Growing up in the 2000s fucked my brain hard. The sexism, homophobia and racism coupled with the free-range parenting that was simultaneously neglectful while gaslighting everyone into thinking that it was too coddling, and an internet that simply did not give a fuck who it traumatized. All topped off with a resurgence of Western jingoism from the “war in terror”.
The only good thing about that period was some of the videogames were okay I guess but only if you avoid ANYTHING remotely military flavoured. A lot of shit outside of Nintendo was afraid of colour and everything was that washed out brown. Just a miserable time. Everyone was so uncreative and the world had some fucked up Southpark brainworms.
It was a terrible time and a lot of what has led my life to disaster can be traced to that. The 9/11 jingoism did a number on my family. Death to AmeriKKKa, it was not a good time to be from one of the terrorist races here.
But I don’t know that there’s ever been a good time to be growing up. I look at what friends’ kids have to deal with now and it’s still terrible. Like, kids were thrown into the meatgrinder of Covid for the economy because supposedly it didn’t impact kids (which never made any biological sense) and now the pediatric Long Covid population just keeps growing year after year because recurrent covid infections greatly increase the chance of long covid. Meanwhile, the economy gets more and more fucked. We just live in a horrible fascist society. And for all that some of the younger generations are more based, others are more fascist. Then when they get out of school they are plunged into an extremely fucked economy.
Things were bad and are just getting worse. 2000s nostalgia is nostalgia for when things were slightly less bad for slightly more people.
One thing that is better is that there’s way more awareness and acceptance of queer people. It would have been so helpful for realistic understandings of gender (read: trans-aware) to be this prevalent in the 2000s.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I think people are misunderstanding me, just because I think my childhood sucks doesn’t mean I’m not saying it’s just as bad now. It’s just a different kind of bad. The purpose of this post was to make fun of my own nostalgia.
To be clear I wasn’t thinking you thought things are better now, just adding or riffing off what you said that got me thinking about related stuff. Not that there’s any way you could have known that because of the imperfections of communicating like this
Another thing that’s gotten better, at least in some circles, is that “jokes” about SA, general misogyny, trans- and homophobia, pedophilia, ableism, etc. aren’t tolerated anymore.
I was reading the archive of Laissez’s Fair, the “leftist” subforum of Something Awful a year or two ago, and holy shit, I’d forgotten how casually the F and R slurs were used even on the “leftist” forum. Made me think how much different a space like Hexbear would’ve been in the 2000s
Yeah… that’s true.