Oh, the 2000s. People were celebrating that the world didn't end in 1999. Flip phones were all the rage, low-rise jeans were the hottest thing in fashion, and tweens and teens were listening to pop-punk on their MP3 players. Maybe it's just the nostalgia talking, but the British, for example, think life was best in the 2000s.
Although I was a tween in the noughties, I don't really see it. But other millennials would like to argue that this was the case. The people in this thread came to the defense of the '00s, sharing what life was like back then, including the good, the embarrassing, and the bad.
#1
I was excited for the future. I'm 43 now. I am no longer excited for anything :|.
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#2
I knew the phone number of everyone in my circle off the top of my head.
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#3
We used to go over to someones house after school and just sit on the computer. Like 4-5 people just playing flash games or going to weird, random sites they had heard of and watching terrible content.
Now a days, idk, maybe kids do a similar thing with their phones and send each other media. But I'll always remember those days, and knowing when that mother f****r Adam got on the computer that I was about to see some weird s**t.
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#4
It was a simpler time. We hung out at the mall, played video games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto. Social media wasn’t as big, so we actually called our friends on the phone to make plans. Napster and LimeWire were the go-to for downloading music.
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#5
I can tell you this we had a lot healthier relationship with the internet when it was confined to a single point, the home computer.
#6
The 2000’s was a lot of fun. Actually, to be completely honest, all of my life has been fun. I was born in 1981 so I got to experience the 80’s to a degree, the 90’s as a kid and the 2000s as a young adult.
All of those decades had some great things about them. I would not have asked to live in any other period of time. I got to experience the simplicity of life and the nuttiness of current time, both somewhat comfortably. The changes of technology didn’t scare me, and the independence of being a “latch key kid” was also something I got to experience. I don’t think I really answered the question though…but life was fun.
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#7
The internet wasn't overloaded with an abundance of the dumbest people on the planet. There were a lot of idiots online, but nowhere near as many as there are now. Also significantly less people worshipped politicians. Prices for most things were way cheaper than they are now. Music was really popping off. Cancel culture wasn't really a thing yet, and you could actually be mildly offensive online without pissing off a million people with blue hair. Life was honestly pretty good in the early 2000s.
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#8
16/f/cali u?
u/Godzira-r32:
My whole life changed when I experienced MSN Messenger for the first time. And getting the screen name from a girl you had a crush on? Man, there was nothing like it for 13-year-old me.
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#9
Music was huge. We had pop-punk bands like Blink-182 and Green Day. TV shows like Friends and The Sopranos were at their peak. We didn’t have YouTube yet, so we’d watch music videos on MTV or VH1. Kids today don’t know the joy of getting a new CD on release day.
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#10
Boring. Although we didn't realise at the time that was a luxury.
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#11
Everyone had a f**k ton of DVDs, but people also burned music CDs. If you had money, you had an iPod. Gas became expensive during the 2007 crash, but in the early 2000s, it was close to a dollar per gallon. Cash for clunkers hadn't happened yet, so cars were ridiculously cheap. You could pick up a cr**py one for a few hundred dollars, and a lot of the time, if you were mechanically inclined, you could work on it yourself to keep it running. The Internet started off cr**py but quickly got better. As that happened, online gaming took off. Prior to that, if you wanted to game with your friends, one of you had to haul your PC over to the other's place for a LAN party. Teen movies glorified drinking and partying, so a lot of cheap beer was consumed.
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#12
Let’s see. I turned 18 in 2000. Cell phones were starting to get really popular, where most people would have one. I got my first one in 2001 and seemed late to the party. They had this thing called “roaming” though, where you were charged ALOT extra if you were out of network or calling outside the hours in your plan (cell plans would often have free nights and weekends, perfect for a young person, but not a business person). Texting wasn’t really a thing until 2005, and it seemed like a strange concept. But that soon became really popular. Cameras on phones took really bad pictures. Disposable cameras were slowly dying out, and digital cameras were what most people used.
Fashion was flair jeans, messy parts until the side part craze in the late 2000s. Low rise pants were extremly low, like one inch zippers, everyone wore rubber thong sandals, sometimes with a wedge (those are coming back). Layering tank tops and shirts on eachother was very popular. Designer jeans were super popular, brands like 7 for all mankind, Juicy Couture, Rock & Republican, True Religion, Citizens of Humanity. There were a lot of cargo pants and cargo shorts for guys. A lot of people shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch, Holluster, American Eagle. Ugg boots became wildly popular for women in 2003, I managed to nab a pair of classic shorts, but Uggs were sold out across the country.
MySpace was THE platform in 2005-2007, and then Facebook started taking over. MySpace had a lot of bugs and the fake profiles were overwhelming. Although I loved how I could design my own MySpace page and got really into it. Facebook didn’t have that options. Facebook did have a things called “apps” that you could decorate your page with to an extent (like one was a cork board with little buttons you could choose from called pieces of flair like Office Space) but it wasn’t the same.
I didn’t have internet in my phone for the entirety of the 2000s. I had to be at home, or go to a coffee shop. We printed out directions from a site called Mapquest. No google maps.
CDs were still a thing, but some people started to get “MP3 players” and iPods. There were also music sharing platforms like Kazaa, Limewire etc. you had to be careful what you downloaded though. Kazaa gave my computer a zillion viruses. I also once spent 24 hours downloading what I thought was Snoop Dogg Doggystyle album, but it ended up being porn.
Oh, and this TV streaming s**t and Roku, HULU, Netflix? Hell no. There were regular TV channels and cable. A boyfriend of mine climbed an electrical pole and got us free cable. Netflix did exist, but it was a DVD you’d receive in the mail, watch it, and send it back in the mail.
There wasn’t much direct deposit either or online bill paying. You get a paper paycheck that you would take to the bank. Bills were paid with checks that you put in an envelope and send in the mail.
There’s more, may come back and edit this.
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#13
Internet was a massive web of interconnecting sites for any interest and hobby. You could browse thousands of sites without repeat.
Now it seems like 5 websites filled with screenshots from the other sites and unlimited s****y opinions (including mine) stated as fact from strangers on the Internet.
#14
A thing I see people rarely mention is that being someone who didn't really use the internet wasn't frowned upon. I knew lots of people who just used their home phone and mail for everything and did fine even. If they needed a computer you could just go to a library.
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#15
As someone who has now lived in 4 decades, the 2000s *by far* has had the worst fashion so far. I see you younger generations trying to bring some of it back and you all need to stop it.
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#16
Two things that were really different:
1) New episodes of shows came out at a specific time on a specific day, so you’d plan your week around it, then talk about it the next day at work/school or plan to watch it with someone every week. Sometimes I’d even call friends during commercial breaks to discuss what was happening in *that episode*
2) The **incredible** amount of fat-shaming and fat jokes that were so pervasive in 2000s society. It’s really hard to communicate effectively because even though people are definitely still d***s about it, and the media and social media still focuses on/idolizes thin people, there were so many magazines constantly recommending diet tips, gossip magazines negatively commenting on stars who took a single bad photo (“[starlet] gained 20 stress pounds!”) and regular people would compare diets as a normal social interaction. You also **never** saw clothes in sizes bigger than L in non-plus size stores. It really is a different world in that regard.
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#17
We had dial-up internet at first, which was super slow. Kids today don’t know the struggle of waiting for a page to load. We used to rent movies from Blockbuster. And if you missed an episode of your favorite show, you’d have to wait for the rerun.
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#18
Simpler in many ways. News was less partisan. Politics was still focused around issues. The internet was opening up the world to people, not consuming our entire lives. It was still on our computers and not our phones. We watched Family Guy, Jackass, South Park, Chappelle's Show, Jerry Springer. We loved movies. Our cartoons were cool. There wasn't so much going on that you couldn't keep up. Most of us were all on the same page of pop culture because it was still coming through TV. We watched a lot of TV, but when it aired. Or DVDs.
Green Day and Blink 182 were at their peaks. MTV was a big cultural trendsetter but was on it's way out. Our cultural ennui toward suburban life was peak. College was expensive.
Final Fantasy was in its best era. Following 6 and 7, 10 came out and we all lost our minds.
Social media was AIM messenger, using Facebook to see where the parties were at and who was single, and dating had to be done in person. No doomscrolling, ragebaiting, daily addictions.
Your favorite bands were affordable to see. Unless you were seeing like NSYNC, it was $20 shows in some divey place with some band you heard on MTV.
And if you wanted to hang out with people, you called them up or still just knocked on their doors.
Overall, way way simpler.
Certainly not every single thing was better. We did massively change the course of history with the 2000 election in terms of politics and climate. 9/11 changed our internal surveillance state and set us off to war for two decades. From that came partisan news. The internet targeted individuals more clearly with advertising and really started dividing worlds and making our realities different. Shared reality started going. Corporate conglomeration was happening. The billionaire class was emerging. World of Warcrack came out and the era of creating truly addictive content was just kind of cracked there. It wasn't always about making great stuff, but the stuff that made you hooked with your eyeballs. And people were wearing Ed Hardy, Affliction, and spray tans. Toward the end we had a massive recession that saw financial greed nearly destroy our economy. And a lot of that is still happening today. And we still had to print our maps with Mapquest or just memorize s**t.
Oh, but the joy of leaving the house and never being bothered until you came home... pure bliss.
#19
Born in 1989, so most of my childhood and development happened in the 2000s.
I got in trouble with my parents for racking up $40 on our cell phone bill because I was texting my crush too much. Couldn't call her until after 7pm either because that's when free minutes on Sprint started. Speaking of cell phones, it was actually really controversial in my parent's social circle when they gave me a cell phone when I was 12. It was still almost unheard of at that point, and I even got in trouble for bringing it to school, even though I kept it in my backpack.
Also, I miss that gaming seemed so much more social. It was weird and frustrating if you played with anyone who didn't have a mic. All the angsty AIM away messages that quoted some s****y Midwest emo rock bands. And man I miss AIM.
Everything just overall seemed simpler. Technology is a wonderful thing. I've made a career out of it. But I do miss how much more simple it felt like when it was still evolving.
I look at it with nostalgia, but the events in the 2000s also setup millennials to have a hard time in our adult years. 9/11 flipped the world upside down. I graduated from high school into the 2008 Great Recession. And for a lot of us trying to make financial progress through the 2010s, a lot of us had that progress wiped away in 2020 during the pandemic. So a lot of people in our generation has become justifiably bitter and pessimistic.
#20
Texting was $0.10 a message.
#21
We ranked our friends 1-8 on Myspace, hung out at the mall, wore makeup 3x too dark for our skin tone, we loved the Snooki Poof, anything Abercrombie (or Hot Topic, depending on your vibe), watched a lot of Ebaum's world, used AIM and cryptic away messages, watched TRL, wore low rise jeans, doubled up on polo shirts with popped collars, and spent a lot of time outside.
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#22
Pretty awesome as a kid tbh, I have fond memories of spending entire days skating all over town with friends and then going home and playing the original SKATE or Fallout 3 till midnight.
Also, moviegoing was so much better and more fun. Before Marvel picked up its steam, the big blockbuster event that everyone would go to the movies for was Pirates of The Caribbean.
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#23
I worked at a cellphone store 2006-2008. Was a crazy time as we had like 60 different phone models with like 12 different operating systems. It was actually a difficult job because you had to know a lot about each individual product. Anyone remember BlackBerry? The motorola Razer? Nokias? The TMobile Sidekick? Those hundreds of similar candy bar phones? Ringtones? When low rez camera phones became a thing? T9 texting? I remember texting and driving was more common and actually a lot safer because with T9 it was muscle memory and you wouldn’t have to look at the screen to text.
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#24
You could actually understand what rappers were saying.
#25
Humanity peaked at Windows XP.
#26
I remember when working from home meant 4 phone lines for me, one for home phone, one for work phone, one for dial up and one for a fax. Hard to believe that faxes are still a thing though.
#27
Touch screen as we know it today was still this sci-fi technology you only saw in movies.
#28
One thing that shocked me, back then if you liked anime in school you got beaten up or bullied.
When I went back to college, my gen z classmates openly talked about and watched anime. I even got called a hipster and a boomer for saying I wasn't currently watching anime.
Feels kinda unfair. I had to hide that s**t for years. XD.
#29
Music Festivals were making a strong comeback, and they were awesome. It seemed like every weekend there was a music festival with an amazing lineup occurring somewhere in the country. You could go to Bonnaroo for just $142, and not have to wade through crowds of influencers trying to brand themselves in the middle of a show. Lineups were a lot more eclectic too. It was a great moment in time to experience.
#30
There was a period of time where "there's nothing on TV" was a real thing. The 2000s brought an end to those limited choices. You went from channel surfing dozens of TV channels, to having access to hundreds, with on-demand programming gaining traction.
The feeling of having things at your fingertips really started to happen in many aspects of everyday life. Cellphones became smart, and mainstream. Media piracy platforms that offered you anything you could imagine with the low cost of potentially destroying the family computer. The music was amazing. The movies were amazing.
Being a teenager in the 00s was pretty awesome. The use of computers was still new enough that we were look to as being experts or computer whiz kids if you had even a basic mastery of them.
The future looked promising. Part of it was just growing up and learning more about the world - but it did seem the carefully crafted "the adults know what they're doing" illusion got ripped away with the dotcom bubble, 9/11, and the housing market crash.
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#31
You could walk around town with a stack of printed cvs and get a job...like that!
#32
I was in my 20s for the whole decade- finishing college, my first job, meeting my future wife, etc. My view on it:
The two defining events were 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash. In retrospect, Bush vs Gore and the Supreme Court stepping in to give it to Bush was the defining event of the decade and maybe the rest of our adult lives. So yeah, much of the decade was spent in the shadow of 9/11 and the Iraq war. The revelations about torture, people slowly realizing they'd been lied to etc.
And ofcourse the housing bubble where people I graduated with bought apartments for like $30k and made insane money, while others bought in too late and were ruined financially especially people who got adjustable rate mortgages. It's hard to explain how easy it was to get financing, how much people were approved for. I was making like $40k out of college and was approved for well over $200k, which at the time could get you into a pretty decent place, at least where I lived. I received good advice and locked it down with a fixed rate mortgage for a rowhouse in a gentrifying neighborhood...made like $800 payments for a solid decade before selling and having enough for my next down payment. Silly how one decent decision can really put you on your way.
On the flipside, the bubble bursting, the resulting financial crisis and the s****y job market afterwards was terrifying., people were super worried about being laid off, people graduating into a crisis and having their future prospects screwed because they couldn't get a job out of college. The painfully slow recovery.
Obama's campaign is hard to describe. People were so sick of Bush, so excited for Obama...he was such an incredible, inspiring speaker, the prospect of a black president was so thrilling. In today's cynical environment it's really hard to capture that feeling.
The last burst of rock, all the awesome indie rock and garage bands, people losing their minds over Strokes and White Stripes. The rise and fall of Napster, so many great shows.
People covered tech and internet pretty well- AIM, PS2, Goldeneye, message boards, blogs, early Facebook, Fark, ebaumsworld. It was fun, slightly taboo, uncensored, mean, cheeky, random. But you still had alt weeklies, people still used online to plan to hang out in person. Mix of analog and digital that will never exist again.
#33
Great.
Music was still pretty good, the internet was taking off, cell phones were starting to be more accessible and we didn't all die at the end of 1999.
#34
Pirating oblivion.
#35
Definitely tough to explain this to younger people. The push notification for example wasn’t until 2009. Before that you’d need to logon somewhere to see if you got a message from anyone. No group chats etc. In many ways that’s when everything changed, in terms of communication at least.
#36
Pretty sick. I remember hopping on Yahoo Games, especially to play pool. You would hop into a room with a general chat room with everyone asking for people’s A/S/L. You would meet others and go into a private match to play a game.
MSN Messenger (popular in my area over AOL) and that’s where all the after school gossip and flirting would take place.
Simpler times for sure.
#37
MySpace top 8 was wild. I also remember using layouts and music to make my page super cute (but actually annoying).
#38
Hip-hop, rap, and R&B all dominated popular culture for most of the decade. It was a massive transition from the grunge styles of the '90s. There was a lot of color and a lot of very big collars on shirts. I think because of the war on terror, there was a general weirdness with movies and TV. Everything felt oddly sanitized but filled with little meta jokes. That all started changing when the superhero craze took off around the turn of the decade, and pop media became almost standardized.
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#39
MySpace made me learn HTML. I enjoyed it so much I took classes later on. Kinda hate I forgot everything, though.
#40
"2 unread messages" on a green LED exterior display on a flip phone hit really, really hard.
#41
Much of the culture was defined by the fact that technology and the internet were becoming ubiquitous but data transmission was still constrained. Most medium income households and above had computers with access to the internet. But many were still using dial-up internet and cable (internet) was still in its infancy. So what you saw was a society where physical media was still widely relied upon. CD's, DVD's, print media, etc. This is how Blockbuster was able to boom. It's also why Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental service.
Streaming media was very slow and limited to short video clips and flash media. File sharing became rampant with services like Limewire and Kazaa where downloading a song would take a few minutes and a movie would take hours. Cell phones were very common but data rates were extremely limited. Many people had only a set amount of minutes and text messages they could use a month before a surcharge was added. So instant messaging services like AIM were very popular. Video calls were almost non-existant. Social media was very early with rudimentary pages that people could customize and link. In the latter part of the 2000's, Facebook came about and was entirely for linking college kids together.
#42
The 2000s were all about pop culture. We watched reality TV shows like Survivor and American Idol. Fashion was all low-rise jeans and trucker hats. We used to burn CDs for our friends with our favorite songs. AIM was how we messaged each other.
#43
Online? Mostly lawless lol
Offline? pretty much the same as the 90s with more technology.
#44
The internet was a new frontier full of possibilities.
#45
Everyone wore polos, flip flops and proudly carried whichever twilight book they were on, regardless of gender. Some of us really got into MySpace and later Facebook. You could break a window with your Nokia phone and it would have been fine. iPod vs Zune. Who would win? Every kids show sold us the idea that if we followed our heart, everything would turn out okay. Follow your dreams, follow your heart. It was a time of blissful ignorance. It was a time of hidden struggle.
#46
It was the best of times, it was the worst of time..we were on the precipice of a new age. Still renting movies but on DVDs now, the internet was still in its juvenile stages but didn't need to use a phone line (sometimes). Weed was hit or miss but you always took it, and you learned the headlights of cars to know when a cop was behind you. Flip phones were the height of technology and music was just starting to be digitally pirated.
Guys had these haircuts that went forward but were then spiked up in the front like they walked into a wall. It was a weird segue into the new millennium, very strange times. We'd use these writing devices on paper..such a primitive form of communication. And we wrote words that were attached in a flowy way.
#47
I saw two planes fly into buildings when I was like 12 and the economy tanked in 2008 but other than that it was pretty cool I guess.
#48
People seem to be missing that it was 9/11 and post 9/11. Basically privacy went to s**t and everyone became war hawks and we went to stupid wars. Then there was a huge push back and Bush became super unpopular. Then Obama came in and we all discovered the government watches everything we do - and then the economy crashed in a Great Recession. So it really sucked for those graduating who couldn’t get a job
*recession technically started before Obama took office.
#49
The life I expected to have when I had kids... source I make double to triple what my parents made. Im a software developer dual income my mom and dad were a photo studio running their own business.
I went on vacations every year sometimes twice a year since we also would go skiing. We also did camping where a night of camping in a rv was like 8 - 10 a night. Same spots now cost as much as a hotel or the difference isn't noticeable.
Parents were able to buy a home in a spot that in 1995 was a tad over 100k. They sold it for over a mill.
I got to use some of the first mac pro computers as a kid though since my mom was a graphics design artist so I had a GUI before most people could conceive of it in the general public.
Also so much crime existed but I at like no joke 5 - 8 would just go around the neighborhood unsupervised. Now the internet has you thinking the child r*pists are sitting in bushes waiting for your kids to come out.
Not going to disagree that in the 1970s it was hard to get a home harder than it is now. Disagree it stayed hard, People in my industry made my pay 20 years ago and I'd have just had sooooo much wealth. As it stands I'm barely upper middle class at my income which is just bonkers.
#50
I was a freshman in college in 2001. I was a cadet in Charlie company at North Georgia College & State University (I think it has since been renamed). In High School i was very active in JROTC, and I wanted to commission as an officer in the Army. Between room inspections, morning PT and class, I listened to Linkin Park and Foo Fighters.
For me, the world really started to change on Sept 11, 2001. The upper classmen were stressed out and amped up. Especially the outgoing, commisioning seniors. For like a month, there was an almost palpable excitement and energy on campus. It didnt take long for the first alumni to die overseas, though, and we had a memorial service for two of them. After that, the mood changed, and it wasn't a game anymore. Not that we werent taking it seriously prior to 9/11, but it took on a much more somber tone.
It may be nostalgia talking, and the rose colored lense youth, but the world has never felt like it did before that time.
