✨️Milennial Meetup Thread✨️ (30 - 49)

I wanted to make a space for the 30+ users to come together and share memories, interests & maybe even talk about where we are now VS. where we wanted or thought we'd be now back in the day! I'd love for this to be an easy way for us to reconnect with others our age.

***This is NOT meant to be a space for arguing over which ages belong to which generations. This is a space for a targeted age group to come together and share experiences and memories, NOT to argue over arbitrary birth year goalposts***

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Personally, I'm finding it very difficult to find other users in my age range & It's been a while since I've been able to make friends my age/who aren't still in their 20's- not that there's anything wrong with that, but I personally always hung around older kids/teens in my earlier years and that helped shape my interests and mannerisms that I have now. 

I want to be able to reminisce about things I did and liked back then with people who were in my age group or above at the time, bc since I was usually the youngest of my groups (thanks to having to stick to my older siblings for safety) I genuinely wasn't hanging out with younger kids/teens then. On the rare occasion I had a friend younger than me, they were never more than 1.5 years younger.

I can appreciate the way Gen Z glamorizes and idolizes 2000's culture, fashion, music, etc. (trust me, it wasn't all just rainbow hair, Hello Kitty & going to cool shows), but it's so lonely and isolating to try to share my memories with people who were <10 years old when I was 13, or still minors when I & my friends were graduating and first stepping into adulthood. I want to share my experiences with others who lived it alongside me, not just people who happened to be alive at the same time.

Now that nearly everyone is online, it really shouldn't be this hard for people to find & form the kind of friendships we were able to back then based on common interests- those internet friends who were more precious to us than oir own families- but the problem I see is that so many people are so focused on tagging into the aesthetics and trends now, way after the fact, that people like me who are looking for friends our own age get lost among Gen X & Gen Z who seem to want to turn it into the kind of social competition that, in my opinion, helped ruin social media to begin with.

Third spaces are all but gone now both IRL & online thanks to everyone trying to be part of anything even remotely fun/cool, age groups are all blended together and as a result, social culture has decayed into shallow competition and advertising.

It's depressing to see how even people in the same boat as me across other age groups ironically struggle to find a sense of community due to trying to find inclusion anywhere any group creates space for any reason. 

Part of what killed MySpace was the focus on gaining enough popularity to become musicians, models, actors & etc., but the more I browse this site since I joined last month, the more posts I see of people trying to promote their art/music in forums and groups where it's honestly not relevant to the topic. 

Social media went from being an online meeting place fornsharing interests and meeting like-minded people to a massive virtual billboard where everyone feels the need to be seen, but only if it somehow leads to clout, a comeup or a career. That's part of why most other social media are flooded with ads and brands now, and why algorithms basically only show you content based on your socioeconomic status and what you're likely to buy, not other users you'd mesh well with or other things you'd be genuinely interested in. 

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I didn't mean for this to turn into such a diary post, really It's also not intended to shame, exclude, or invalidate anyone in any way.

I just want there to be more opportunities for people to meet & form real connections based on things relevant to them, not to consumerism or competition. 

I think the best way to get that started is to start small, focus on others like ourselves that we can relate to on a personal level, and not focus so much on sweeping, generalized inclusion and acceptance. Trust me  I know how that sounds & I'm aware it can and likely will be taken the wrong way, but there are far, FAR too many people online living completely different lives all with different dreams, interests, goals, and situations for everyone to keep trying to all lump together based on marketable aesthetics/nostalgia. 

Just because we can all like similar things doesn't mean we're all the same. We have to start rebuilding small communities together so that once we have our footing again, we can then branch out into helping others build their own communities & form alliances with them- that's what community really is, not just a few massive groups of people aligned with dozens of different things all lumped into one app/site/space. 

Diversity creates inclusion, inclusion builds community, but this concept has been used in a very Catch-22 style way to dismantle communities & I feel like that's why almost everyone feels so lonely anymore.