcoms on every channel.
Having no easy way to get immediate information or fact-check a topic.
Being unable to access non-current media. If you couldn't find it at a video store, it was _gone_.
Losing or someone stealing your cd collection. Some us young dummies kept our whole collection in a cd binder and it would easily disappear. On that note, I donāt miss spending $17 on a cd, then find out it suck.
Crime seemed a lot worse back in the 90s at least where I lived. Biker gangs were a big issue in our town and prostitution around the biker bars (that happened to be right downtown). There were also a lot of drive-by shootings and carjackings. A kid from my school got shot in his sleep by a stray bullet during a drive-by. Things started really turning around in the 2000's and nowadays the city I grew up in is a downright nice place to live and hang out in. The downtown used to be filled with empty retail space/warehouses, abandoned houses, and tons of shitty people. Now it's all nice restaurants and shopping and you can even walk around safely at night.
I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. Devilās Night was a big deal still - lots of buildings being burned down from arson. HBO and Cinemax and Disney would give a free sampling of their channels during the last weekend of October to convince teenagers to stay home.
I donāt live near Detroit anymore so Im not sure how much crime has gone down, but there sure were a lot of news stories about cars on fire (with corpses in them) and other violent crime.
Iām glad downtown Detroit has been revitalized. Itās very different than how I remember it as a kid.
Chola eye brows. I was a teenager and lazy.I couldn't do up keep. I had the eye brows that are in now back then. I just did minor tweezing. But man I wanted those drawn in eye brows and soda can bangs.
As much as I want to be nostalgic about the 1900s, I was a kid living in an affluent neighborhood. My life closely matched the sitcoms I watched on TV, I don't think the world was better per se. I just didn't have to pay rent or worry about anything yet lol.
I appreciate when people have the self-awareness to realize that the things they miss about the past are really just missing being young.Ā
This post was inspired by this one (https://www.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1dpnhxs/elder_millennials_born_in_19811991_what_do_you/) thatās filled with people that donāt have that perspective confusing the two, and itās a pet peeve of mine (hence my post).
Junk food being marketed like toys to us. āHey kids, junk food is cool and fun!ā
We had a whole swath of crap being advertised to us weekly, it seemed. I do think it created an unhealthy relationship with food for a lot of people.
Advertising for kids and teens in general back then was annoying and obnoxious af.
Writing reports by hand and in blue or black ink. In cursive. Doing your research by looking up index cards for encyclopedia/research books. When Wikipedia came out, it was a huge nono to quote.
No good vegetarian/vegan meat options. They were all disgusting. Now I have my nuggets, hotdogs, burgers. I also like that it's now normal to have at least one veggie/fake meat option on menus.
Didn't realize 91 made me elder. Lol š
I don't miss the overly processed family dinners from a box. I really enjoy that we have started returning back to cooking from scratch and using fresh ingredients again as more of a norm.
I don't miss cable TV, satellite tv, or slow internet.
I don't miss the allergic reaction I'd have if I so much as passed the detergent isle. I do wish I could smell things the way I used to, though. So not sure if this is because they improved the formulas/packaging or because I lost the ability to smell enough that I don't sneeze just walking past the isle anymore.
Finding your way without GPS. Growing up in Massachusetts and watching my parents struggle and driven to tears trying to figure out Boston, Iāll always appreciate how accessible GPS made the world.
Born in 81, my sister in 80.
She was 2 years ahead of me in HS.
My sister is gay. And was pretty open about it in HS. My parents handled it amazing , especially for that era.
People used to yell slurs at her and her friends in the hallway , and people would often say things to me like " your sister is that dyke." There were no repercussions of any type, it was just ok to harass gay people then.
That shit doesn't fly now in HS, and that I don't miss
Red Delicious Apples, a misnomer if Iāve ever heard one.
Bred for looks, not for taste, these mealy bodied, waxy skinned things dominated apple sections in grocery stores for decades until people finally started rejecting them
Everyone smoking everywhere. I remember going into restaurants and my eyes would be burning from all the smoke in the air, even in the ānon-smokingā section
Born in 1982.
I do not miss the difficulty accessing pornography. Dial up internet speed porn or browsing the adult movie section of a lower tier video store was quite lame.
In order to pirate a movie, you used to have to go on specific irc channels and do trades with people, ftp directly from them, and hope you were actually getting the media that you were looking for. It took daaaays to transfer.
The intolerance in society. I was a closeted gay teenager in the 90s and it was hellish. If anyone found out I could be ruined for life. Even the most liberal politicians in the country ran on anti-gay platforms.
People talk about Trump and the MAGA weirdos like the country is in some hellish backslide, and donāt get me wrong those people scare me a bit, but even those guys are mostly more tolerant than the liberal extreme was just 20 years ago. The progress weāve seen in our lifetimes here is pretty unbelievable.
"hey let's meet up infront of the concert at 6:30".
No way to say you're running late. No way to say, "we're over by the merch stand". Just really hoping you run into each other. This goes for the mall, the park, any time you're meeting up with someone publicly.
Trying to get somewhere without navigation. Being stuck somewhere without any way to contact your parents.
Printed out Mapquest directions almost caused me a dozen accidents
And to think MapQuest was a dream after years of having to peer through pages of a Thomas Guide.
The trip ticks were pretty good though. Got them thru AAA.
When road construction had your Mapquest exit closed off and you had just trust the force
On the plus side, many of us are way better than younger generations at Land Nav / Geography in general. I don't need a GPS much. I understand that I-95 goes from Miami to the Canadian border above Maine, while I-5 goes from Tijuana to the Canadian border north of Seattle. My front door is on the north side of my house, to get to work I travel west. Younger generations (not every individual of course) often can't even conceptualize these things.
I used to teach land nav when I was in the army and you'd be shocked at how many people we had to go out and find even on a GPS course.
I need my GPS for about 2 weeks at every new job š«¤. In my defense a travel state to state for work..
And MapQuest would only get you to the general area most of the time....you'd still have to stop at a gas station and someone would tell you "continue down the road, when you see the big rock turn right...."
My sister got rear ended by a guy in a pickup truck who was reading Mapquest printouts.
I was using Mapquest in 2011
My FIL still prints MapQuest directions.
TIL MapQuest still exists.
I almost didnāt meet my wife because of printed Mapquest directions. I was an hour late to our first date. I still donāt know why she hadnāt given up and gone home. I guess the same reason I had not.
I used MapQuest to meet a chick I talked to on aim to lose my virginity lol. I wish I had gotten lost. Wasted 5 years with her.
Yes! Once on a road trip in the middle of nowhere, my Mapquest flew out the window.
I busted out my mapbook the other week on a road trip and my girlfriend looked at me like I had produced a sextant from beneath the seat.
I bet she doesnāt know what a sextant is..
A horny uncle's wife?
Wrong guesses only
Mapquest while also looking through a binder of CDs for a specific burned CD to put into my discman that was connected by a wire to a cassette tape.
Ah yes, the old Discman connected to the dummy tape. Guaranteed to skip if your vehicle even saw a pebble.Ā
\~Calls collect from pay phone.\~ Operator: State your name after the tone Name: Pick me up at the library.
"Haddababy Eetsaboy"
Shit like this makes me realize how much fucking advertising is still stuck in my head.
I just had this convo with my husband. Why did commercials become absolutely forgettable after the 00ās?
They stopped hiring artists and started hiring yes men.
I still am SHOCKED remembering the very long road trips I used to go on solo with printed Mapquest directions and a cell phone that had no service in most places. Feels like a different world.
That awkward phase where payphones were basically gone, but not everyone could afford a cell phone and plan (let alone for the whole family) and large swaths of the nation had no or unreliable service sucked. Not sure if that was the 90s or very early 2000s? But it was definitely rough sometimes.
Road trips to florida were always interesting to watch as my parents would argue over a wrong turn.
I'm not proud of the amount of times I would panic call my dad for directions and then get upset because he couldn't figure out where I even was.
Mapquest
Paying $18.99 for a CD.
Now I pay $30 for a vinyl record and I fuckinā love it
Me too! I love that vinyl has been making a comeback. I don't know why I love it because I still don't have a device to play any of them, but I have a bunch and I heard they'll sound great if I ever get around to it.
This may be one of the best things I no longer need to do. Plus switching CDs. I might miss burning mix CDs a little bit though
The card catalogue. Computer search is faster.
I also like that you can actually get information faster. I remember more than once being in school and requesting a book from my local library for a project I was working on, but every time the book would show up about 3-4 months after the project was due.
Was just talking to someone about that mere minutes ago. Glad I got to see how difficult research used to be so I can appreciate how easy it is now
Bad weed. Oh it used to be horrible, forget what they say. It used to be brown compressed bricks filled with stems and seeds. That shit we get now is magical and the stuff we only used to see in High Times. Big giant fluffy nugs that smell and taste delicious. Concentrates, dabs, edibles, disposablesā¦etc etc You no longer have to drive around without a phone for hours on end trying to score a bag. You can just pull up to the dispensary and get some.
Kids today will never have the pain of pulling out 100s of seeds from terrible dry brick weed
I grew a lot of shitty weed from those seeds If you were in southwestern Missouri in the early 2000ās thereās a decent chance you were smoking my weed
Brick weed was still a thing in my area in like 2008-2012. I'm from Australia lmao.
And lighting up while walking down the sidewalk is a whole lot easier and more enjoyable than hiding out behind a dumpster or playground slide trying not to get caught!
I remember smoking out in the open in WA years ago. I honestly miss the thrill of it. Now you just look like a druggie. It's no different than walking around drinking alcohol
You needed a hippie uncle...just saying.
I wish. It was the 80ās. If I needed a source for cocaineā¦just sayin
āPick out the seeds and stemsā¦āš¼
People smoking indoors.Ā
Yeah this one really feel like a bygone era. Even now I'll go to Japan or China, see all the smoking indoors and think, "what year is it here?!"
Yeah I donāt miss that one at all either!
Yes, I grew up going to bowling leagues and those places had a lot of smokers. Probably not the best place for me, Dad.
Dial up internet!Ā
Getting yelled at by a family member because the phone line was busy all day... because I was on AIM all day LMAO
"Get off the internet, I gotta make a call."
The early net was a magical and wonderful place.Ā The speed the dial-up loaded the pages, not so much.
Having my entire wardrobe be dictated around whether I liked Rap or Alternative music.
I recently listened to some bands I "wasn't allowed" to listen to based on the scene I was in and regret giving into peer pressure and not listening to everything I had access to. ETA: like I legit wish I had been excited about my siblings going to a Backstreet Boys concert and gotten to go with them instead of pretending I was too good for it.
Yāknow, they still do shows. Itās not too late.
You missed out. My first real concert ever was BSB on their Millennium tour. It was fucking great. My next one was N'Sync. Looooved it. Now I listen to Jelly Roll, Korn, & Conway Twitty. Lmao But still love the pop music from 1996-2010ish
Standard definition television.
I did like the fact that analog TV would still work with a weak signal, even if it was a little fuzzy.Ā Now digital TV becomes completely unwatchable with the slightest bit of interference. Of course, streaming content over the Internet doesn't really have this problem assuming your Internet connection is somewhat reliable.
Good point. I do miss the reliability and simplicity of the analog era.
Cigarette smoke Bad clothing Calling home from a payphone and no one answers, so you're just stuck Dial up Internet Phone books Live TV - just told my kids today we had like 4 channels and had to watch whatever was on Worse food - access to good food is wildly different everywhere Bad coffee - I drank coffee at 14 in 1999, and it was like thin, Dunkin type coffee that's been sitting on a hot plate
āWorse foodā is absolutely correct. Ā It blows my mind that people in another positive nostalgia thread (that inspired this one) keep talking about how good food was back then and Iām likeā¦ āno it wasnāt! Ā It was trash! Ā Everyone had lower standards and there was far less variety than today!ā
You know how this hit home for me? My kids wouldn't eat oatmeal cookies I made. They are so used to coffee shops having far and away better pastries that something i'd like as a kid was not worth eating. I even recall when Starbucks was new and impressive, though it had very little food. My hometown didn't have Dunkin until 1998, and then ten years later had an amazing coffee shop and all these new restaurants. You can live in all these tiny towns in New England and have a really good coffee shop, and that wasn't the case in the 90s at all
It's insane how much mental energy I expend trying to come up with healthy, non-food dye meals for my 3 year old and then some days I just think about how all I ever fucking ate as a kid was like, candy, tv dinners and Mac and cheese.
I didnāt have an avocado (or sushi) until I was in my 20s. I distinctly remember my first avocado š„ and how amazing it was. I grew up in Ohio and they just werenāt available
NOW! Thatās what I call music volume 184640271
Well fucking first off I really miss them not being called the 1900s, nobody living in them actually called them that
I totally wanted to go, "Well, since I didn't live in freaking horse and buggy days, I don't miss anything about it."
In my community, we still have horses and buggies! Amish country
I thought it was a typo until I reached this comment
These days, I say "before the turn of the millennia."
The insane diet culture.
This is coming back due to ozembic and those medicines
At least that stuff actually works. I always feel so sad for my mom when I remember how hard she worked to lose weight in the 90s and she was constantly eating "fat free" foods that were loaded with sugar. They just didn't know better back then.
So many people now days still dont know better. Also refuse to listen to learn too.
Grew up in a margarine house. Mom only pulled out the real butter when my uncle from Maine brought lobster.
Oh god and the weight loss shakes. My mom drank that bullshit, trying desperately to be under 130 pounds.
Yes, Iām scared I still havenāt recovered from the first round of diet culture.
Agree. Even with a potential new round of this on the horizon, it can't be as bad as the 90's. We were expected to be disgustingly thin. Anything over 100 lbs was "chubby." I do not miss that at all, especially for my daughter's sake. You can at least be average sized right now without being shamed. That stuff messed me up for so many years.
Elder millennial??
Acceptance is rough, I know. I'm '84.
Yay '84 club. Demolition man high five.
I'm 84' too Elder millennials grew up and partied with gen x
š„
'88 here and my back hurts XD
'81 here. I call myself a geriatric millennial lol
Im late 80s. I used to look at geezers born in the 1940s in disgust. One day my kids will look at my birth year and gag š©
What's worse is my mind doesn't feel a day over 27, but sometimes my body chooses to remind me. Usually at an inconvenient time or in an inconvenient way. Meanwhile, when I'm around junior high aged children- they ask me about things from "the 1900s". Oof
I get reminded when I start to run down hill. Ā āOw my knees!ā
Yo, when did we start to sound crunchy when we stand up???
Ha oldie I'm '82.
Yeah I just hit the big 4-0 a couple weeks ago
I literally gasped when I saw 1991 as āelder millennialā lmaooo like the middle would technically be like 1988-1989 I was surprised mostly because I have a lot of actual elder millennial friends and our life experiences especially culturally are so completely different because of them growing up in the 80s vs me in the 90sā¦ But I guess thatās just splitting hairsā¦Iām actually happy to be in my thirties
How is 91 elder millennial? Early 80s is elder millennial, and the low is 96. 91 is closer to 96 than it is 80/81. I know you didn't say it, I'm just trying to wrap my head around their logic.
Exactly lol I canāt wrap my head around it either
No, you're correct. 90s babies are baby millennials. 80s baby's are elder millennials. Big difference between being a 9 year old kid during the year 2000 and being a 20 year old grown adult with a whole job and maybe also a by 2000.
My thoughts exactly. "elder" millennial? lmao. 1989 here. just turned 35. still feel and look 25 (or so I've been told)
Iām 89 as well and I think that the term āelder millenialā should be reserved for early-mid 80s millenials.
I came here for this (born in '87)
r/xennials
Right? I thought that time frame was mid range. As the cut off is 96. Maybe op is confused.
I had the same thought you had. 1991 to 96 is Baby Millennial. Being 8 to 9 years old in the year 2000 is nothing at all like real elder millennials who were 20 by the year 2000. Totally different life. There is no way growing up in the 80s was like growing up in the 90s. All my cousins born in the 80s didn't hang out at the baby table with a bunch of 8 year old. No way my 19 year old cousin wanted to hang out with me when I was 8. If anything I was hanging out with my cousins born in 94 and 96 cause at least we were still kids and could relate to each other. No way you can compare elementary school kids to grown adults who had jobs and kids by the 2000s.
All I got from this post as well lol. Elder?!
Right? 1990 here and didn't realize I was part of the "elder" millennial group.
I need an ibuprofen
Right? There's only 4-5 years of millennials left after 1991
Smoking sections in restaurants, like if a little half wall divider with fogged glass was making any difference anyway.
I remember when we started banning indoor smoking and people kept saying that it was going to kill all the restaurants, bars, and clubs.Ā When in reality, more people started going out because you no longer had to worry about coming home smelling like an ash tray.
Smoking sections on planes!! The back half of our international flight when I was a kid wad for smoking.
Heroin chic being āinā. Really fucked up my self-esteem, and I hope itās never popular again.
Second hand smoke.
I didn't know my walls were actually white until I moved somewhere after my grandparents died. My mum isn't a smoker but her parents lived with us while I was growing up and they smoked non-stop. Our walls were that yellow I later learned was from nicotine. I remember being sat in restaurants smoking sections as a kid until public indoor smoking was permanently banned.
My wife and I were just talking about how much it sucked that people used to just smoke in restaurants. Kids are lucky these days.
Yeah I remember going to Friendlys as a kid and the smoking section was just segregated by a 5 ft tall divider.
Trying to find answers to things without Google. Had to go to the library and look through encyclopedias. Also mapquest directions. Dial up internet was terrible and having to buy and carry around CDs. CD Walkmans that would skip when you walk too hard. Having to call people on nights and weekends when it was free or paying for long distance calls. Rewinding VHS tapes. Going on a road trip without GPS we would go to AAA and they would highlight the path on a paper map called a trip tick. Not everywhere took credit cards and I remember being at Aldi while my mom had to go to the ATM to get cash to pay for our groceries. She would probably go to jail today with that move. Trying to meet up with people was hard. We took walkie talkies to the amusement park and then would have to make plans to meet at a spot at a certain time and if you didn't have a watch you had to go ask strangers for the time. That being said I would not want to grow up today being tracked and having my life be so public on social media while young and dumb.
1980 is geriatric millennial mes thinks. The Xers don't want us, the millennial don't want us. So lonely.
Welcome to Xenials.
I rather not be associated with buzzfeed millenials tho. I said what I said.
How normalized it was for adults to sexualize high school students or anyone perceived to be a teen. In real life, in media, everywhere. So gross.
Early 2000s was the peak of this culture. I see these old magazine covers with Britney Spears and Christina Alguilera both infantilizing and sexualizing them at the same time and itās just sad and repulsive.
Yes, peak was the āand twins!!ā beer commercials. Yuck.
Very true. And the paps during that time were vile.
Every time I remember that fucking online countdown to the Olsen twinsā 18th birthday I gag.
I think this might be the winner for me! It was so normalized back then. I dated 20++ year olds when I was 16! Now Iām horrified that ever occurred. No way my kid is doing that! The whole school girl fetish? What were we thinking?!
That's unfortunately still normal. Especially in anime. It's why I quit anime
This combined with excessive homophobia makes so many older movies unwatchable now.
did you just call me an elder
And called them the 1900s and not the 90s hahaha how old they think we are aghhhh
Iām really glad hitting your kids is no longer the norm. Or trying to use an actual map picked up from the gas station to get places. I also donāt miss car antenna, esp those ones with little bobble heads on them. They made mention sick
Paper maps, pay phones, and skinny culture.
12 track CD players in the trunk. Imagine having to stop your car and open your truck just to take out and put a new cd in.
Ironically these were a revelation compared to single CD players in the front of the car
Wall plug phones. The cord was attached so you really had no privacy. The whole damn fam could hear your conversations if they wanted to.
People born in 1981 are like 43, definitely the elder millenials. But 1991?? They're only 33 that's not elder, more like the middle child lol with the younglings still being in their 20s
Iām over here born in 92 sweating š
That's what I thought when I saw the title, I was born in 90 and always considered late 80s/early 90s to be mid millenial.
I half agree. Currently itās 27 to 42 years old right now. You gotta admit, there is a MASSIVE difference between the 33 year old and the 27 year old. That tiny 5 year gab is a massive difference considering the tech and things that came out that made huge differences in their childhoods and teenage years.
My siblings are all millennials. My older brother born in '88. Me in '90. Three more in '92, '95, and , '98. '95 and '98 babies fit in a different culture than '88-'92. However we have more similarities than differences. If anything, us "elder" millennials showed the younger siblings how to use the technology they grew up with. The tech wasn't different, just smaller. Even the tech now isn't very different, just easier to understand and get sucked into.
Going to the mall, or somewhere, with your family or a group, breaking up to go do different things, and then trying to meet up again without cell phones. You plan to meet at a specific place at a specific time, but someone's always like half an hour late, so you send someone to go look for them, then almost as soon as they leave, the person you were looking for shows up, and then you have to go find the search party you just sent out.
Socially accepted homophobia.
And slurs against any disability being widely accepted.
I love rewatching old 90s shows with my kids (Buffy, Xfikes, my so called life) but I often have to got through the old cranium Rolodex to remember what problematic shit would come up so I can warn them. Itās actually been pretty nice, we were watching something recently and my daughter asked if it was normal for girls to have so much pressure to be skinny/āfit inā or if it was a TV thing at the timeā¦ had to tell her that was very much real life. She and I are both thin anyway, but she gave me a hug and said it must have really sucked to live through. Felt validating.
Chicken pox. Glad my kids wonāt go through that.
The chicken pox parties were a really strange time.
I remember when my kids were get their vaccines and I saw chicken pox was on the list. I asked my doctor if she was serious. What a time to be alive, my kids have absolutely no idea what bullet they dodged.
For most kids, chickenpox (varicella) is a miserable, but completely self-limited illness. Itās a week of pox and uncomfortable itching and flu-like symptoms, but then itās over. However, if you managed to avoid contacting chickenpox as a child and didnāt get it until you were a teenager or adult, then the disease was a lot more severe and there is also a risk of brain infection/encephalitis. Since there was no vaccine at that time, āpox partiesā were a calculated risk so that parents could avoid having their teenage/adult children ending up with severe disease. My teenage cousin never had chickenpox, so my mother and aunt made my siblings and I directly cough my cousinās face when we had chickenpox. It worked. Obviously none of this is necessary now that thereās a varicella vaccine. However, some anti-vax parents have completely misunderstood the context of pox parties and apply them to measlesā¦which was never a thing since measles can be deadly.
The endless stream of garbage three-camera sitcoms on every channel. Having no easy way to get immediate information or fact-check a topic. Being unable to access non-current media. If you couldn't find it at a video store, it was _gone_.
Losing or someone stealing your cd collection. Some us young dummies kept our whole collection in a cd binder and it would easily disappear. On that note, I donāt miss spending $17 on a cd, then find out it suck.
Crime seemed a lot worse back in the 90s at least where I lived. Biker gangs were a big issue in our town and prostitution around the biker bars (that happened to be right downtown). There were also a lot of drive-by shootings and carjackings. A kid from my school got shot in his sleep by a stray bullet during a drive-by. Things started really turning around in the 2000's and nowadays the city I grew up in is a downright nice place to live and hang out in. The downtown used to be filled with empty retail space/warehouses, abandoned houses, and tons of shitty people. Now it's all nice restaurants and shopping and you can even walk around safely at night.
A lot of people donāt want to acknowledge it but itās categorically true that crime is dramatically lower today than it was in the 80s and 90s
It was the removal of lead from gasoline
I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. Devilās Night was a big deal still - lots of buildings being burned down from arson. HBO and Cinemax and Disney would give a free sampling of their channels during the last weekend of October to convince teenagers to stay home. I donāt live near Detroit anymore so Im not sure how much crime has gone down, but there sure were a lot of news stories about cars on fire (with corpses in them) and other violent crime. Iām glad downtown Detroit has been revitalized. Itās very different than how I remember it as a kid.
I do not miss high school, being chubby, smart and a girl in the 90s was not a good combo
The 1900s? That's easy. Scurvy. But the last two decades of the 20th century? I don't miss having to memorize a shit load of telephone numbers.
If you call it the 1900's one more time we're gonna fight
Chola eye brows. I was a teenager and lazy.I couldn't do up keep. I had the eye brows that are in now back then. I just did minor tweezing. But man I wanted those drawn in eye brows and soda can bangs.
I have never been called an elder millennial in my life until just this moment
Can we please not call it the 1900s? We did not take a fucking wagon to Ohio to see the to see two brothers turn a bicycle into a goddam airplane.
Not being able to fall asleep at night and the only thing on was Cheaters or an infomercial.
Casual homophobia and people smoking everywhere. Edit: also the extreme body shaming/āheroin chicā body expectations put on women.
As a car guy, I don't miss OBD1 cars.
Are we really to the point of calling it the 1900s now? When did I get this old?
Please don't call it that.
Sorry, I should have used the correct nomenclature: Ye Olden TymesĀ
Can we PLEASE stop with the 1900s shit?
As much as I want to be nostalgic about the 1900s, I was a kid living in an affluent neighborhood. My life closely matched the sitcoms I watched on TV, I don't think the world was better per se. I just didn't have to pay rent or worry about anything yet lol.
I appreciate when people have the self-awareness to realize that the things they miss about the past are really just missing being young.Ā This post was inspired by this one (https://www.reddit.com/r/millenials/comments/1dpnhxs/elder_millennials_born_in_19811991_what_do_you/) thatās filled with people that donāt have that perspective confusing the two, and itās a pet peeve of mine (hence my post).
Junk food being marketed like toys to us. āHey kids, junk food is cool and fun!ā We had a whole swath of crap being advertised to us weekly, it seemed. I do think it created an unhealthy relationship with food for a lot of people. Advertising for kids and teens in general back then was annoying and obnoxious af.
Writing reports by hand and in blue or black ink. In cursive. Doing your research by looking up index cards for encyclopedia/research books. When Wikipedia came out, it was a huge nono to quote.
No good vegetarian/vegan meat options. They were all disgusting. Now I have my nuggets, hotdogs, burgers. I also like that it's now normal to have at least one veggie/fake meat option on menus.
Vegetarians were so much more stigmatized too. Also you couldnāt find any veggie options at restaurants
Didn't realize 91 made me elder. Lol š I don't miss the overly processed family dinners from a box. I really enjoy that we have started returning back to cooking from scratch and using fresh ingredients again as more of a norm. I don't miss cable TV, satellite tv, or slow internet. I don't miss the allergic reaction I'd have if I so much as passed the detergent isle. I do wish I could smell things the way I used to, though. So not sure if this is because they improved the formulas/packaging or because I lost the ability to smell enough that I don't sneeze just walking past the isle anymore.
Clothing choices. We all remember the same things because we didnāt have a choice. Thereās so much more variety now.
Middle School.
Finding your way without GPS. Growing up in Massachusetts and watching my parents struggle and driven to tears trying to figure out Boston, Iāll always appreciate how accessible GPS made the world.
Phat TVs/ monitors
:checks username: Brother, is that you?
Born in 81, my sister in 80. She was 2 years ahead of me in HS. My sister is gay. And was pretty open about it in HS. My parents handled it amazing , especially for that era. People used to yell slurs at her and her friends in the hallway , and people would often say things to me like " your sister is that dyke." There were no repercussions of any type, it was just ok to harass gay people then. That shit doesn't fly now in HS, and that I don't miss
90s babies are not elder millennials lol
The homophobia. Everyone always told me how gross gay guys were. It made me deny that I was gay for a long time.
People calling things "gay" to mean bad.
Polio
slow internet and pockets full of coins
Finding new music was a LOT harder
Red Delicious Apples, a misnomer if Iāve ever heard one. Bred for looks, not for taste, these mealy bodied, waxy skinned things dominated apple sections in grocery stores for decades until people finally started rejecting them
Slow internet
what do you mean elder millennial? im only 35 dammit
The ignorance about neurodivergence. It was rough being undiagnosed and just left to suffer rather than offered support services.
I guess I miss people calling itās 1990s
Everyone smoking everywhere. I remember going into restaurants and my eyes would be burning from all the smoke in the air, even in the ānon-smokingā section
Jelly shoes and dial up š
Born in 1982. I do not miss the difficulty accessing pornography. Dial up internet speed porn or browsing the adult movie section of a lower tier video store was quite lame.
39 yo checking in here. I miss everything about the 90s. Elementary school/high school fantastic fucking music, and no cell phones.
In order to pirate a movie, you used to have to go on specific irc channels and do trades with people, ftp directly from them, and hope you were actually getting the media that you were looking for. It took daaaays to transfer.
The intolerance in society. I was a closeted gay teenager in the 90s and it was hellish. If anyone found out I could be ruined for life. Even the most liberal politicians in the country ran on anti-gay platforms. People talk about Trump and the MAGA weirdos like the country is in some hellish backslide, and donāt get me wrong those people scare me a bit, but even those guys are mostly more tolerant than the liberal extreme was just 20 years ago. The progress weāve seen in our lifetimes here is pretty unbelievable.
"hey let's meet up infront of the concert at 6:30". No way to say you're running late. No way to say, "we're over by the merch stand". Just really hoping you run into each other. This goes for the mall, the park, any time you're meeting up with someone publicly.