"Grew up and / or came of age in the 2000s" gang, where you at, fam?!?!?! 🥺🥺 (The 2000s decade discussion thread)

This thread is SPECIFICALLY (and ONLY) for people that grew up in the 2000s (so I guess people that are nowadays in their early to mid 30s, ig? Idk dawg don’t look at me I can’t math for the life of me…). If you have never, idk, lived even one year in the 2000s then click the Lemmygrad symbol at the top left hand corner of the screen (look, I know, it’s hard to find, but don’t worry, you can’t miss it!) so you can get to the main page. No exceptions * (oho, an asterisk (*) next to that last sentence? What could it mean? Chat, what did Makan mean by this?! Scroll down to find out…(Look, it’s not what you think it is))

Anyway

You may NOT join and / or participate and / or comment underneath and / or in any way, shape, or form interact or reference this thread outside of the actually, err, thread.*

Well, with that said…

Uhh

Fuck it, I’ll just ask it:

Who here remembers the 2000s?

And who here grew up or maybe even hit the age of 18 in said decade?

Perhaps you vaguely remember the 1990s or even the year 2000.

Well, I have honestly been wondering about that decade now.

Such a WEIRD decade.

Arguably the apex of the “end of history”-type thinking that was basically inculcated into most of us at an early age.

I would even venture to say that it may very well be one of the darkest decades in human history (and may have in the end fucked up many of whatever generation lived through it in the long run, even those that weren’t Gen Xers or Millennial or whatever Zoomer was born around the year 2000).

It was honestly a BIZARRE time when I look back on it.

Now, disclaimer:

My childhood was not fun AT ALL.

You can even see the mental effects of that right now.

I have had an extreme form of OCD that has survived due to this day, partly due to religious trauma (and usually in the form of, say, cross-posting multiple times for some reason or another).

My father was honestly a brutal narcissist and abuser. Abused my Mom for thirty or so years. Abused me for twenty or so years.

Didn’t help that I got into another abusive situation from around very late 2019 which ended about five years from then (not that people would in real life and especially online would notice or at least not immediately notice).

So I guess I may be biased or whatever.

Idk.

You can stop me if you think that I may be going too far in some of my observations.

But there are things that, when looking back, make the 2000s decade very surreal. I remember someone (who was basically a GenXer, was born around the late 1980s, I think) going like “You know, that decade was pretty weird when you think about it, huh?” (I’m probably butchering what was said, though I don’t think so; some of my recollections, even from the 2020s, are kinda crystal clear)

And the surreality and weirdness and - I would argue - sinister feeling or the atmosphere of the decade is certainly… Interesting to me since I never really cognisized it in my head when I lived through it but it certainly seems downright palpable to me even compared to the 2010s (for me personally, mind you).

(BTW, I use “sinister” to kinda mean “darkly weird, menacing, and surreal”)

First off, the movies were definitely different and arguably a bit… Innocent? I would even say innocent in a somewhat good way that I missed, not that we would appreciate it when we live in an era where art has to be “subverted” or “taken apart” or whatever. Also, a lot of “life-y” movies. Not sure what else to call those types of film. It’s not like it was really it’s own genre.

Also, I remember people really being kinda stupid and oblivious to stuff that they were ensnared in.

Even the George Lucas hatred seems almost astroturfed (it was definitely genuine though lol). The “George Lucas raped my childhood” phrase or meme, which I do remember people not only saying jokinngly but saying unjokingly and even dead-ass defending their usage of that meme in a very un-ironic way on Internet message boards whenever they were questioned for using it sometimes (with people even genuinely coming to such-and-such forumite’s defense, mind you). What interests me is that I enjoyed the prequels… But immediately started to hate them almost immediately after 2005. Why? Because everyone, especially the Gen Xers, kinda just said we just “didn’t understand” and we “were kids” and so couldn’t tell what was true cinema or whatever. And I believed it. They were older than me. The worst part is:

Looking back, it seemed other people around my age (say, 10 years old to 15 years old) wanted desperately to be accepted by Gen Xers, a generation that is arguably VERY cynical and even packages a lot of their cynicistic beliefs as, well, humor or “they’re just jokes, bro, get over it”

(Also, it’s not lost on me that Jon Stewart, the comedian that famously got booted from Comedy Central for questioning a NYT columnist or whatever on her trying to downplay the lies that led to the Iraq War, used that very same defense with Cramer and a few others too; now Stewart drumbeats for whatever war is popular now, go figure…)

But yeah, when you look at Gen Alphas now, they don’t even act like the previous generation before them “knows it all”

It’s a bit sad because I think that there definitely needs to be more respect for what came before and to build off of what came before (including from Gen Xers, boomers, the generation before boomers, whatever).

But is understandable and I really don’t blame them.

It’s also not lost on me that YouTubers nowadays, big YouTube channels even, seem to have that “white cishet male in their 40s, maybe 50s, with a beard or even just a neck beard that has really toxic, rightwing, and/or really contrarian opinions that are also somewhat popular because ‘they’re true but nobody wants to admit it’”-social type to them.

…Zamn, in a world where individualism rules, especially in the West, do we even know what a “social type” is? We barely even speak of personality types anymore!

It should be noted that the “cult of youth” -phenomenon or whatever one even calls it (“millennials are here to SAVE THE WORLD”) was definitely drilled in our heads during the 2000s and even 2010s.

We literally sang songs about it.

Even during DARE class, I think.

And looking back, it is essentially just boomers saying:

“Look, we fucked up, but hey, we’re retiring now so we’ll pass the buck to you, okay? You can DO IT. You can WIN. YOU. GOT. THIS.” (I’m honestly getting TFS Piccolo vibes here as I type this)

That… was something, even then, I kinda thought was putting way too much on my own abused shoulders lol

Speaking of Comedy Central…

Anyone remember this?

I 'member when the Libertarian Party folks at the High School debate club used to have shirts with this very same image on it (look, a lot of us had that phase, okay?! Yeesh, don’t @ me)

…The Libertarian Party folks in Virginia were also kinda weird.

They literally got arrested by police (and sometimes got into what would essentially be straight-up police brutality cases against, well, white folks). There were a lot of such clips of this happening on YouTube.

Honestly, at least the Libertarians then (as far as I remember, to be clear) actually were against Black people being murdered by jack-booted state troopers

The Libertarian folks in Virginia now are basically just round-about fascists (with an emphasis on being crypto bros, ironic humor, centrist-y bullshit, but also affinity for MAGAts or Donald Trump in various corners, at least depending on where you are, afaik). It’s not lost on me that many of them, like someone I knew in college, turned into neo-liberals (“the state is indeed a necessary evil to perpetuate capitalism” ) and then basically into MAGAts or outright fascists.

Even the ancaps look better compared to the ex-libertarians, ngl (also, am I the only one that keeps seeing them on social media and whenever I chance upon them in real life in, well, funny hats and headgear? No? Just me? Okay…)

Oh, btw, Libertarianism was definitely popular during the 2000s and early 2010s and not just capital-L libertarianism ahahaha

I really think that the Gary Johnson gaffe, the “What is Alleppo?” thing, actually hurt the libertarian cause at the time (because, as time went on, the Libertarians were kinda trying to paint themselves in a “dorky and weird but ultimately respectible” image; I wouldn’t even know how to exactly describe the aesthetic or imagery that they were going for back then or even now to a degree). My old college friend literally griped about that bit. He said that it didn’t make sense or it was very stupid. I… actually liked it? Especially since Gary Johnson was kinda making a point there, regardless of whether he even really knew anything about Alleppo or not (which, again, would be besides the point).

There were honestly a lot of mistakes and blunders made over the course of the Libertarian ascendence in popularity in places like Ohio, Virginia, Michigan even, etc. that honestly probably really did undermine their cause, looking back, though it was a bit hard to know it at the time.

Keep in mind “Internet tough guys” were especially rife in those days.

I actually feel that people were perhaps even more toxic than they are now (though I think that people are more depressed now and sometimes don’t know why and sometimes have “hidden depression” or even anhedonia, which can seep into their entire belief systems or worldviews). Keep in mind that the word “toxic” (at least how it is typically used now) wasn’t really used to describe, well, what we may have now in some Internet communities what was also the case back then for a lot of the Internet.

Also, I miss Web 1.0

I’m literally making an Internet forum (even kinda have it ready right now but haven’t really launched it yet) to revive some of that culture, you know?

I don’t like the infinite scroll feature (invented in 2007 but has definitely hit critical mass now)

I don’t like the lack of web pages on my websites or social media (and, thus, no boundaries)

Oh yeah, and web novels don’t end.

Web sites (especially socials) also don’t end now.

Coincidence?

Heh. I think not (gottem).

No, but seriously, I remember in the 2000s we wanted “more of it” but didn’t really know why and we kinda got “more of it” in the worst way possible (literally the web page in front of you going on and on into infinity; web novels never ending or having really any “break-off” point where the initial story ends and, if you want to come back some other time a decade later to see the sequel, you can; the 1980s films and cinema were kinda prized above all else and modern-day television was “trash” and so now we literally have sequels to them that don’t have anything really new; also, lots of nostalgia-bait referencing the 70s, 80s in particular, and 90s nowadays; etc.)

Now we literally don’t want more, at least some of us.

I do to some degree but it’s not more Star Wars at this time LMAO

I’m pretty sure we’re already doing 2000s nostalgia-bait but I am not going to look it up on DuckDuckGo now because seeing it confirmed would honestly depress me at this time lol

What else, what else can I mention in my stream of consciousness…

Ah yes

So, I’m Turkish.

People knew it. I knew it.

And I was bullied in school for being “Muslim.”

Didn’t help that I was also Latina.

The Islamophobia was honestly pretty rife back then.

When a new terrorist attack happened in Spain or France or Germany or what have you, every one in school talked about it.

A white supremacist who later joined the National Guard right after High School threatened to snap my neck and kill me and was very racist toward me.

But I also remember it being before 2014 (there was a big and much-talked about police shooting when it happened somewhere in the Midwest, I think, and you all probably know about it, but I remember it really kicking things off in regard to the Black Lives Matter and accountability movement for police officers and later the “Defund the Police” movement as well). The closest thing we had to that was the Trayvon Martin. I remember vividly on CNN and CBS them at first giving Trayvon the benefit of doubt but then, at one point, almost immediately shifting the blame to him and castigating him and his behavior before the murder. And I remember people even in my school going “I don’t get why the mainstream media is talking about this, Trayvon was a punk and / or a murderer”

The worst part is that, in the 2000s, you had people like Bill Cosby going on and on about “When are Black people going to fix their own problems and do some soul-searching about the violence they do” or whatever.

And it must have indeed been a gruesome thing to grow up with the media telling Black people over and over and over again “When are Black people going to have fathers in their families” or whatever.

Really abhorrent example of gaslighting there.

They just acted like “nobody is TALKING ABOUT THIS” and use the constant enforcement of social amnesia (now even worse than before in 2026) to your advantage.

An absolutely rancid and awful display of narcissistic abuse and gaslighting in action, folks.

I also remember Black folks and a lot of Latine or Latino folks talking about “rejecting violence” and “cleaning up their own neighborhood” or acting like they (or at least the punks in their community) were the major problem, not anyone else or any outside forces.

Honestly a bad thing to grow up with.

I felt less than others.

I felt like I had to perform more and more.

It was never enough.

That kinda changed in 2014, I remember (although the media seems to be making a big retreat on that front in regards to the topic). It was somewhat changing since Trayvon too and people remembered the Los Angeles uprising in the early 1990s.

But when I was threatened by that National Guardsman (he is probably still in there, or moved up, or somewhere else in the military, idk), I didn’t really have the language or even cognitive formulation to know what was happening and why it was happening.

People thought that racism was literally just saying the n-word.

People said all sorts of racist jokes to each other back then.

The very students or classmates in my school said that shit.

To each other.

And dared each other.

I was horrified each time but I kept a “mask” so nobody would notice (I am Autistic after all)

Didn’t help that people called me the r-word and others the r-word (I hated it and knew exactly who it was meant to refer to).

And you were expected to kinda do the same.

I never used it, thank fuck

Such bile would’ve over-stimulated me back then, not that I knew what it was.

I also never hated LGBTQ+ people AT ALL. Not even the “removed.” Especially not them. I had constant thoughts about being a girl.

But didn’t have the vocabulary or mental rubric to understand what was happening.

Also, the word “f***ot” was also rife then.

When it comes down to it, becoming an atheist was nothing to me in the end. Not even then. I was already an atheist by around age 10 and had those thoughts.

The Four Horsemen and New Atheism and “edgy atheists” were rife, by the way.

It means nothing to me now. I hated the Islamophobia from the New Atheists (which has only grown since then) but again kept a social “mask” and moved on.

I secretly hated Autism Speaks and what they did to other children, including children I knew or people in my own family or children of family friends.

I really did not like the “debate culture” which basically started then (and it makes sense that it would hit the ground running with social media and the Internet because, think about it, the West basically tells you that “if you debate with someone else, you will eventually arrive to a good enough conclusion on the matter and maybe convince other people” of stuff, idk).

I hope that I can now leave behind all that baggage.

(Also, I hated the fact that so many of the Muslims, Latine folks, etc. in my area (remember: Virginia) were in the CIA, FBI, NSA, some other alphabet-soup agency, etc. but whatever, it’s fucking Virginia, what are you going to do? Just really made it hard to sometimes relate to them considering that I knew back then what had happened to the Dominican Republic and Juan Bosch and all the others after that madman Trujillo was gone…)

Uhhh…

…This basically turned into a stream of consciousness, sorry :/

So, erm

1. What do you remember from the 2000s? What sticks out to you the most?

2. I guess what were your favorite movies or television shows from that era? Bonus points if you can name any “life-y” ones like Big Fish or whatever lol (or, what movies / television did you not like lol)

3. What stuff from the 2000s do you actually want to see come back?

Okay, I would still argue that the 2000s were a VERY DARK decade that people basically slept-walked through and didn’t realize it

But I also genuinely like a lot of the ideas behind Web 1.0

The culture was still bad then

But honestly?

The bad culture and discourse is kinda amplified now by the socials of today (Twitter, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, whatever)

4. Favorite memes?

(Lol whatever, it’s 2026, we reference memes now, get with the program for now lol)

5. What are the least talked about things in the decade that you are genuinely interested in?

6. Idk, maybe pose a question to yourself and answer it, idk

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• Sooooo… Okay, it was probably what you thought it was.

Yes, you absolutely can comment down below or talk about the topic in this OP (the 2000s; look, don’t be fooled by some of the trauma-dumping and venting and all that, it is basically about the 2000s and you can even kinda loop it back to how everyone was affected by it, even if they didn’t realize it at the time, but it is basically just talking about the 2000s)

Uh…

Yeah.

(I really should do stuff other than a parenthesis sometimes, smdh)

Discuss.

(Disclaimer: If you’re looking for the *, the one you should specifically be looking at (not the one you see in this disclaimer, don’t be fooled you chump!) is right after the bisecting line that I put up there (look, I know you have GAD and / or some undiagnosed panic disorder now, but look, you can’t miss it, stop freaking out on me (common it’s right THERE (I’m not panicking, you’re panicking!!)