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This reminds me so much of being in middle school and high school and just the moments where it was lonely as hell and just being a teen online
Oct 22, 2024
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📺I remember the 2000s being particularly lonely. I think part of it was that I was a queer child and always knew there was something about me that my friends didn't quite get. The other factor, is that there was no social media. Nobody had phones. If you were hanging out it was a school event, your parents put it together, or you were neighbors.
So, I spent a lot of time alone, riding my bike (with a boombox tied to the handlebars) and reading at the used bookstore.
& everything required being a little bit sneaky because everything was physical. I hid the books I read, I hid the movies and CDs I checked out from the library. I hid the bra-catalogs I stole from my aunts recycling bin. Ultimately, I think it was good to form an identity in absolute privacy. I can't imagine how hard and intimidating it must be do that now, in full view of and connected to everyone, all the time.
6d ago
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‼️i think that the era of the cool mysterious girl is out and we should just all go back to when we were thirteen being obsessed with the hunger games & divergent and running fan accounts and wearing merch and getting excited over things again!!!!!!!!!!! like when was the last time you went to a thursday midnight premiere of a movie sequel??? ........ my point exactly.
Jun 4, 2025
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🎭Every new piece of technology was so exciting, because of the monoculture every new release felt like an Event, everything was shiny and glittery and in fun colors. Listening to music for the first time on an iPod was crazy. Getting a portable DVD player to watch Buffy the Vampire slayer DVDs on long road trips made me feel like I lived in the future. Seeing digital cable for the first time where it would display the programming schedule with descriptions blew my mind.
I played so many games on CD-ROM on a clunky beige monitor attached to a giant tower running Windows 98–a lot of my parents’ friends were educators so they were constantly giving me new ones to play. Neopets was my life and I loved exploring new sites. I remember frequenting many websites that were just lists of other sites lol. I did also spend a lot of time playing outside and just imagining things. Everything you see on Buzzfeed 90s kid remember the 2000s articles is accurate. The high of optimism when Obama got elected after eight years of Bush was unparalleled!
That said yeah the forced conformity was incredibly stifling and social groups were still cliquish (though this was starting to dissolve by the time I got into high school). Things that would make you cool now would lead you to be mocked or become an outcast so it was nice that emo kids existed because they were a lot more accepting of idiosyncrasies and quirks. Gender nonconformity was frowned upon—I got my hair cut short in eighth grade and was made fun of by so many people, and my male gym coach called me sir!
The beauty standards were insane and also so narrow. I remember being in a Kohl’s dressing room when I was like 12 and crying as I tried on increasingly larger pants sizes because my butt wouldn’t fit into anything I tried on and wondering why I was cursed with this body.
HONESTLY the hardest thing for me was that I needed glasses and the only ones that were really available at my local glasses shops were very ugly and nerdy (or if there were cool ones they were designer and cost like $600) and you couldn’t just buy them online so I was walking around looking like Harry Potter for most of my childhood and early adolescence and feeling very insecure about it.
The good thing about personal style, culture, and taste is that i truly had to figure it all out on my own by seeking out and curating sources of inspiration, or by word of mouth from other people, rather than having inspiration algorithmically fed to me.
I remember going trick or treating in the mall after 9/11 because some parents including my mother were very paranoid that something (?) would happen? My mom was very paranoid in general because of her own childhood experiences and seeing all of the news stories about child abductions but I wasn’t helicoptered and my parents would let me walk around the neighborhood with my friends as I got older. We spent so much time just walking from strip mall to strip mall and like loitering at Barnes and Noble lol.
So it was a mixed bag really but I wouldn’t go back and my nostalgia is usually only in passing. This is controversial but I don’t have any fondness for physical media other than vinyl records because I remember just thinking CDs DVDs and VHSs sucked and I hated when they would get damaged. When I realized that I could acquire any digital media I wanted on the internet it felt like the world was my oyster and I never looked back.
You know what though actually I just remembered how much cheaper everything was and I got mad so…
I played so many games on CD-ROM on a clunky beige monitor attached to a giant tower running Windows 98–a lot of my parents’ friends were educators so they were constantly giving me new ones to play. Neopets was my life and I loved exploring new sites. I remember frequenting many websites that were just lists of other sites lol. I did also spend a lot of time playing outside and just imagining things. Everything you see on Buzzfeed 90s kid remember the 2000s articles is accurate. The high of optimism when Obama got elected after eight years of Bush was unparalleled!
That said yeah the forced conformity was incredibly stifling and social groups were still cliquish (though this was starting to dissolve by the time I got into high school). Things that would make you cool now would lead you to be mocked or become an outcast so it was nice that emo kids existed because they were a lot more accepting of idiosyncrasies and quirks. Gender nonconformity was frowned upon—I got my hair cut short in eighth grade and was made fun of by so many people, and my male gym coach called me sir!
The beauty standards were insane and also so narrow. I remember being in a Kohl’s dressing room when I was like 12 and crying as I tried on increasingly larger pants sizes because my butt wouldn’t fit into anything I tried on and wondering why I was cursed with this body.
HONESTLY the hardest thing for me was that I needed glasses and the only ones that were really available at my local glasses shops were very ugly and nerdy (or if there were cool ones they were designer and cost like $600) and you couldn’t just buy them online so I was walking around looking like Harry Potter for most of my childhood and early adolescence and feeling very insecure about it.
The good thing about personal style, culture, and taste is that i truly had to figure it all out on my own by seeking out and curating sources of inspiration, or by word of mouth from other people, rather than having inspiration algorithmically fed to me.
I remember going trick or treating in the mall after 9/11 because some parents including my mother were very paranoid that something (?) would happen? My mom was very paranoid in general because of her own childhood experiences and seeing all of the news stories about child abductions but I wasn’t helicoptered and my parents would let me walk around the neighborhood with my friends as I got older. We spent so much time just walking from strip mall to strip mall and like loitering at Barnes and Noble lol.
So it was a mixed bag really but I wouldn’t go back and my nostalgia is usually only in passing. This is controversial but I don’t have any fondness for physical media other than vinyl records because I remember just thinking CDs DVDs and VHSs sucked and I hated when they would get damaged. When I realized that I could acquire any digital media I wanted on the internet it felt like the world was my oyster and I never looked back.
You know what though actually I just remembered how much cheaper everything was and I got mad so…
6d ago
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My parents told me many times growing up they both love this movie and I finally watched it last year for a class that I took
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💖It’s just so nice when people genuinely give a shit about you or your friends and you both want to get to know each other more love people like that
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🌫There’s been multiple reports of AI taking up lots of energy to generate things and we don’t need more energy being wasted to produce a soulless, computer generated piece of AI art (Idk how others feel about AI art but whenever I look at it I feel sick and my heart sinks because it just feels so empty) so that’s one thing. Another issue is all these horrific deepfake scandals, to an incident that happened to at least 1 girl at the high school I went to (I’m not gonna say their names or anything because they’ve already been through so much shit) to South Korea’s recent crackdown on deepfake p0rn which revealed just how rampant it was throughout the country (and I just know shit like this is happening worldwide it’s not just their country). There’s also social media manipulation, biases in AI (only 100/7,000 of this world’s languages being used in chatbot training which only contributes further to languages being endangered), the very real threat of AI to be used to create more inequality, etc. While it looks like generative AI is flopping in some areas now (thank god) I’m still very concerned about it