The Best Time To Be in College Was 2006-2010 (FM #4)
This week, we're celebrating back to school season by reminiscing about the glory years (AKA the mid-late 2000s) and LIVING!!!
Welcome to Forever Millennials, a place where I write about life, motherhood, getting older, stuff I love, and millennial nostalgia. Come for the laughs, stay for existential dread! XOXO.
Welcome to volume 4 of the Forever Millennials weekly newsletter!
APOLOGIES for the hiatus, but after having two kids home for 19 days, a family surgery, and a ‘vacation,’ THE NOSTALGIA IS BACK.
Today’s newsletter is a special back to school edition! We’re talking about:
the best time to be in college
using all those back to school photos on social media as motivation to STOP WASTING TIME
why everyone needs to stop caring about what other people are doing
I HOPE U ENJOY <3
~*FoReVeR rEmEmBeRiNg*~
this week, we’re reminiscing about college
The best time to be in college was from 2006 to 2010.
We started college with one social media platform and no unlimited texting, and we ended it right before Instagram, iPhones, algorithms, aesthetics, and anxiety became mainstream.
We carried our phones, digital cameras, and iPods everywhere because none could do it all, and we socialized while these things sat in our bags or North Face jacket pockets.
We solidified an inner circle of 1,000+ friends we barely knew by becoming Facebook friends with everyone we’d ever been in the same room with, along with the classmates we talked to online the summer before college and never actually met.
We decorated our dorm rooms with dozens of 4x6 pictures taped over one another on the wall creating a collage of our most unhinged Facebook albums next to posters of our city’s sports teams and movies like Wedding Crashers, Old School, Superbad, Borat, The Departed, and Fight Club.
We bought bedding at Target and Bed Bath and Beyond, got sensible storage baskets and plastic drawers from The Container Store, put our cheap blow dryers in those clear bins that we kept on display on our dressers, and decorated our desks with one single desk lamp.
We walked through Forever 21 like it was the Louvre, searching for going out tops that spoke to us, and we had an out of body experience when American Eagle released jeggings, and again later on when leggings became pants.
We went out constantly, and not just because we loved to party, but because the only way to meet our future exes, crushes, and hookups was to do laps at dive bars and crowded house parties, searching for mutual eye contact.
We got into cars of all shapes and sizes with random drivers and walked long distances in the freezing cold with nothing but sheer, ripped tights from CVS on our legs and tiny coats covering our mini dresses.
We made weekend plans through Facebook events and wrote on people’s walls instead of texting or calling them, and we went on regular outings with friends to get fro-yo and got together with people weekly to watch quality TV shows like Jersey Shore and True Blood.
We posted every unfiltered and unflattering picture ever taken to Facebook photo albums that we named after rap songs without worrying if we looked good or if the people in the photos would care, and instead worried solely about how many people would write on our walls to wish us happy birthday that year.
We were beta testers of the internet, always learning how to do things before technology mastered how to do those things for us, like how to download photos from our pink Nikon camera’s memory card onto our computers and how to download music without getting sued (YouTube to MP3 converter websites anyone?).
We spent hours making pre-game playlists full of downloaded songs like Crank Dat (Soulja Boy), I Love College by Asher Roth, and obviously all bangers either by or featuring Lil Wayne, like Down, Let It Rock, and Swagga Like Us, three songs that are the soundtrack to every basement party we went to senior year.
We weren’t yet glued to our phones, just occasionally velcro-ed. We didn’t worry about likes. We vomited content, even if that included the blurriest photos you’ve ever seen or pictures of the sky with absolutely no context.
We were very much online, but we were also offline. We went out on Wednesdays, drank like we didn’t have class the next day, and danced like no one was watching, because even if they were, they wouldn’t remember it, and then we did it all again the next day, no content creation necessary to prove it.
We got to experience college with bare minimum social media, watching it graduate from infancy to the fun, innocent, chaotic, and non-complex stage that is toddlerhood. We spent our free time cruising around Facebook with training wheels while Mark Zuckerberg monitored us like guinea pigs, using our data to figure out how to destroy society. Who knew a bunch of 19-year-olds regularly making groups titled “lost my phone, need numbers!” while wearing Uggs without socks would help build something so destructive.
College between 2006 and 2010 had the best of both worlds, before social media and after. Facebook helped us stay in touch with old friends and connect with new ones, and we didn’t have to shout at an algorithm while scrolling through a bunch of nonsense to do so. Our aesthetic was chaos. We drank Natty Light and Burnett’s instead of water and ate cereal and pasta for dinner every night. The biggest fashion trend was cheap, and the biggest wellness trend was sleeping in. We didn’t know how to put on makeup, we didn’t wash our faces, and we didn’t have personal brands. We just had personal lives, and boy did we LIVE.
You say we were messes, but we were just carrying around a LOT, literally. I mean, you try juggling a phone, camera, iPod, and sometimes a GPS all while trying to open a Poland Springs bottle full of vodka and crystal light mixed together without it exploding on you and others.
We were masters of a craft.
Dare I say, the last great college dynasty.
Dare I say, the greatest college dynasty.
Live laugh leggings!!!!!!!!
~*FoReVeR gEtTiNg BeTtEr*~
this week, we’re not wasting any more time
Every year, the end of August and beginning of September bring a bombardment of posts on social media from parents sending their kids to school. There are BABIES going to kindergarten. There are toddlers going to middle school. There are children who I swear were just in elementary school going off to college. And there are kids whose parents must have forgot to post this year, or no wait, those children are in the working world now.
How did this happen?
When I turned 30, I thought to myself, “wow I just spent the last 10 years either blacked out or watching Netflix, how did this happen?” I couldn’t comprehend that 10 years had flown by and all I had to show for it was 1,040 hangovers.
Now, I’m about to turn 37, and I can’t comprehend that 10 years have flown by since I was 27, even though I now have two kids, a house, and a husband to show for it.
But what I really can’t comprehend is that BABIES have become ADULTS during this timeframe as well.
It doesn’t matter whether nothing changes or everything changes. Time flies.
It flies when you’re having fun, and it flies when you’re miserable, stressed, and have no idea what you’re doing with your life. It flies when you’ve got absolutely nothing going on, and it flies when you’re the busiest you’ve ever been in your entire life. It flies when you’re counting down to tomorrow, and it flies when you’re clinging to yesterday.
The thing about time is that it doesn’t actually move any faster than it did yesterday, but it feels like it does because today is always a smaller percentage of our lives than it was yesterday.
I know I’m going to blink and my kids will be teenagers, and I’m beginning to understand that this is not an exaggeration muttered by sentimental old people in grocery stores to parents of babies and toddlers. It’s real, and so I should probably keep those baby-safe locks on our alcohol cabinets for when they end up being interested in drinking what’s inside, and not just trying to knock it all over.
I think that’s what’s so bittersweet about back to school. You’re thrilled they’re out of the house so you can have some peace and quiet and go grocery shopping without a small dictator demanding balloons while checking out, but you also know, time is coming for you, and suddenly, you want to go back and buy the balloon. Because just as fast as the timeline jumped from 2015 to now, they won’t be asking for balloons anymore. They’ll be texting you to buy them protein or yogurt before heading out the door for college, and you’ll be left sitting there wondering how 15 years went by and all you have to show for it is debt.
Parent or not, back to school time is the biggest reminder to LIVE. Time is fleeting. Like how are your random former co-worker’s kids in college now? HOW?
If you don’t want to wake up in 10 or more years wondering why you didn’t do more with the time you were given, stop wasting it. This doesn’t mean buy the balloon lol. But it does mean get out of your head and off your phone! Unless you’re reading this newsletter, of course.
If you want to do a thing, do it. If you want to try something new, try it. Make plans. Say yes more. Ask for help. Take care of yourself. Acknowledge that you’ll always head into tomorrow with an unfinished to-do list from yesterday because you’re a bad, ambitious bitch. It won’t make the passing of time sting less, but at least you’ll have more to look back and smile about when fighting away the tears.
~*FoReVeR nOt GiViNg A fUcK*~
this week, we’re not caring about other people’s lives
I don’t give a fuck about what other people are doing anymore.
This week I saw a post from Scary Mommy about middle school kids making fun of a girl for the value of her home on Zillow.
Literally the only reason a 12-year-old kid would know to do this is because a parent taught them.
So, like, I have one question for us adults: Are we okay?
Kids have been obsessed with what other people are doing since the beginning of time. In high school, I dressed myself based on the contents of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog even though that led to me strolling the halls with an exposed ass crack. (How did we let low rise jeans come back?)
Today, kids don’t have catalogs. They have the internet. They see creators, likely older than them, wearing clothes and carrying bags, and they listen to them talk and learn about what they do. Watching influencers on TikTok is like if the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog came alive in 2004. We would all be trying to emulate the life of the model and not just the outfits.
That’s why we now live in a world where 9-year-olds buy skincare products from Sephora and drink water from Stanley water bottles. They are emulating older girl behavior, whereas long ago, we just emulated the outfits.
And now, we have young girls stalking home values on Zillow.
Long ago, I detached myself from caring about what other people are doing. I do what I want pending finances. I’m inspired by others, but I don’t try to be others. I care about me. I worry about me. I talk about me. And I encourage everyone else to HOP ON THIS TRAIN!!!! Then we could get rid of mean girls. Because how would they know how to be mean?
Xoxo,
Sam
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This made me actually laugh out loud and feel the most nostalgic in the best ways possible. All paired with a dose of reality- *~LoVeD~* this, Sam!
Even more unhinged was being in college from 2002-2006, where AOL Instant messenger and the Away message reigned. Texting crept in midway through, same with Facebook, not until junior year!! Loved this piece and related to so much of course. Honestly how lucky were we THE LUCKIEST!!