The '00s - a lost decade or what?

[TedShatner10]

A squandered decade where the Anglo-American economy entered the final stages of being systematically run into the ground, New Labour turned bad, GWB's reign of terror, and a big mess for the under 35s to overcome.

And decades chronologically do not mean much to me - from my perspective 1992 seems almost as remote and alien as 1979, with the 1999 feel not really ending with 2009.

 

[Jadzia]

We should reboot the 21st century by making this next year be year 2000

 

[Zulu Romeo]

We should reboot the 21st century by making this next year be year 2000

But that would give the "21st Century Began In 2001" lobby even more to complain about!

 

[Australis]

This decade, for me as well as the general population, began with promise and fun, and hope for the futurte.

Then 9/11, Iran, and worldwide economies all happened dragging us down a little further each time. And on a personal level, I looked at what's going on in my life, and not much enjoying what I see. Bit of a disaster, really.

So the sooner we can move on and get back on an even keel, the better.

 

[Showdown]

I think it was a pretty good decade. Compared to the last decade celebration, its small potatoes.

 

[CaptainStoner]

It does feel to me that much of the 00's sort of fell down a hole somewhere. I find myself 35, dirt poor, but after much setback and depression, once again filled with hope, ambition, and with the blessing of a lot of love.

I do find myself old enough to be saying "Whooaaaaa! Slow this shit down!!!!" and in better moments and times, really able to savor the treasures and blessings of this life. This past decade went by in a flash to me, and I don't want the next one to go by quite like that.
Here's to new adventure, friends, and 2010: The Year We Made Contact, and to not letting stupid shit derail us from following our bliss.

 

[Amaris]

It does feel to me that much of the 00's sort of fell down a hole somewhere. I find myself 35, dirt poor, but after much setback and depression, once again filled with hope, ambition, and with the blessing of a lot of love.

I do find myself old enough to be saying "Whooaaaaa! Slow this shit down!!!!" and in better moments and times, really able to savor the treasures and blessings of this life. This past decade went by in a flash to me, and I don't want the next one to go by quite like that.
Here's to new adventure, friends, and 2010: The Year We Made Contact, and to not letting stupid shit derail us from following our bliss.

Amen (as it were).
This decade flew by. We had our 10 year high school reunion this year and that just blew me away! Ten years since I had set foot inside my high school. Just amazing to me.

J.

 

[startrekwatcher]

This decade wasn't nearly as much fun as the 90s. In the 90s we had Clinton and blowjobs were pressing concerns. This decade we get Bush & Obama, wars, a failing economy. This decade's music mostly sucks. In the 90s we had great women singer songwriters and great bands like Green Day, Nirvana, Soundgarden etc now we get Nickelback. MTV no longer plays music videos. The Real World was actually an interesting experiment dealing with heavy issues like race and AIDS now it is a tired shallow affair where the casts just run together.

In the 90s Trek was in its heyday with TNG, DS9 and VOY now we get a vacuous remake with Trek XI. In fact, it seems Holllywood has run out of ideas choosing to resurrect old shows & films but without any of what made the originals so entertaining and fun i.e. 90210, Melrose Place, Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, Halloween etc.

We certainly have had a boom of new channels but nothing worth watching. TV has gotten crappier and crappier. Cable news is awful. Oh how I miss the Ted Turner days of CNN where we had anchors like Natalie Allen Lou Waters Bernie Shaw Judy Woodruff rather than clowns like Rick Sanchez.

In the 90s we were spared MySpace, Facebook, blue tooths, Iphones. This decade I also lost my grandmother and father.

 

[melancholymecha]

But now we're heading towards the end of the 00's and it seems as if most of us are just realizing that a decade is ending. We aren't seeing books on the 00's coming out the way we did with the 80s and the 90s. Fact is, no one really seems to care very much this time around. I know it's having zero impact on me. I'm not experiencing any of the nostalgia I usually experience as a decade ends.

yeah it didnt dawn on me that a decade has almost ended until i got my copy of EW 00's decade special this weekend. Then after I looked thru the issue the thing that stuck out at me was how shallow most of our culture was this decade. Souless. Fake. I wonder if some of that has to do with the spread of internet culture...

And they've never known what it feels like to WAIT for something. It's all about instant gratification. Everything you want, you get it RIGHT NOW. As soon as a movie's finished, you don't have to wait to see it in the theater as it was meant to be seen, you can download a crappy workprint of it and pick it apart with other douchebags online before it even has a chance. Same with albums. There's no anticipation. As soon as you hear about it, it leaks, and you've got it. We've really lost something, and we can never go back. Having instant access to EVERYTHING is fucking kids up.

yeah, I think this is part of it...this is something that really grew this decade...also we witnessed & analyzed everything this decade while staring at a screen- 24/7. Thats gotta do some major, um, something to the whole social/cultural psyche...

 

[Spot's Meow]

Yeah, a sucky decade. I feel like I should be remembering it fondly, since I entered high school in 2000 and in 2010 I will be graduating with my Master's degree. And high school wasn't absolutely horrible and college was pretty good. But the 90s were really so much better. All of my favorite music, tv shows, and movies are from the 90s. Even if I didn't watch them back then I am discovering them now and loving them.

I think, overall, I just have so many more negative memories from the past decade than good ones. Even the good ones don't seem all that great compared to the ones from the previous decade. Sure there was some crappy stuff in my childhood, but god there are so many good memories from that time, especially of the years 1997-1999. Those were really my favorite years, for entertainment, for the attitude of the world at that time, for the "issues" faced that really don't seem all that bad in comparison to today.

But I actually find it pretty hard to think of positive memories from the past decade. Meeting and beginning to date my boyfriend is about it. Everything else is death, lost friends, misunderstandings, economic problems, fights and anger, and sleepless nights feeling disheartened and like the world really is a bad place.

God I miss Tickle Me Elmo and Rosie O'Donnell's fake Tom Cruise crush. They were so annoying then, but now they seem so harmless.

 

[zephramc]

From a personal standpoint this decade's been pretty good. I've been blessed with a wonderful wife, two beautiful daughters, a home and a good career. While there's been a few scary times, my mom's breast cancer, an autoimmune disorder that my daughter developed several years ago and my sister being in a very bad car accident, we're all still here and (now) healthy.

The technological breakthroughs have been nothing short of incredible. One has a world of information literally at their fingertips, at any time, through smart phones and/or home computers. Bluray, HDTV, WiFi, broadband internet, etc... Medical breakthroughs have also been amazing.

I will also say the cars of this decade have been amazing. The recent Corvette ZR1, the Lambo Gallardo, the Nissan GTR are all incredible machines. Most I-4s today are making the same, if not more, horsepower than V-8s 15 years ago. The construction of even the cheapest vehicle on the road is probably 10x safer than the most expensive vehicle just 10 years ago. And most of the vehicles look better to, though crap like the Nissan Cube might make me think twice about that statement.

All that being said there's nothing culturally that really set this decade apart from the 90's. Television today is nearly unwatchable. There's no great dramas like ER. There's no great scifi like TNG or Babylon5. There's no great sitcoms like Seinfeld or Friends. There's nothing new in regard to music. There's been no new edgy (or just plain likeable) music such as that from Nirvana, or AIC or Tupac or Garth Brooks (to pick from various genres). In regard to movies, if you don't make it to the theater within a couple of weeks of the films release, it's gone. Not that it's a bad thing. The video's out within 4-6 months of it's theatrical release anyways and most of the movies out there are not very memorable. There's the occasional "diamond in the rough" such as the LOTR movies.

The fashion too has been somewhat dull. The 80s had funky hairstyles and even funky-er clothes. The 90s had it's own unique look as well; The hairstyles ranged from MC Hammer's zig-zags, or Vanilla Ice's hair to long floppy hair to the "ceasar cut". As far as clothing there was flannel (grunge) or super baggy jeans or overalls. There was Doc Martins, there was FUBU, there were Starter jackets. I won't even get into women's fashion.

This decade... well there's some differences than the 80's and 90's but there's many similarities and its all dull IMHO.

The previous decades seemed so much better overall than did this one. I always wondered if it was just me, but judging by this thread apparently not. Like I stated, from a personal standpoint I have a great deal to be thankful for, but looking at the "bigger picture", this decade blew chunks.

 

[tomalak301]

What can this decade be remembered for? I guess the big thing was the realization of terrorism is very real in the world and the decade was really shaped by the attacks on 9/11/2001. Still though, pop culture gave us the Hannah Montana/Jonas Bros-ization of Disney, two book series that made it absolutely huge for the younger generation, and I can't really name a movie that shaped the decade for me, or a TV show for that matter. Maybe this decade was a lost one, and I know I would much prefer the way things were in the 90s, but I know that's not going to happen.

 

[RJDiogenes]

We should reboot the 21st century by making this next year be year 2000

Sort of an anti-Abrams Reboot; this time nothing blows up.

 

[TedShatner10]

I don't think "top rate" movies and television shows from the 2000s were considerably worse than anything in the 1990s (much of which blended into each other anyway), and the 1990s (or 80s) were not exactly free from crap anyway (as the Nostalgia Critic can attest to).

And shitty Turbo Capitalism (the "free" market) has been carving a path of destruction through the Anglo-American sphere since perhaps the late 1970s, only that in this decade it was the middle class households and the huge banks who have been badly affected, and not some crappy Midwest town nobody cared about when their local Mattel factory was packed up and shipped to China in the early 1990s.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

This decade has The Wire and Lost for TV. That's not too bad.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

We should reboot the 21st century by making this next year be year 2000

Sort of an anti-Abrams Reboot; this time nothing blows up.

And featuring Bruce Greenwood as Susan Boyle.

 

[RoJoHen]

This decade has The Wire and Lost for TV. That's not too bad.

I think this decade raised our expectations too high. Despite some rather annoying and juvenile pop culture things, I feel like most people started to really appreciate truly excellent movies and TV. However, as a result of that, the extraordinary stuff doesn't feel extraordinary anymore; instead, I think we now expect extraordinary things, which is one reason I think a lot of TV shows are failing lately.

 

[TedShatner10]

Say what you want about David Caruso's "acting" and odd mannerisms, but CSI: Vegas and its successful spin-offs are arguably the last genuine megahits on TV that are up there with M.A.S.H, Hillstreet Blues, Dallas, Cheers, Law & Order, and ER. And let's not forget the successful relaunch of Doctor Who which has sparked a renaissance of sci-fi/fantasy UK television.

Network television in America perhaps went into a slow, hard to perceive decline in the mid 1980s, which has rapidly sped up since the mid 2000s. The increasing popularity of the Internet and video games in the last 15 years must be a factor in the increasingly steeper decline of viewer numbers, but the multiplying commercials and vapid, unintelligent management is a significant factor to why once important stations like NBC are in the shitter.

The Internet is why TV shows and films today are subjected to overly harsh criticisms and rantings that were restricted to fanzines in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. A good reason why our culture is comparatively impoverished despite the expansion of the Internet is because of outdated copyright that has now become much more of a suffocating liabilty than it was before the 2000s, but kept in place largely through corporate hubris and greed.

 

[iguana_tonante]

I think that the government seizing control of our economy will be looked back upon as a revolutionary point in our history, so this might mark one of those end of decade events a poster above referred to. I also believe the new decade will usher in a citizen's revolt against the socialist policies now being introduced in Washington. We've already seen the beginning.

On a personal level I loved the 00's.

I'm the only one not surprised that the decade most people seems to despise is the highpoint for TLS?

 

[tomalak301]

I feel real bad for NBC. This is the same network that brought us shows like Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld, Will and Grace (Was there another show in the Must See Thursday Line up or did I get them all) and ER. Heck, their comedies now are good too, with 30 Rock, The Office (which I don't watch) and Parks and Recreation (I wish people gave it a second chance, because it is laugh out loud funny). They just market the dramas, which aren't that good, and had the stupid idea of moving up the Tonight Show an hour and a half. Still, for all that is bad, NBC still has the comedies and the sports (Horse Racing, Hockey and Sunday Night Football) so it's not all doom and gloom as people want others to believe.