What It Was Like to be a Teenager in the 2000’s Part 2

This post is continued from Part 1. Learn more or reminisce about what it was like to be a teenager in the early 2000’s.

Listening to the radio

As a teen, you start to hang out in your room a lot more. I would spend hours alone in my room, listening to my CD’s or scrolling through the FM channels on the radio. In the late 90’s, I mostly listened to the pop music stations. But once I got to high school, I discovered the rock/alternative station which introduced me to some of my favorite bands of all time.

I made mixed tapes for my friends, using my state-of-the-art stereo system to record songs from the radio and our CDs onto blank cassette tapes. Listeners would call in to request our favorite songs. I never did that, but I once tried to call in to win Blink-182 tickets. Caller 10 was the winner. I was caller 9.

We didn’t download music onto iPods yet. Some kids had MP3’s. I brought my Sony Walkman to school and listened to it on the bus everyday. Each morning, I’d select a CD and listen to it straight through. My most requested birthday and Christmas gifts were CD’s. I’d only get a handful each year. So, I had to be choosy and would flip through the Best Buy and Circuit City ads to try to determine which ones I wanted.

I would get hooked on a certain album and play it nonstop until I received the next batch. I came to love the more obscure songs over the hits. It made me very possessive of my favorite bands. If someone told me they were also a fan but then went on to name their most popular song as their favorite, it would infuriate me to no end like the snobby fan that I was.

Passing notes

I didn’t get my first cell phone until my first year of college. Even then, it was a prepaid track phone from Virgin Mobile that I used only for emergencies. I didn’t even get texting for my flip phone until I was long out of college. So, I was one of the last generations to pass notes in class.

I loved when my friends handed me notes in the hallway. The lined notebook paper was meticulously folded into origami shapes with my name on the front and written in several different colored gel pens. Most would start with some version of “Waz Up??? Nuttin’ much here!!!” Then, it would go on to talk about how bored they were in class or how they couldn’t wait to talk at lunch. Rarely did they contain anything of substance, but that didn’t make them any less exciting to receive.

Technology

Going to the movies, passing handwritten notes, and listening to the radio makes it sound like the 2000’s were more like the 1900’s. But we had actually entered the digital age. We just couldn’t take it everywhere we went yet. When I was in high school, cell phones were still for rich kids. A select few attached pagers to their saggy pants.

My family bought its first computer in 1996. It was mostly used for typing up school reports and playing games on CD Roms like Math Workshop and Gizmos and Gadgets. But then, when I was in high school, my family got a new computer complete with an Internet account and our family email account via MSN. We actually signed up for the Internet with the computer salesperson at Best Buy. He set us up in the store and then sent us home to figure out how to hook it up and get online. My parents still use that email address to this day.

The Internet came through the phone line. This meant that every time we signed in, it cost a phone call and tied up the phone line. While my parents didn’t mind the phone being tied up day and night, they didn’t want us signing on and off several times a day. So, we’d have to pass the shared computer off to each other. We’d put out a call: “who wants to use the computer?” That would send three other kids scrambling for it.

Instant messenger and message boards

There was no social media at first. In the 90’s, we called each other on our landlines. Then, AIM was born. We made plans with our friends to get online on the same time and chat live.

I remember the rush of hearing the sound of a door opening followed by footsteps to indicate that a friend from my contacts lists had just jumped online. Everyone had personalized screen names, usually the name of their favorite band, TV show, or sports figure followed by a combination of numbers that may or may not have some significance.

While you were chatting, you would browse online. I loved looking at different movie sites. There was no YouTube, but there were .wav files featuring audio clips. Many of the bigger sites would include video clips. With dial up, it would take at least a half hour to download a movie trailer. But you could just keep chatting with your friends while you waited for it to load.

Then, message boards started to emerge. There were message boards for every subject. If you felt lonely, here was a community of people who shared your common interests. I soon became addicted to a site called The Tim Burton Collective where people discussed their favorite Tim Burton movies. I read through the forum threads everyday, commenting and even creating several of my own.

While social media feels like a place to compare your life with others, these message boards felt more inclusive and interactive. We used Avatars as photos and didn’t even have to share our real names if we didn’t want to. Incidentally, this anonymity provided the freedom to be yourself.

Internet friendships and relationships

Eventually, you’d start private messaging with the strangers who you met online. Then, you’d exchange screen names so that you could chat live on AIM. This was before the Catfish documentary came out. You trusted that you were talking to who you thought you were talking to.

If you wanted to send a picture, you had to have a scanner and scan in a hard copy to your computer and hope it wasn’t too large to go through. It could freeze up your messenger and keep you from chatting. So you often decided to keep things faceless.

Sometimes, you’d hit it off with someone from out of state and declare yourself in a relationship with this cyber SO. Your dates consisted of nightly online chats. I had a friend who “dated” a boy from another state. Their love was so real that, except to go to school, she didn’t come out of her room for years. I don’t think they ever met in person.

If you were really brave, one of you would buy a phone card at the grocery store. Then, you’d call them up long distance to chat for however long your minutes lasted. It was awkward, but at least it made your internet boyfriend feel real. And you always vowed to meet in person one day.

How stupid was that? And thus started the age of living on the Internet. It was a place where the world was what you made it. And it was populated only with people who you felt were worth your time.

Geek culture

Thanks to the Internet, we geeks got to see that we weren’t alone in our obsessions. It made us feel more normal, and it gave us a lot of facts to learn and share. Because of this, we became film experts, book critics, and opinionated about everything. The entertainment industry began to pay attention to our opinions, and big franchises started to emerge from what were previously thought to be nerdy stories and ideas.

Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchises all came to fruition in my teen years. Hollywood took over comic-cons. People started calling themselves “nerds” endearingly. Uncool was cool. It was like we were living in The Matrix.

For some reason, The Nightmare Before Christmas suddenly became cool to obsess over during my senior year of high school. Hot Topic started to sell merchandise like it was 1993, and people spoke of it like it had just been released.

A scarier world

I graduated from high school in 2004. So, my teen years were coming to an end when we were barely halfway through the decade. After 9/11, the DC Sniper, the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, the war in Afghanistan, and numerous school shootings, starting with Columbine in 1999, we had had seen a lot, and the world was a scary place.

The 90’s had seemed so mellow in comparison. Maybe we were too young to notice, but even as a kid, I was a news junkie, and I don’t remember being so horrified by the news back then, at least not so frequently.

We were heading into college not realizing that we were heading towards a major economic crisis that was really going to mess up the job marketing just as we were walking into it. We’d had it jammed into our heads that we needed to go to college in order to do well in life, and instead, college debt ruined more lives than it helped. Every grade had a handful of graduates who enlisted in the armed forces. Most came back battered, broken, and often suicidal. Some people who I passed in the hallways everyday at school are now buried in the local military cemetery.

Others succumbed to the opioid crisis, despite being raised in the era of the DARE and SADD programs. We learned about how bad drugs were from an early age. Yet many former classmates and celebrities still managed to get hooked on them and not live to see their 30^th birthday.

How the world sees us

Many of us were given legitimate childhoods full of enriching activities to participate in, trips to go on, and organizations to join. But somehow, we still ended up bitter and depressed adults, feeling like we aren’t good enough, weakened from panic attacks, and medicated in some attempt at living a functional life.

We’re called entitled, spoiled, and whiny. Maybe if our childhoods had been harder and we would have been more responsible in our teen and young adult years, we’d be better people. Our society perceives us as one giant stereotype, disregarding the individual trauma, neglect, pressure, and abuse that was hidden behind the Sears portraits and participation trophies. It diminishes those who tried their hardest and still didn’t get what they wanted out of life.

Our parents who sacrificed or worked to make sure their kids didn’t struggle like they did didn’t take into account the fact that life happens. They didn’t account for the fact that there are more deciding factors over a person’s happiness than their upbringing. That maybe they righted some wrongs from their own childhood but also made new mistakes that they hadn’t accounted for.

How I see younger generations

My goal as an adult is not to degrade the teens who grew up in the 2010’s and the ones coming into their teen years in the 2020’s. They have their stereotypes like any other generation. But you can’t judge them all based on this one vision. They may live on their phones, dress weird (to me), and be stingy about what they put into their bodies while open minded about what they put onto their bodies. What they find funny and what occupies their time is foreign to me.

But like all of the rest of us, their generation is going to encompass a mix of personalities, interests, faults, and strengths. They’re going to right some of our wrongs while making new mistakes. They’re going to do a lot of good and a lot of bad, just like the rest of us.

There’s a reason why the world didn’t end on Y2K. And while my generation was the first to grow up in this new millennium, we certainly weren’t the last. But we definitely set the tone for the transition to this futuristic age. And that’s something to be proud of.

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