If you are making a list for someone who is in prison from 2004 to 2009 trying to catch them up on pop culture in 2009. What would you include in that document?

I’m almost 21, but sometimes I feel like a Millennial at heart. My parents are 65 and 60, and my mom had me when she was 44. They raised me with a more old school perspective, so I sometimes feel like I have more in common with older people than people my age.
A lot of my peers have parents in their 30s or 40s, while mine are in their 60s. When I was growing up, people sometimes mistook my parents for my grandparents. That could be embarrassing, and it made me feel different from other kids. I’m grateful for my parents and the wisdom they’ve shared with me, but I had a different experience growing up.
I’m autistic, and I can find it hard to connect with some people my age. I have friends around my age and friends in their 30s, but I often feel like we grew up with different experiences.
Does anyone else feel this way? Do you think having older parents or being autistic affects which generations you relate to?

I've recently been chatting with teens about how they feel about today's world. It is quite obvious that the way they have been programmed in school that they are confused about making decisions on hard topics. As someone who was born 1980 raised on pop culture. Music had always led me to heal myself through lyrics and dance. I'm curious to ask the youth of today, what do you do when life gets hard? Being broke or heart ache? I'm thankful I had rap music to disconnect from the noise and plug into a different life

Not every career or job is going to be a fulfilling one, and that’s perfectly fine. Some jobs are just jobs, places to exchange your labor for money. You don’t need to be fulfilled at every single workplace, and not everyone is seeking fulfillment from a job. Some of us just want do to the 9-to-5, get a paycheck, and call it a day.

But for those of us who do find a degree of fulfillment in your career, what do you do and what’s it worth to you? How important is being “fulfilled” or “having purpose” in your career, and how does that balance with your material needs?

I’m over a decade into my career in environmental consulting, and have finally hit that level where I feel like my work matters and gives me a sense of purpose. Not to the degree where I’d substitute a healthy paycheck for it, but I wouldn’t consider doing something else for a marginal raise elsewhere.

Two years ago I quit wearing a smartwatch and went back to my mechanical watches. Since then I've been watching the wrists of people my age and have seen a reduction in watches with screens to more traditional watches.

Have you noticed this or have you made the switch yourself?

Sorry if that headline felt like clickbait, does anyone struggle to find the energy or the will to make themselves food? So you end up living off of takeout or fast food? I can cook okay, but I struggle to get myself to make food at home. Part of it may be years ago I stopped being able to have dairy and now I have a difficult time figuring out what to make that doesn’t involve milk or cheese, but I’ve been this way a lot of my life, I think.

Have we gotten any better?

We’re technically the last year of millennials and (could be my biases speaking but) because of that I feel like because of that we are such an iconic generation. We really lived and saw it all and still remember the first cell phones and life before them. Obviously some millennial stuff was before our time but I feel like (especially those of us that had older siblings) still grew up millennial.

I’m curious about this because I was born into the age of the Internet now whenever I have a question I can just go to Google or YouTube.

If you didn’t know where to start looking, or the information you needed wasn’t available in the sources you had access to, how would you go about learning something?

And when the internet became more widely accessible, were there specific things you’d always wanted to learn but suddenly found easier to explore because the information was available online? Or do you still primarily learn things offline, even now?

I understand that lots of people are Christian, but I don’t think any other genre as predictably promotes Christianity as horror. If it’s about Ghosts or Demons, it’s pretty much always presented from a Christian understanding of Spirituality. Even if it doesn’t directly mention God or Jesus Christ, it’s always showing you that people either go to a wonderful place full of light after they die or to a dark, painful place if they were bad, OR they’re stuck here and haunting people for this, that, or the other reason. If there is a non-human Spirit involved, It is invariably evil and needs to be exorcised. The “Insidious” series is one of the few I have seen that doesn’t stick a cross in your face at some point, but as a general rule, this is just my observation. Has anyone else noticed this? Cuz it’s kind of boring, honestly. This continent is ANCIENT. There’s a lot of Native American material that can be drawn upon for horror, and of course there’s a lot of different people here now other than Christians and there’s a lot of Pagan and Occult stuff that could be done with horror too. I loved “Hereditary” too, even though it represented Paimon as some grotesque, head-hunting monster.

Summer 2016 i was just 19 playing Pokemon Go.

How did time pass so fast

For those elder millennial ailments.

edit: recent*

Can we all agree that The Faculty is the de facto Millennial cult classic of our generation? Let's do a quick rundown:

Elijah Wood

Josh Hartnett

Jordana Brewster

Usher

JOHN FUCKING STEWART

The guy that played the T1000

Edit: Also Shooter McGavin and Salma Hayek

This movie has it all. Not to mention the intro music is a song by The Offspring.

Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer can fuck off, they pale in comparison to... The Faculty

This was a massive thing in the US - I remember a home makeover show focused on this, as well as articles from the CDC and weather channel. I'd love to hear about others who remember this too.

I was doom scrolling through YouTube just now and came across a short that the final members of Gen Y (the original designation of Millennials) are either 30 or turning 30 by the end of the year. I’m on the other end of the generation (mid 40s) and find it both interesting and humbling that there’s people whom would’ve had their 10 year high school reunion at the same time as others having their 25 year reunion and still be in the same generation.

Unless you were living on the moon in 1998, you couldn’t avoid hearing the song “Sex and Candy.” It was everywhere. The song was so popular the band actually had an accountant dedicated to managing the revenue generated by that tune alone. The band still collects decent royalties from it. Hell, even Maroon 5 recorded a popular cover.

Sadly, everyone now remembers them as a one-hit wonder. It was the hit that doomed the band because, let’s face it, they were never going to live up to that level of commercial success and cultural significance. In fact, very few artist could match that performance going forward. From what I read, the band has similar feelings about their success stemming from “Sex and Candy.”

It’s worth going back and listening to that whole self-titled album. It’s a banger—“Poppies,” “Saint Joe on the School Bus,” “Sherry Fraser,” “Opium” were all great songs. But the group was relegated to one-hit wonder status even before the new millennium. They released their sophomore album in 1999, but hardly anyone noticed. Same goes for their subsequent records. And while they continued to tour—and apparently still do—you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who is familiar with anything in their catalog beyond “Sex and Candy.”

I think they deserve a proper revival.

I grew up with a dog and we always loved and treated her extremely well (especially at the time) but I think times have changed a lot and even my parents comment on how differently they treat and much more they spend on their current dog compared to our childhood one (and feel bad about it). I view my own dog like a child and there is nothing and no amount i wouldn’t spend on him.

I feel like our generation really changed the norm and I love that for us.

We are old enough to remember how the world was prior to the recent technological milestones (internet, powerful computing, social media, smart phones), and--maybe more critically--we are young enough to understand the current tech and its implications and risks.

I'm generalizing here, but consider this: the younger gens simply don't know what that old world was like, and the older gens have issues understanding and adapting to new world: scams, (especially AI-driven scams), higher gullibility towards AI-generated content, etc.

From a social perspective, allowing AI to generate images of physical matter existing in our universe was a mistake. This gave us the ability to produce alternate reality: people, animals, scenes, backgrounds, landscapes and other things that do not exist in this world. Then we give this ability to virtually everyone in the world, and to no one's surprise, it's going to get used for all sorts of nefarious reasons.

We (society) are at a point where we have to question whether an image or a video we see is real and we have to do that multiple times every day. It's exhausting.

A basic foundation of human societal (social?) trust has been eroded as a result of all this, and no one knows how this impacts all of us, but we are seeing now that it does.

I have recently gotten back into journaling. One of the things I like to do, is when I get a fortune from a fortune cookie that really speaks to me; I tape it in my journal and then write my reflection on how/why I found that relevant. And so, this led me to create a section of my journal full of my favorite quotes that I can refer back to.

So, I am just curious if anybody has a quote tattooed on themselves, a post it note on the mirror or just a mental note they go back Rob of a quote that really impacted you, and wanted to hear your story.

As an ADHD Millennial, I struggle with being in the present moment, so whenever I need to pull myself away from a distraction and back into the present, I think of a quote Sal Vulcano said on his Podcast “Hey, Babe”. He was definitely quoting someone else, but there is something comforting about hearing it in his voice, but the quote was “it’s called the present, because it’s a gift”, and it is so simple, and cliché, but I find it really helps me sometimes.

I WISH I was 35 again 😭

Let’s be honest: we don’t read or understand everything we’re signed up for.

I’m 37 and had the distinct and incredibly naive pleasure of finding out that dental insurance maximums are a joke if you run into ANY problem outside of a couple cavities, 2x yearly cleanings, and 1x x rays.

I needed an emergency root canal with a crown. The thought of, “But I have dental insurance,” crossed my mind ….. but then I saw my MAX benefit for the year was $2000.

I’m just glad I can eat / drink again, but $2000 OOP was ooooooof.

Disclaimer since people can't read: This is NOT a "omg we look like teenagers post"

I'm still convinced that people age a lot more slowly than they used to (again for the 100th time, NOT saying we look like teenagers but people don't seem to age as harshly as they used to). Drinking water, using sunscreen, not having 7 kids by the time you're 25, and not having a diet of Marlboro Reds and Jack Daniels will certainly do wonders for your skin and your overall vitality.

However, I also noticed something very interesting about how adults my age behaved in the 90s vs today. I will say this probably depends on where you live, but I remember adults being a lot more formal. They tucked their shirts in, they addressed each other as Mr. or Mrs. if they weren't close, shook hands even outside work, dressed conservatively, and didn't use slang or colloquialisms. A 35 year old guy going "sup bro" and giving you a fist bump wouldn't be too weird now, but that would be extremely unusual back then.

Now, I feel like we express ourselves a lot more casually. You'd be hard pressed to find a group of 30-somethings who address each other using formal titles or dressing business casual outside work. There's no longer an age limit for having a sense if style (sometimes I still buy from the junior section because the whole timeless look just doesn't speak to me), and there's less pressure to abandon all the hobbies you enjoyed when you were younger.

Anyway, these are just personal observations so they may not resonate for everyone. I'd like to hear your thoughts!