Why has "today" started since the year 2000?

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Each time we're speaking of cultural decades we are making clear distinctions between each (from at least the 40's) up until the year 2000 where the 00's and 10's are sometimes blended together (as well as the 20's more recently).

Is there a massive cultural stagnation (with the many remakes, reboots, remasters and making sequels after decades) or we are psychologically wired to think that the year 2000 was like 4-5 years ago?

I've been thinking of that old post

https://twitter.com/x/status/1397709801891713026

And

 

[Dakarus]

The 2000's will and forever be "today" from now on

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

Everything pre-COVID feels like an eternity ago if you ask me.

 

[Снегопад]

Cultural stagnation.
Everything is a copy, of a copy, of a remake, of a copy.

 

[RanmyakuIchi's icon RanmyakuIchi RanmyakuIchi]

Consumer technology reaching a soft plateau could play a role too. Day to day tech advancing at a more incremental pace in turn creates a feeling of stagnation.

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

I remember going from flip phone, to blackberry, and then smartphone.

Now, all smartphones look the same, i can't tell Iphones apart anymore, they all just blend in.

 

[Antilocal123]

Time compression I think, older we get the more events become increasingly distant from one another, which can make the time between feel short asf.

Also technology has been advancing at a rapid pace which makes it seem like the world is moving far more rapidly but we’ve been also stuck in an ouroboros of rehashed content.

I think corporations should just come out and say “lmao we want money fuck you” instead of nostalgia baiting.

 

[Tounushi]

Consumer technology reaching a soft plateau could play a role too. Day to day tech advancing at a more incremental pace in turn creates a feeling of stagnation.

nowhere is this more apparent than in video games. The 70s required extra accoutrements to enhance gameplay, since you basically had basic dots and lines on the TV; Early 80s were simple shapes and stark colors; late 80s was the 8bit era, early 90s the 16bit era, late 90s the early 3D era, with ever more polygons by the year; early 2000s things started approaching "realism" and cinematic presentation; late 2000s onwards it feels like it's been the same.

I felt we reached the plateau with Max Payne 2, with every following release being an incremental improvement in various aspects of the way a 3D game is made: lighting, model polygon counts, movement capture, textures, mapping, effects, physics, etc.

It's far easier to put milestones in improvement in the 32 years between Pong and Max Payne 2 than the 22 years between Max Payne 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. For the latter I honestly can't think of many titles outside of Doom 3, Crysis, and Ryse.

 

[RirisuPK]

I was born in '05, so '80s and '90s just seem like myths & legends to me. But because of my family, I got to play a lot of retro games when I was younger.

 

[hazys]

I don't think this is really entirely true. If you look at the fashions and pop culture of 2005 vs 2015 vs 2025, there are clear differences. We just don't have enough distance from them to really tell so easily yet.

However I think there is some truth to this argument in the sense that the internet and social media have "flattened" culture. Aesthetics and cultural products from around the world can be consumed completely free of context and we cycle through trends at a breakneck pace. This can create a sense of inertia.

 

[Gorse]

Here's a challenge: What can you tell me about the culture of 1900 to 1910*? How about the 1910s – can you name me any particular standout works of arts, entertainment, or popular media from those ten years? As a matter of fact, I could tell you much more about the 1890s – which are so fondly-remembered that they were nicknamed the Gay Nineties – than I could about the first fifth of the 20th century. Culturally speaking, it wasn't until at least the '20s (and that's being very generous, because a lot of what people think of when they consider 1920s culture is from the '40s) that we in the West started organizing 1900s culture into neat little decades.

Every century takes a little bit of time to get into, culturally. Especially as we now live in a permanently-globalized society, it's going to be a bit nebulous to identify common threads that define each decade while we're living through them. I don't think modern culture is stagnating at all, though the culture a lot of us are exposed to on a day-to-day basis – internet culture created by people between the ages of about 18 and 45 and distributed across YouTube, Twitter/X, 4chan, Reddit, and video game app stores – might be.

But even then, who's to say someone won't invent a new information-sharing medium that we all move onto tomorrow, with its own unique tropes that are introduced and develop naturally? Maybe in five years, when we're all hooked up to Tesla-McDonald's™ Cerebral Enhance-o-Trons™, we'll think "Gee, how little we knew back then!"

And seriously, folks – you look me dead in the eye and tell me you can't immediately identify which decades these pieces of media came from without Googling:

(*HARD MODE: Don't mention the St. Louis World Fair.)

 

[Deleted member 121503]

Today I learned I was born today. Also, this thread is 25 years old.

 

[Dyne]

I feel like the 00's and the 10's dont really have a proper name like the 20s-90s do. Not a universally accepted one that is easy to say, anyway. "The two thousands" or "the oughts" or "the twenty-teens" are all terrible names.

This has some kind of subconcious effect on how we view the decades I think. But maybe I'm just pulling that out of my ass.

 

[Deleted member 121503]

I feel like the 00's and the 10's dont really have a proper name like the 20s-90s do. Not a universally accepted one that is easy to say, anyway. "The two thousands" or "the oughts" or "the twenty-teens" are all terrible names.

This has some kind of subconcious effect on how we view the decades I think. But maybe I'm just pulling that out of my ass.

Can't they just call them the zero zeros or something? Doesn't sound too hard or long

 

[Gorse]

the 00's

I quite liked "The Noughties" for this one, but it never caught on. :(

 

[NobodyHere]

Perhaps an aging thing? Being a younger person the 00’ and 10’ feel distinct in their own way, I was also a very different person at drastically varying levels of development at those times. I particularly agree with the points about it being due to the internet, but the internet today isn’t the same as in the 2010’s, or the 2000’s.

I feel like the 00's and the 10's dont really have a proper name like the 20s-90s do. Not a universally accepted one that is easy to say, anyway. "The two thousands" or "the oughts" or "the twenty-teens" are all terrible names.

This has some kind of subconcious effect on how we view the decades I think. But maybe I'm just pulling that out of my ass.

Hadn’t realized this till reading this, there is just something more distinct about the naming; 2010 doesn’t have the zing as saying “the 90’s”

I think corporations should just come out and say “lmao we want money fuck you” instead of nostalgia baiting.

Honestly though when have companies not done this

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Everything pre-COVID feels like an eternity ago if you ask me.

For me little has changed between 2021 and 2024...

Hope that this year will mark the true start of the decade.

I was born in '05, so '80s and '90s just seem like myths & legends to me.

You know what? You're somewhat right.

The 80's in itself looks like a door to another reality.

I can hardly accept it was almost half a century ago.

 

[PaleFolklore]

TL;DR: The 2000s feel like the default era, and the 2010s still lack a clear identity. When will we truly define them beyond nostalgia?

It's reassuring to know that someone else shares this feeling as deeply as I do, OP. In a way, it really does feel like we've "reached the end"—in many quotation marks. The 2000s seem to have solidified as the status quo, almost as if they represent "the way the world has always been for the past 25 years," so to speak.

That said, my take on the matter—aside from what others have mentioned about "cultural stagnation"—boils down to a question of perception. How long does it take before we develop a true "collective imagination" of the 2000s and 2010s? One that genuinely captures the peculiarities of these eras, rather than just pointing out isolated trends like what was on the radio at the time?

Right now, it seems like our understanding of these decades remains fragmented, reduced to nostalgia for specific pop culture artifacts rather than a broader, more cohesive sense of what defined the period. Granted, there have already been many efforts to portray these decades as distinct from one another, but certain aspects of their identity still feel underdeveloped. There are lingering issues that, in some ways, hinder the formation of a more unified cultural narrative for these eras.

 

[NobodyHere]

That said, my take on the matter—aside from what others have mentioned about "cultural stagnation"—boils down to a question of perception. How long does it take before we develop a true "collective imagination" of the 2000s and 2010s? One that genuinely captures the peculiarities of these eras, rather than just pointing out isolated trends like what was on the radio at the time?

Right now, it seems like our understanding of these decades remains fragmented, reduced to nostalgia for specific pop culture artifacts rather than a broader, more cohesive sense of what defined the period. Granted, there have already been many efforts to portray these decades as distinct from one another, but certain aspects of their identity still feel underdeveloped. There are lingering issues that, in some ways, hinder the formation of a more unified cultural narrative for these eras.

As I went through school I could very much feel/see the education system changing. I’m not going to get into it because politics but at least for where I live things have very much been rapidly changing due to event of the past so that also adds to my own opinion on the topic.

Some of the things on this site have been rather eye opening for me, in terms of noticing little details that have made a large impact I hadn’t thought of before

 

[Rocket2049]

i mean basically nothing game remasters and reboot movies/shows
I lost track of how many sonic 3 ports i've played

 

[Ravl]

Sadly, "today" starts when you become an adult

 

[KirboDeku]

If today is 2000, I haven't been born yet it seems. Jokes aside though, perhaps the reason is because of media's creative stagnation and confusing culture with media. Looking at people in general, I notice a generational divide, which is basically just different cultures at this point. Does anybody remember back when generations could go on and you'd live the exact same life as your great-great-great-grandfather? Probably not, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is long out of living memory.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

i mean basically nothing game remasters and reboot movies/shows
I lost track of how many sonic 3 ports i've played

Honestly, for Sonic 3 it had like a decade without any proper rerelease thanks to music copyright.

 

[bjork]

I could be wrong, and I'm having trouble exactly phrasing it how I want, but:

I think it's partially because of fragmentation in the market: there are so many outlets for people to plug into, but not everyone does, so it's harder for things to make a big enough of a splash to be everywhere like they once were. There are far more eyes out there, but they're not all looking in the same place. I mean, you have your hit media that people are aware of, but not everyone has consumed either because of lack of interest or more options. Everyone is trying to convince you that their thing is the best with some kind of manipulated data to back it up, but is there "must see" anything any more? I know that ratings have changed with the advent of website clicks and streams and all of that, but go back to 1983 and the finale of MASH. I was too little to really know it was a thing, but that was a big big deal. 100 million people watched that. 60% of american households at the time. You could probably go find some boomer and ask them what it was like and they'll regale you with some wistful tale of what the room smelled like and who they were with how they cried together when it ended or whatever, but it was an event. You don't have events like that any more. I'm not sure, but I think the only thing getting 100 million viewers in a night is the super bowl, and it's been that way for awhile. Because you have choices, where before you either watched because you liked it, or "I live in bumfuck missouri, we only get 2 channels and the other one is the farm report at that time." So I think it's harder to break through for anything new.

Another thing is nostalgia for better or worse. Not just in the way they found a way to sell you your childhood all over again at an extreme markup, but repackaging a property for a newer/younger audience, so they have their version. Take something like Ninja Turtles. I don't know how many times there's been a revamp, but it seems like every few years and that's fine. But if you were in mixed company and mentioned Ninja Turtles, you could probably have five different conversations about five different series, even though the core concept is the same dumbass thing. So it's hard for those products to carve out an identity as a part of this period, because the water gets muddy after awhile.

One thing that 2000-2010s doesn't seem to have, and maybe it will once more time has passed, is the people who will not let go of a given time period. I lived through the entire 1980s and there was so much stuff dedicated to how great the previous three decades were... so many shows about the 50s/60s/70s, but no one from the 40s did that because they knew they'd look like an insane asshole praising a time period from a lifetime ago, forty years. So fast forward forty years, and what decade will so many people not shut the hell up about? The 80s. It's exhausting and is rarely presented the way it actually was. But for those people, it doesn't matter if you made the best album ever, if theycan't play it on a tape in their boom box (as they link you to a video about "remember boom boxes?"), fuck you. It's just ridiculous.

Anyway I am rambling. But basically, I don't think outside of a few cultural events and touchstones, there's as much to be mined from 2000-2010s, but maybe that's a very good thing. And anything after that, it's such a free for all that I don't even know.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's icon TamagotchiTamaHero24 TamagotchiTamaHero24]

That said, my take on the matter—aside from what others have mentioned about "cultural stagnation"—boils down to a question of perception. How long does it take before we develop a true "collective imagination" of the 2000s and 2010s? One that genuinely captures the peculiarities of these eras, rather than just pointing out isolated trends like what was on the radio at the time?

I think the time when this comes to pass is the time when the people who grew up in that time come to dominate the conversation. You may not like it, but young people always will shape the narrative when they become not-as-young-people-anymore.

That said, on top of all else, let’s make one thing clear:

WE WILL **NEVER** HAVE ANOTHER CENTURY LIKE THE 1900’S.

Ever. The way decades got defined in that century came down to more than just this or that thing. For entire decades, certain trends evolved and stylized themselves. Every decade would come to be defined by some new technological innovation. It’s nuts to think about, but we will never quite have that again. Regardless of if you think the world moves too fast now or too slow now, we will never have that again.