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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.
Jul 20, 2025
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this is the one i relate to the most. i also lived in a tiny town with no businesses and nowhere to go without a car so the only private thing i had was my profile on the family laptop lol
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âď¸- running around outside spontaneously with neighborhood kids and siblings. once you agreed to be friends, you would just show up unannounced to their house and ask if they can play. No plan. No warning. Doorbell only. their family members would know who you are and when they opened the door would shout your friends name, then announce youâre her for them. Nowâthis is a terrifying scenario.
-would only go back home when my mom would yell for me from the porch or literally ring a bell or have to come find us. This usually happened around dinner time.
-Dial up internet, would only be able to use extremely slow internet or someone was using the line to be on the phone, couldnât be both.
-AIM, Xanga, GAIA online (cursed), MySpace eventually. low-poly video games I still like to play like FFVII.
-Exploring areas I wasnât supposed to like sheds, nearly-abandoned garages, small fields with random paths, and the woods without a sense of direction.
-Cool older friends and sisters had GARMINS to navigate them. Other than that, you had to ask for direction, write them down, MAPQUEST it, use a physical map, or just generally know where youâre going.
-Casettes, but mostly CDs for music. I did have a CD player for the bus in middle school. When iPods came out that was a game changer. Music was mostly pirated from limewire. Burning and making mixed CDs and playlists for people was a thing. New music was discovered on bandcamp, YouTube, and MTV.
When browsing for CDs at a physical store, there were CD players with headphones attached so you could listen to it before buying, otherwise you wouldnât know what the music was like and it was a blind purchase.
-Home videos were shot on cam-corders, photos taken from digital cameras or disposables. Polaroids were a treat.
-If there was snow, I would stay up watching the news with my mom watching the bottom of the screen to see if my school district was closed for a snow day the next day.
-I didnât have a smart phone until after I graduated high school, and only shared a flip phone with my brother the last few years of high school, so I missed out on that experience. it was a social handicap for sure.
-still needed to go to the school office or pay phone if I needed to call my mom. And I would need to have her number memorized.
-Cable TV was annoying So many commercials. So many reruns. you had to look up what was playing in a TV Guide: first a printed book, then a channel dedicated to it on Cable. Netflix started with mailing DVDsâI think 1 or 2 at a time. renting movies at blockbuster was still a thing, then Redbox. when DVR came around, it was HUGE. Finally could record a show to watch later, but only if the tv was on and it could only record one show at a time.
-midnight premiers at movie theatres
-game boy color and Nintendo DS were fun.
-2000s skinny culture was toxic af tho and there were many other not great things about 2000s but this was the WORST.
6d ago
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đEvery 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.Â
I played so many games on CD-ROM on a clunky beige monitor attached to a giant tower running Windows 98âa lot of my parentsâ 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 uponâI 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 Kohlâs dressing room when I was like 12 and crying as I tried on increasingly larger pants sizes because my butt wouldnât 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 couldnât 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 wasnât 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 wouldnât go back and my nostalgia is usually only in passing. This is controversial but I donât 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 soâŚ
I played so many games on CD-ROM on a clunky beige monitor attached to a giant tower running Windows 98âa lot of my parentsâ 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 uponâI 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 Kohlâs dressing room when I was like 12 and crying as I tried on increasingly larger pants sizes because my butt wouldnât 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 couldnât 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 wasnât 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 wouldnât go back and my nostalgia is usually only in passing. This is controversial but I donât 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 soâŚ
6d ago
Rec
đI saw somebody else respond in this format so Iâm going to provide my misc memories from being 6-16 in the 2000s:
⢠frying an egg on the sidewalk/asphalt/car hoods with kids from my apartment complex because we were convinced it was that hot out ⢠watching SpongeBob seasons 1-3 on repeat ⢠watching mtv after school and always having a talk show or pbs queued up on the âprevious channelâ button so if my mom came home I could quickly look like I was watching Ellen or Oprah or cyberspace all along (mtv shows were so raunchy) â˘you had to watch vh1 for anything music related ⢠catalogs!!! i would do all my âscrollingâ in limited too catalogs and then dig through racks at tj maxx to find similar things my mom could actually buy â˘teen mags for the quizzes ⢠driving around with my mom listening to her cds while she smoked and ran errands (honestly this still holds up today/ I keep it alive in my own ac-less suv) ⢠beanie babies and being called out if you had fakes ⢠listening to radio Disney on my boom box before bed â˘riding my bike aimlessly when I had nothing else to do â˘walking to the gas station with my $5 allowance and buying Sobe, now n later, tgi Friday potato skins, and cherry vanilla coke â˘I also got in trouble a lot for wandering off or smoking rolled up sticky notes or vandalizing storage units with âbrat girlâ or something so y2k â˘I remember my outfits so wellâŚ. Many cheeky graphic tees, ringer tees, layered tanks, peasant skirts, stripes, capris, platform sneakers, chokers â˘redesigning my MySpace every weekend â˘changing my aim screen name with the seasons â˘being bullied by boys in middle school, over aim or getting prank called â˘when I got a cell phone I never remember charging it, but I do remember trying to break my Nokia brick because I wanted a razr or a chocolate, but it was truly indestructible â˘listening to mix cds in friends cars as they began to drive because nobody had an aux cord or Bluetooth â˘2008-2010 weâre really dark so Iâll spare you more details
⢠frying an egg on the sidewalk/asphalt/car hoods with kids from my apartment complex because we were convinced it was that hot out ⢠watching SpongeBob seasons 1-3 on repeat ⢠watching mtv after school and always having a talk show or pbs queued up on the âprevious channelâ button so if my mom came home I could quickly look like I was watching Ellen or Oprah or cyberspace all along (mtv shows were so raunchy) â˘you had to watch vh1 for anything music related ⢠catalogs!!! i would do all my âscrollingâ in limited too catalogs and then dig through racks at tj maxx to find similar things my mom could actually buy â˘teen mags for the quizzes ⢠driving around with my mom listening to her cds while she smoked and ran errands (honestly this still holds up today/ I keep it alive in my own ac-less suv) ⢠beanie babies and being called out if you had fakes ⢠listening to radio Disney on my boom box before bed â˘riding my bike aimlessly when I had nothing else to do â˘walking to the gas station with my $5 allowance and buying Sobe, now n later, tgi Friday potato skins, and cherry vanilla coke â˘I also got in trouble a lot for wandering off or smoking rolled up sticky notes or vandalizing storage units with âbrat girlâ or something so y2k â˘I remember my outfits so wellâŚ. Many cheeky graphic tees, ringer tees, layered tanks, peasant skirts, stripes, capris, platform sneakers, chokers â˘redesigning my MySpace every weekend â˘changing my aim screen name with the seasons â˘being bullied by boys in middle school, over aim or getting prank called â˘when I got a cell phone I never remember charging it, but I do remember trying to break my Nokia brick because I wanted a razr or a chocolate, but it was truly indestructible â˘listening to mix cds in friends cars as they began to drive because nobody had an aux cord or Bluetooth â˘2008-2010 weâre really dark so Iâll spare you more details
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â°No screen Sundays. If I want to listen to music its CDs or radio. If I want to watch a movie, no I donât. If I want to see a friend, I will make plans with them on Friday or Saturday to meet up. As a result, I read more, write more, and sit with questions like âdid Citizen Kaneâs 50 year winning streak in the Sight and Sound critics choice survey end in 2012 or 2022? When did Stephen Merritt come out? Whats the etymology of Whitsun?â
This is something that I have practiced off and on for many years but Iâve been doing it every week since December and I love the way that it just allows me one day of true freedom and rest.
This is something that I have practiced off and on for many years but Iâve been doing it every week since December and I love the way that it just allows me one day of true freedom and rest.
Jan 22, 2025
Mar 3, 2025
Rec
My calendar this year has 52 of these week at a glance pages but I donât think that way. So, I've been inspired by Ross Gayâs Book of Delighs to start recording the little moments and sensations that bring me joy throughout the day. An analog pi.fyi, if you will.
heres some of what I have so far:
- Waking up to the sound of my upstairs neighborâs footstep. It sounded nostalgic. Felt like company.
- Strawberry jam
- feeling tender for strangers: their lips, nail colors, their small wrists. Thinking of all the lives we hold gently.
- A young girl bought an LP at the bookstore just before I left. She stroked its cover with love
- Green tiles âthe mint shade always makes me think of Jancie
- Charlieâs little bop and punch dancing to some German language punk - lunch with Katherine, curry Brussels sprouts
- small talk at the photo studio. The photographer's brother was named after their dad, stole his identity, bought jet skis.
heres some of what I have so far:
- Waking up to the sound of my upstairs neighborâs footstep. It sounded nostalgic. Felt like company.
- Strawberry jam
- feeling tender for strangers: their lips, nail colors, their small wrists. Thinking of all the lives we hold gently.
- A young girl bought an LP at the bookstore just before I left. She stroked its cover with love
- Green tiles âthe mint shade always makes me think of Jancie
- Charlieâs little bop and punch dancing to some German language punk - lunch with Katherine, curry Brussels sprouts
- small talk at the photo studio. The photographer's brother was named after their dad, stole his identity, bought jet skis.
Jan 13, 2025