Happy New Year, BOOMers!
We, with an average birthdate of 1951, have lived through 3/4 of the Game of Life. Ready for more?
Let’s start ’26 by looking back at the quarter-century just completed.
Sigh. The 21st century—so far, a rollercoaster that feels like it was designed by a committee of caffeinated squirrels. Along the way, we’ve elected a few of them. We kicked off the new millennium with grand expectations, only to spend the next 25 years tripping over our own shoelaces. Here’s a lighthearted roast of humanity’s greatest hits (and misses) from 2000 to 2025.
The Y2K Bug: Humanity panics over a glitch that turned out to be less buggy than our actual lives.
The century dawned with Y2K hysteria. Billions spent stockpiling canned goods and generators because computers might think it was 1900, and planes would fall from the sky. Midnight struck… and nothing. The biggest disaster? Hangovers and regret over those expired beans. Meanwhile, the dot-com bubble burst, turning tech millionaires into baristas overnight. Lesson learned: Never trust a stock that ends in “.com.”Then came 9/11, a tragedy that unified the world in grief before dividing it in endless wars. We invaded Afghanistan and Iraq searching for WMDs that were about as real as my diet resolutions. Reality TV exploded—Survivor, American Idol—proving we’d watch anything if it involved voting people off islands or stages.
The Dancing Baby: Early internet chaos in pixelated glory—because nothing says 2000s like a CGI infant grooving badly.
The 2000s were the peak of “low-rise jeans and high drama.” Facebook launched in 2004, promising to connect us. Instead, it connected us to conspiracy theories and exes we ghosted. MySpace let us customize profiles with glittery backgrounds and top 8 friends—causing more teen heartbreak than actual breakups. iPods killed mixtapes, YouTube birthed cat videos, and Twitter (pre-X) gave everyone a megaphone for hot takes. Financially, 2008’s Great Recession hit like a hangover after the housing bubble party. Banks too big to fail got bailed out, while the rest of us learned “subprime” the hard way. Obama swept in on hope and change, becoming the President of color. I’m still waiting for my “hope and change,” and no one seems to care much about what he has to say.
Pop culture peaked with Britney’s meltdown, Paris Hilton’s “That’s hot,” and the rise of superhero movies that haven’t stopped since. The 2010s? Smartphones turned us into zombies, scrolling Instagram filters and Tinder swipes. Pokémon GO had adults chasing virtual monsters in parks, briefly making exercise accidental. Brexit: Britain votes to leave the EU because “take back control”… from what, exactly? Trade deals and straight bananas? Trump’s 2016 win shocked the world. #MeToo exposed Hollywood creeps, K-pop invaded globally, and Fortnite dances became courtroom evidence. Climate strikes with Greta Thunberg reminded us the planet’s on fire, but hey, at least we recycled our straws. It must have worked because 2025 failed to deliver a single landfalling hurricane in the US! No one cares much about what Greta has to say these days. Can we stop with that insanity, please?
There was Mark Zuckerberg testifying, looking like a robot who just discovered emotions—and water.
(NOTE- Around 2011, BOOM Magazine was born!)
Then the 2020s arrived with a bang—or a cough. COVID-19 locked us down, turning Zoom into a verb and a noun. We baked sourdough, murdered houseplants, and argued over masks like it was a fashion critique. Tiger King gave us Joe Exotic, mullets, and Carole Baskin memes during peak isolation boredom.
We should have trusted our immune systems more and feared a whole lot less.
Has anyone heard a good Murder Hornet story? ” Vaccines rolled out amid anti-vax rallies, and nobody seems to be sure if they did more good than bad. NFTs made millionaires out of pixelated apes. Russia invaded Ukraine, reminding us that history didn’t end. Crypto boomed, crashed, and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried went from hero to zero faster than Bitcoin’s value.2024-2025? AI exploded—ChatGPT writing essays, deepfakes fooling everyone, and robots pondering existence. Trump returned for round two, tariffs flew, and protests raged. Measles outbreaks, shootings, and disasters continued, but hey, we got advanced rockets and voice modes on apps.
The Future in 2025: AI takes over jobs, and our existential dread—humanity responds with memes.
In 25 years, we’ve gone from fearing computer bugs to begging AI not to replace us. Connected more than ever, yet lonelier. Fought pandemics, recessions, and each other online. Progress? Sure—medicine, tech, equality strides. But we’ve also mastered self-sabotage. Here’s to the next 25: May we laugh more, doom-scroll less, and remember that in the grand comedy of life, we’re all just improvising.
My plan is to approach the 4th quarter by deploying the most important lesson learned in the first 3.
I’ll get wherever I’m going one day at a time.
Greg Budell has lived in Montgomery for 20 years. A 50+ year veteran of radio, TV and writing, Greg hosts the Newstalk 93.1FM Morning Show with Rich Thomas, Susan Woody, and Jay Scott, 6-9 AM Monday – Friday. He returns weekday afternoons from 3-6 PM for Happy Hour with Pamela Dubuque and a variety of sidekicks. His favorite topic is life! Greg can be reached at gregbudell@aol.com.