A Quarter Century into the Millennium

This piece was originally posted on Substack on January 2, 2025.

I was seven years old when my family prepared for Y2K. I remember being terrified about what my conservative parents told me would happen: all the computers would crash, and everything we depended on technology for would no longer work.

I was under the impression that all the criminals in prisons would be released because the locks and security also depended upon computers. The basement of our little house in Minnesota was stocked with lots of dry goods, and we even filled extra buckets with water in case the plumbing went down.

My family had a tradition of eating a piece of pickled herring on a saltine right at midnight. It was apparently to honor our Swedish heritage. I remember standing around the kitchen table, counting down the last minute to midnight, and feeling dread about how much life as we knew it was about to change. We simultaneously crunched our fish and crackers and waited for the lights to go out.

The lights didn’t go out. Nothing changed at all, except that we had a lot of prepper supplies to go through over the next several years.

This new year feels like bracing for the worst. I wish I could say differently. I want to say we’re imagining a new future for ourselves, but it seems like we’re being propelled at lightning speed toward a situation nobody wants. I am struggling to hold onto hope.

This new year doesn’t seem new and fresh. It feels like the same old thing, being repackaged and marketed to the masses as revitalizing. The fact is that we are tired!

Americans are tired of being slapped with inescapable amounts of debt whenever we experience medical emergencies. We’re tired of the way insurance companies in our country are literally adding insult to injury.

And being denied free, quality healthcare is the tip of the iceberg.

Our housing market is so terrible, people my age don’t expect to ever own homes. Food prices are rising, and our incoming president certainly isn’t going to make that any better. I mean, he was president already, so we know how terrible he is. In less than three weeks, we’re going to be dealing with more of the same old shit that got us here.

Since I was seven years old, my understanding of what constitutes doomsday-level thinking has changed a great deal. I can laugh in particular about how drastically my view of the prison system has shifted. As a kid, I was afraid of criminals. Now, I fully support prison abolition. I realize that the system targets the poor and marginalized, and profits on their labor and suffering in the prison-industrial complex. If I knew then what I know now, I’d be glad to expect the mass release of imprisoned people.

While it’s important that the year 2000 did not lead to the types of crashes predicted, I remember a different world than the one I know now. Climate change is upon us. My childhood had rainier springs and heavier winters. There used to be so many splattered insects on windshields, we’d have to scrub them frequently to see clearly. That is no longer true. Each year, our planet gets warmer and another collection of species goes extinct.

I don’t think it’s useful to fearmonger about instantaneous changes. However, I have seen a lot of change in my young life. Is my trepidation a lingering fear from 25 years ago? I don’t think so.

I no longer expect that the stroke of midnight on a new year will break a magical spell, so to speak. I no longer do extensive prepping for an impending apocalypse. Still, the changes of the past quarter century point to an undeniable shift toward a hotter climate and greater inequality.

Note: I haven’t been posting on any platforms in the past two months or so because it’s been painful for me to type due to a case of carpal tunnel. I had to drop several projects in November, and I’m slowly getting back into creating. Thank you all for your patience and support!