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.

Pretty terrible

January 2008 I had just turned 16 and on summer break from high school. I was an awkward nerdy guy but mostly life was pretty good.

I had just moved from Texas to RI as my father took a severance package from the military. We went from a family of 6 surviving on one military paycheck, to my father making almost 4x what he made in the military as a professor. When we moved north I remember my parents talking about how the house they got was twice as expensive as the house we lived in in Texas, so you can imagine my surprise when we got there and it was almost half of the size! My father being a professor ment my mother, and us 4 kids had the opportunity to attend higher education. Our lives changed a lot! No more moving every 2-3 years, things were tight being 2008 but not near as tight as we were used to.

I’m 2006 and feeling old already 🥲

I cannot fully remember, but I think that was around the time my father was going to a college like thing that later ended up getting revealed as a scam recently. I don’t think many people saw that coming at the time.

Ain’t no way I would have considering In was still in primary. Cannot fully remember much else, but I do know I was a lucky child for the immediate family I had/have. Even if I did have squabbles and fights with them all ( minus my grandma, she was the only one I never fought with at all ).

I still wear clothes from 2008, so that wasn’t a long time ago.

No it is not

I graduated with an associates degree in 2006. It was hard finding a job for some reason even with a degree and a internship under my belt. I think it took me 3-6 months to find a job.

By 2008, I was in that new job and mad at my step mom. So i moved out and got a roommate. From there it was very good at least for me. Only thing I dealt with was work and my health issues.

2008 was basically the start of my adult life. The naive and confident me.

Oh it was awful. I was about your age back then, and I had been raised religious which I rebelled against by trying to be completely rational, to the point of trying to suppress all my emotions like a robot, which made me miserable. I had no self confidence, crippling social anxiety, and all sorts of bad ideas steering me in completely wrong directions.

I don’t think I had met any openly queer people at that point and the first time I did I was like, “I don’t get it, I would never express myself that way, because what would people think?” while of course completely sidestepping the question of how I actually felt or wanted to identify because again, suppressing my emotions. Spoiler alert: probably should’ve examined that!

The best decision I ever made in my life came a few years later when I studied abroad in Japan. It exposed me to a lot of different perspectives in the international house and also gave me interesting experiences to talk about which helped with my social anxiety (actively identifying and working on it with therapy techniques later on probably did more).

Politically, I had no real awareness of leftism and was into Ron Paul and libertarianism, because he was the loudest antiwar voice at the time. It’s also a great ideology for if you’ve never had a boss or a landlord. I was mostly just glad to be rid of Bush, and I had some hope that Obama would end the war, prosecute people in the Bush administration for war crimes, and stop mass surveillance. I was very naive at that time.

I feel like this was a time before a bunch of movements or cultural tendencies became associated with the right. The problems were still there, but there were also some non-shitty people included in them:

• It was before Gamergate, but there was a lot of sexism in video game communities.

• I remember being into “transhumanist” ideas that would these days be associated with Elon Musk and his sycophantic techbro fanboys.

• Many prominent “New Atheists” either had or would break right and support the wars in the Middle East, with logic like, “We’ve already fixed sexism completely here in the West (and the feminists who don’t agree with that are just a bunch of dumb broads), the big problem is Islam,” ignoring the threat of Christofascism at home.

• Even stuff like 4chan, I had friends who were on /b/ back in the day who turned out normal and chill. There was an element of rebelling against the Pat Robertson, stick-in-the-mud, “D&D is witchcraft” types, and part of that was reveling in rule-breaking, and so they delighted in shock images and made fun of anyone who cared too much about things in response to that.

I guess the positives were that people were less divided and it was easier to have hope for the future. But like there were reasons why those things changed, either movements/groups showed their true colors, or valid criticisms of those groups became more widely accepted. I much prefer the division and conflict that we have now compared to the “post-9/11 world” where virtually everybody was in agreement about slaughtering Muslims. And yeah I had more hope for the future but it was because I though technology would fix everything for everybody and didn’t understand how it could hurt workers and benefit capitalists, it was based on ignorance.

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

Was 18 and still in school. 1 1/2 more years until I was finished and initially I planed to go to university to study. Still thinking I stay in the city I grew up in.

I earned money by tutoring students in math. I wanted to be good in school but still liked the boys. So after school, I learned, I worked and dated guys. I wrote with people online and met strangers. I am still surprised nothing ever happened to me. Never getting catfished.

My mom was unemployed and it sucked. It annoyed me that she was around. Everyday after school we would meet at my granny’s and great granny’s place. Great gran, gran, mom and me.

There was a big goth scene in my city and the disco‘s (I will never not say disco) l frequented had always the same people there. You could go without making arrangements, you‘ll always meet someone you know. Once a month we met in town before going partying. 30 to maybe 100 people just chilling. Some teens really thought they are the toughest, most badass people.

Uh, I was going to graduate from highschool in a year and Obama was running and we were all pumped for Medicare for all (you can guess how that went)

Overall it was a good year but mired with a lot of negatives. The economy crashed, college tuition went skyhigh and cost of living went up like crazy. I was lucky to have family to help support me through that period, though family has also been the only thing keeping me together the last 10 years as well so I suppose it isn’t that different. As a 17 year old at the time, I didn’t care too much.

The internet was much more hopeful and diverse back then. Explaining to people how different the Internet is now compared to 20 years ago is extremely humbling but also incredibly concerning. It feels like we’ve failed to teach the next generation how to approach the internet.

Really miserable. I’ve come a long way!

The first thing I remember from that time is sitting in the living room and playing Halo, then hearing that the economy was crashing and everything was going to shit. And it kinda did, I remember a lot of stress about my parents keeping their jobs. I’m from the mid 90s and this is the first moment that I can remember where I became aware of how fucked up the world really was. A shattering of the protective bubble that you experience as a kid.