There is little as humbling as being told that the clothes you wore in your teens are now considered bona fide vintage. Miss Selfridge tops that I coveted from Just 17 magazine and skater jeans I bought in Hairy Legs on Liffey Street would now make up an enviable “thrift haul” on TikTok. Nothing catches the breath in my throat more than realising “turn of the century” string tops and platform runners are back in fashion. How am I, a youthful and vital millennial, witnessing teens and 20-somethings basically cosplaying as me and my friends when I myself am barely out of my 20s*?
This delusion (*I’m in my early 40s) feels inextricably linked to the turn of the millennium. It really did a number of us in terms of time distortion. That gorgeously round number – 2000 – is embedded in the brains of people of a certain age as a modern and tech-savvy time. We feared that with Y2K the computers would become sentient and try to recruit our microwaves and curling tongs into their microchip armies.
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When that didn’t happen, we leant more and more into embracing the internet and mobile phone technology. In the first 10 years of the 2000s, we had iPhones, flat screen TVs, online shopping, social media, reality TV and though the versions of those things we live with today have advanced greatly in complexity, we’ve been living more in a time of evolution rather than revolution.
Is that why a meme that’s circulating that informs us that by the end of this decade the 80s will be 50 years in the distance is so horrifying? In my mind, the 80s were 20 years ago, not 40. I was at a table quiz recently and one of the questions asked teams to fill in the blank on a 40-year-old headline about an exciting touchdown at JFK Airport. Lots of people chose the Beatles as their answer, despite the fact that John Lennon died in 1980 and the Beatles takeover of the USA actually took place almost 60 years ago.
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Is this how my parents felt in the 90s when flare and tie dye and platform shoes were all the rage and my friends and I would comb the Eager Beaver in Templebar for authentic 60s and 70s pieces? I asked for David Bowie and Beatles CDs as a teenager one year and I remember my mother’s bemusement as I appropriated the music of her youth. I need to reach for a stiff drink now when I realise that Oasis and Blur are similar cultural touchstones for Gen Z and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are their equivalent to your Bing Crosbys and your Glenn Millers.
Even worse is the realisation that in two years, Clueless will be 30 years old, while Mean Girls is pushing 20. That 70s Show – a sitcom set in Wisconsin in 1976 – was a hit when it premiered in 1998. Now, there’s a 90s version, and it feels too soon. I’m sure the teens born in 2005 are lapping it up though. 2000s nostalgia hasn’t been exploited much as a setting so far, although Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird made a decent fist of it.
Memes about nostalgia and the whiplash of time passing are a dime a dozen but that’s because of the collective shock around how quickly it’s happening. This isn’t a vanity of ageing in a time of lunchtime Botox, it’s a genuine brain melt about where those 20 years have gone. It’s true that our brains have been forced to deal with increasing loads of information and news, as social networks and consumption of media has evolved at a rate faster than we can comprehend and most elder millennials, Gen Xers and Boomers can compare the 2000s to the relative innocence and ignorance of life pre-widespread internet and social media.
In my lifetime, there are some handy events that mark the decades for me in Ireland. We had Italia 90, then we had the big millennium celebration followed by a change to the euro in 2001. In 2010, it was all bail outs and big freeze and 2020 brought the pandemic. I can discern the decade markers but can’t fathom what happened in between, particularly from 2000 onwards. I know time appears to speed up the older one gets but this “soon the 80s will be 50 years ago” seems like a big wind-up. Sure, it’s not for another seven years but they’ll be gone in the blink of an eye. By then, at least, Gen Z will be fretting too.