Ask Lemmy

The housing crisis and recession was in full swing, and my wife had to close her retail business as a consequence. Shitty times, but absolute bliss compared to today.

Oh wow! Has. It ben that long already? In 2008 I had just graduated from software engineering and started my first career job. It took me months before I found a job because of the economic crash. And when I found one, the pay was shit. Cost of living wasn't as high though so it was ok.

Nonooonoonoonoono. People born in 2008 are NOT 18 years old! This was just a couple of years ago!

I was 18 in 2008 so this feels really weird because back then it felt like the year I was born was ages ago (it was in a different millennia though).

In college, watching the industry I was getting a degree in tank (and many others). I chose the field in part because of historically good job stability and 95%+ job placement after college. That all evaporated. Folks who should have been retiring were having to work longer, leaving no room for fresh college grads.

I hope this AI crap resolves down to a more stable level. I'm concerned the folks in college now will have it even worse between another generational bubble working it's way through and now AI making things more "efficient" so fewer humans are perceived as necessary.

I was still a high-school student. Got baptized and confirmed in 2008. Bought an iMac from the gift money and became a bit of an Apple fanboy for a while. I've since left the church and no longer like Apple.

I was in Guangzhou, China.

I vaguely remember the hype around Bejing Olympics, but I never cared about sports so... eh... don't remember much of the actual thing, only the hype around it.

I was... um... 6 years old?

In 1st grade, public schools didn't allow me and my brother because we did noy not have a Guangzhou Hukou so we went to some privately-run school that my parents had to pay out of pocket, which according to mom, it was worse than public schools.

We lived in some apartment in a... kinda... "slum" part of the city.

Parents was either working all the time or was looking for work all the time. Didn't get to see them too often.

Maternal grandmother was at home to watch us.

No internet, no sure if because of our neighborhood not having it or because of money issues...

But we did have some paid subscription cable(?) tv thingy... so that was all the entertainment there was... a lot of um... I think kids cartoons(?) memory is kinda blurry.

So I'd walk to school with... usually grandmother, but sometimes, very rarely, one of my parents that somehow had free time. Probably dad because he didn't have a stable job... but I don't remember much.

No free lunch in schools, so you either paid for lunch or you went home for lunch...

I remember just walking home by myself for lunch time, cuz grandma thought it was fine? Cuz nobody would kidnap me in broad daylight right? Right? (👀 mom told me about the supposed "lots of kidnappings" in China, idk how serious that actually is tho)

Its like 5 flights of stairs to the small apartment unit, I don't think this building meets western building safety codes lol.

So I had lunch at home, then go back to school like approx 1 hour later.

Then finish the rest of the school day and go back home, for dismissal, there was always someone was there to pick me up, either grandma or dad or rarely mom. I remember mom always warning me to never trust a stranger that claims to be picking me up. Cuz apparantly there's a lot of kidnappers. That "stranger danger" thing terrified me lol

Don't think I ever remember hearing Cantonese (the lingua franca and "dialect" of Guangzhou) used in school, not by peers, no one. Its all jusr Mandarin

Teachers had meter sticks to "discipline" "misbehaving" students

The schools used blackboards and you write with chalk. There were no smartboards anywhere to be seen. No projectors.

All instruction just using this small student handbooks that each student had their own, and teacher wrote stuff on the blackboard to teach things.

I think summers we go back to our ancestral village? Dad and mom were from different villages and I think usually I go to my mom's village, cuz that's where my maternal grandmother lives.

Mom told me that my maternal grandfather took me to the stores and he'd buy ice cream for me... but I don't remember lol

In Guangzhou, I remember sometimes, my parents took us to the McDonalds near us, but its more like a "vibe" memory, don't remember much about the food or the taste of food, its over a decade ago. But I remember having ice cream.

I vaguely remember this one school trip... to idk where lol... all I remember was being on the bus and I think I threw up... car sickness lol... we didn't have a car and so I don't get used to it.

I think its either this year or 2009 that I had the incident of my older brother (5 years older than me for context, its not a fair fight due to age difference) fighting me then I ran away from home for a few hours... was so scary to be alone in the city for a few hours... still traumatized...

I remember the malls...

I remember being at that store and asking my parents to buy stuff...

this one time I ask them to buy these board games so I can play with my brother... (yes that same brother that want to fight with me all the fucking time)

I remember the metro system... the platform safety door thing was so fascinating to me...

...that's all I remember on the top of my head right now. I think that one traumatic memory kinda casted a lot of "fog" the blurriness of the memory, and my family leaving that city and the country altogther made it so much easier for my brain to just repress most of it...

Edit: Also I had zero friends... :( So yea I basically spent my early childhood with my sort of abusive older brother... 😭

Edit2: Lol, fixed phrasing mistakes that I just realized after this comment has been up for hours

Happy Birthday.

Only one person mentioned Obama, so I'll put it in.

2008 was only 40 years after MLK was killed, so you had a lot of people who'd seen him when he was alive. I knew people who didn't want to watch on election night because they were so fraught. They couldn't even believe he'd gotten as far as he had.

I was working in downtown Brooklyn, in an area with a lot of Black people. The most you saw was the occasional poster, and he was usually part of a group with MLK, Malcolm X, and other icons. I never saw any of the giant flags that Trump lovers fly.

This is another thing I noticed. In the Bush years you'd see a lot of skulls in fashion; in the Obama years there were more peace signs. That's my personal experience in NYC, so take it with a grain of salt.

The first half of 2008 was okay. I was a year into having my own place, was dating a lot, and traveling multiple times a year. Going on your first solo vacations as a young adult is a pretty dang cool thing.

I was still new in my career and was building my adult life. I had a job lined up in Chicago, but it was with a financial company, and the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman, and the whole economy got the offer pulled that September.

I remember being very excited for the election. I actually got to go see Michelle Obama give a speech in the jazz district here in Kansas City, and the line to see Barack Obama speak at his Liberty Memorial campaign stop was so long they had to cut it off for security reasons. We sat on one of the hills and listened to the speech, and he was elected by a large margin.

In hindsight, 2008 was the last year I had any real hope for the future.

Obama was supposed to be the Anti-Dubya, but he turned out to be a conservative fascist too. The banks were rewarded with bailouts and bonuses for crashing the economy, and to this day, only one person's gone to prison for it. I now just assume each new year will be incrementally worse than the last, which while bad for my mental health, has been great for my financial planning.

I entered undergrad. My dad had a massive accident. I turned 18 and in retrospect, I started feeling suicidal that year. Yeah, overall, it was a pretty bad year for me.

I'm 16. My dad gave me his old Ranger, so I can drive my friends to Taco Bell (most of them just jumping in the bed) for our lunch break. Bean burritos cost $.89, so I eat one of those for lunch since it's cheap enough that I can buy one almost every day as long as I keep stealing pocket change from the dish in my parents closet. My high school adopted an IB program into it in order to boost failing test scores, so I'm pulling up to the Taco Bell parking lot in the US South, and out of my bed jump 2 black kids from the hood, a chinese kid, an indian kid, and a gay guy - like some kinda after school special.

Or sometimes we would drive over to the Publix, where I would buy a loaf of bread, then walk over to the tables outside the Starbucks in the same strip mall and eat it with other friends who had got a coffee. I remember feeling like both of these things - bread that actually had some texture to it, that wasn't pre-sliced, and buying coffee from a shop that only sold coffee - were very fancy. A taste of an exciting world that was breaking through the boring, prefabricated, and onerously corporate life I'd been cloistered in for too long.

In class, I half listen to my teachers drone on while desperately trying to do the homework for my next class which is due next period - I'm a huge procrastinator. Actually, this seems to be one of the main things my classmates and I bond over - our habits of chronic procrastination and sleep deprivation.

In a break between classes, I find a water fountain and awkwardly tilt my plastic 1L nalgene bottle to the side to fill it. I still remember people saying that buying bottled water like Dasani was dumb and weird since "you can get water for free from the tap". Carrying a reusable water bottle around with you and refilling it is a fad that is just a few years old - but I've adopted it because I've sworn off all soda for more than two years now. This makes me weird, but I don't care, because I've been slowly losing the weight that made me a fat kid in middle school. Ironically, we would find out a few years later that the plastic in that bottle might cause cancer.

After school, I head to swim practice. I don't like swimming. I'm not good at it. I dislike how cold the water is every day, the smell of chlorine, the constant lack of air, and the boredom of staring at a black line on the floor of the pool. But I need to participate in some sport to get my IB degree, which will get me a college scholarship, and my sister was on the team so I defaulted to it. And anyway, at least it's not the football team where I would be bullied to no end. And I get to look at girls in swim suits. And think about what if one of them could maybe, possibly, someday, impossibly, like me.

After school, I drive home. Looking back, I regret this choice, since I could have gone anywhere else and done anything else with that time - and home was always where I was most miserable. But I'd had the habit built in, so I guess it never occurred to me. Once I got home, I would play video games or fuck around on the internet (I had a desktop pc in my room) until dinner. My folks usually worked late, so dinner for me was often, say, a frozen stouffer's meal heated up in the microwave. I might eat it while watching The Daily Show or the Colbert Report on the TV in the living room - probably my first foray into real political thought and current events.

Then it is time for bed. Or, it is the time when a reasonable person would go to bed. I spend that time endlessly scrolling the internet some more. Or playing my Xbox. Or reading fantasy novels late in the night until my mom pounds on my door and screams at me to go to sleep. So I turn out the light, wait 5 minutes, and then go right back to doing what I was doing.

Around 2 or 3 am, I get tired enough to want to sleep. And I lay down in bed and think about shit. About how I can stop being miserable all the time. About getting the fuck out of this house and this town. About how I can get girls to like me. And then I pass out, only to feel like I've been punched in the face a few hours later by the piercing bleet of my digital alarm clock.

So, yaknow. Some good, some bad

My first child was born that year. 🥲

That month I left active duty military after 11 years, moved my family, and got licensed in my home state to do my job. I had prepared quite a bit and had family help, but it was still a rough life transition for all of us.

By that spring when everything started to settle down and go a bit smoother, the housing crisis set in. Everything got more expensive quickly. I remember worrying I wouldn't be able to afford fuel for my long commute. I was terrified I wouldn't be able to support my family.

Somehow we held it all together, but it was a stressful fucking year. Despite all I never regretted leaving the military...it was either that or go back (again) to secure Halliburton's oil interests in Iraq.

I remember being very confident and optimistic. I had just started college, and nerd shit had just become the dominant force in our culture.

People were joining the internet and connecting via Facebook which I thought would lead to world peace.

Bush was out of office and Obama had won.

The iPhone meant I could use the internet and apps whenever I was.

Everything was becoming higher quality. The fast food restaurants were all remodeled to look like actual buildings. TVs in waiting rooms became all flatscreen, something I associated with the very wealthy.

Every brand was trying to copy apple so everything became a lot more white and clean. Simplified.

I had discovered reddit which felt like cheat codes for knowledge, especially since I was the only person I knew in real life who knew it existed.

I was in 8th grade, so it was much better than 2007. My 7th grade teacher liked the popular kids more and absolutely couldn't stand me, but my 8th grade teacher liked our outcast group more and vibed with me. She was an older teacher, so more skilled, but also I think their generation had a different perspective on weirdness. That was the first year I made online friends. My parents got through the crisis unscathed. Both rented, so no house lost, and neither lost their job. It definitely instilled the belief that I would graduate high school and fail to get a job, which never faded through high school. I would say that time reinforced the messages I received from the Iraq War era, that America was in decline and the old narratives are now false.

In 2008, Iron Man had just come out and blown everyone's minds. iPhones were still quite new, so was Facebook. Obama got elected and everyone was excited by the first black president, even here in Australia.

Happy birthday!

I was in high school and honestly having a great time. My friend group was pretty solid, I remember having a decent bunch of fun classes, and that was the first year I had a cell phone. Having a phone and a friend with a car meant that I was granted a lot more freedom.

My friend with the car would pick me up at 6am on the weekends and sometimes on school days and we'd go snowboarding, pushing each other to be better and to have fun. We did a lot together besides just that, and I spent a lot of time at her place, which was nice to get away from mine.

It was a good time :) I hope your teen years haven't been too fraught with all that is happening in the world and you're able to have your own freedoms and fun

"Why are you all concerned about boys? Have you heard the song Time to Pretend by MGMT? Why are you not concerned about the song Time to Pretend by MGMT? Do you not miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms????"

Feel bad for the kids today, at least older people can remember what hope felt like.

I voted in my 2nd presidential election that year.

Sadly, I was still just beginning the very first stages of realizing God is the biggest scam in the history of the universe, so I voted McCain.

There is a lot of my past I'm not proud of. But given that I didn't really have a lot of human contact outside of church members until I was almost 14, I gotta give myself a little slack. But it's still embarrassing af.

I finished high school in spring which was a true blessing. I had always been a good student (4th best in my year) but got bullied for being a nerd.

Over the summer, I worked as a programmer for a small game studio, making a Nintendo DS game that got cancelled by the publisher on the day we sent in the last release candidate because they finally noticed that their idea was crap and they should have accepted the changes we had proposed. Didn't matter, I had already been paid and got a lot of experience out of it.

In October, I started university which was a great chance to make new friends. By now I've lost contact with most of them but some are still around and I appreciate them a lot. I was lucky enough to already live close to the university so I could stay at my parents' house.

Through all of this, I was in the middle of my first serious relationship. My partner moved from across the country to a town just an hour away from me. Being able to see each other more often was amazing but at the same time it made things more complicated. We were constantly struggling with aligning our schedules, couldn't agree at whose place we should meet and got annoyed when one wanted to meet friends on a day the other would be free. We broke up in 2009 but we're still good friends.

It was pretty much the peak of a community that I'm still part of today. Apart from long online discussions, we met twice a year for community events with about 60-80 guests who decided that it's our turn to define what being a grown-up means. These events still exist (the last one was just a few weeks ago) but they've gotten smaller and some of that chaotic creativity has been lost forever.

Overall, 2008 may have been the start of one of the best sections of my life. I've never had more active friendships at the same time, before or after. I had many of the perks of being an adult without most of the drawbacks. I earned a bit of money and could keep most of it because university is cheap in my country and I didn't have to pay rent. If I had the chance (and could take a few people that I met later with me), I would probably go back.

Many old chaps ITT, heheh. I was 18 in 2008, graduating high school. Happy birthday OP.

What was it like ? lots of Halo3, lots of wanking,... lots of feeling lost too, as I was approaching the moment I had to make choices for myself.
It's hard to give a rundown really, as my grip on the world was waaay less firm than it is now, and I barely knew what was going on.
In mainland France we could consider ourselves blessed -but little did I know, not far from us, the Arab Spring was about to mount like mayonnaise. The US were still widely thought to be a bastion of democracy (or was it just my youthful naïveté?), Abe Shinzo had not been murdered yet and Iron Man had just released. Maybe they'll make more of these ? -political assassinations, I mean. Here's to hoping 🥂

It's when I went from a freelance perpetually broke dork to a full time and well paid dork with a career. That's also the year I met my now GF and mother of my children.

I was in elementary school, parents took me to Ron Paul rally which was pretty cringe. Reading Warriors books, watching Star Wars the Clone Wars, mascot for older sisters robotics team.

The east coast had a HUGE snowstorm. I was a kid. I remember building tunnels and igloos and having snowball fights with my siblings and friends. My younger brother was undergoing chemo. My parents were stressed about money. Obama won the presidential election and I cried, not understanding politics but only knowing that Obama was the option my parents didn't vote for.

I was stoned off my gourd so I hardly remember.

I was 21 in 2008. The cat in my profile pic, Oscar, was born in April that year, and I adopted her in June. She died of complications from kidney disease last July, at the age of 17. Time moves too fast.

College. Having fun with friends. Economy was crashing. Jobs, if you could find one, were trash. Democracy was still safe though. The dumbest members of society weren't dictating our future.

So just kind of a mix of fun and stressful, with less existential dread.

Juuuust out of college, perfectly in time for the housing bubble to burst and all the jobs evaporate.

In my late twenties, working the same job at the same Rite Aid store since 2003. I hated that job at that point; the latest person to get put in store manager position was an awful boss. I was taking classes at community college just hopping around trying to figure out what the hell I could do to move on to some other employment.

I ultimately did not quit that job until about six years later.

I never enjoyed my early years, I was consistently bullied at school and the school itself never made me feel challenged mentally. In a couple years I'd switch school which would let me to meet my first love and set my social health back up.

fucking awful. university was not going well, and I was alone and felt it. Depression was making everything worse.

2018 on the other hand... SABBATICAL TIME BABY best year of life

Drunk, got fired for being a drunk, sold plasma to get a daily McDouble and a couple 40s. Read library books until my landlord (wife of the woman who fired me) evicted me.

What a low time to look back on. So glad I got sober.

Part whirlwind, part most stability I've experienced in my life, and part adjusting to a new norm.

My life in the mid 00's was... Interesting. Mrs Canopyflyer and I met in 2004, got married in 2005, moved 400 miles for her job in 2006 and baby #1 was born in 2007.

So by 2008 I was getting used to:

1. Being a newish husband.

2. Being in a completely new city where I knew no one.

3. Being a new father.

My family were all still alive, and Garry's Mod was basically the greatest thing ever to me at the time.

2000-2013 were the best years of my life. Don’t get me wrong things were really good before 2000 for me but those 13 years were the best.

My wife and I had great jobs that gave us everything. Good money, fun work, great work life balance. Also we loved were we lived. Everything was great. We enjoyed our kid playing sports, Video Games were really taking off, we did an annual summer vacation to the Outer Banks of NC.

The three of us had really good circle of friends.

Things were just bliss.

I was in highschool and I begun to date my ex-girlfriend this year (she's now my wife).

A lot better than it is now

I was 29, single and back-packing in SE Asia, then Oz, working in dive bars, hostels and selling strawberries for beer money. It was a bizarre time in my life that I enjoyed tremendously.

Just got back from Alaska, my 2nd kid was born, my wife got her first job in her career field, had to vacate a house that I was rent to own due to a busted foundation and being at the bottom of the hill so got super flooded and found black mold in the basement. Played a crap ton of halo 3. Started work at a NOC after completing my associates. Wasn’t a terrible year just a couple snags. I think my wife became disabled from her maladies at the end of this year as well. Things got pretty scary in the following year for us.

I was in high school in France and had no idea what was happening on the stock market. I just heard from the news that there was something big going on. My main focus were my girlfriend (at the time) and my friends. I think I had my first parties with alcohol at that time. My grades kinda dropped around this time but I managed to turn it around the next years!