If You Remember Watching ‘Fight Club’ In A Movie Theater, You’re Probably Still On Twitter

Watching the implosion of Twitter is the moment Gen X has been waiting for since 1999.

Our first view of Brad Pitt’s abs. We haven’t looked away since.

Remember going to movie theaters when even the legit ones had sticky floors and creaky seats? They reeked of stale popcorn coated in fresh butter-flavored oil.

As 1999 was coming to a close, I went to see Fight Club in just such a theater. Happily. The perfect timing for this end-of-world scenario, anticipating the mass destruction of Y2K.

ICYMI, Y2K was presented as a very real threat, the end stage for computers around the globe because their internal clocks did not include a date past 1999. The minute 1999 turned to 2000 was shrouded in dark mystery. What would happen to internal operating systems when they reached the end of their programmed lifespan?

No one, and I mean no one, could predict what was going to happen. Ah, those were exciting times—staring into the abyss and praying the banks would implode, thereby erasing your student loan debt, mortgage debt, credit card debt, etc.

Even the idea that your identity might be wiped was thrilling.

Fight Club’s motto was the perfect sentiment for this moment: “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.”

Of course we did talk about Y2K then, but I don’t recall confessing my excitement at the prospect of starting my life from scratch knowing what I’d learned to get where I was, but without the baggage.

Is it any wonder then that we’re all congretating on Twitter, waiting to see what will happen? Gen Xers have been primed to watch destruction. And let us not forget, Elon himself is a Gen Xer.

On the plus side, we’re quick to embrace change. Ish.

Many of us have scooped up our Mastodon handles, even if we can’t figure out what they are. (Mine is @LLKirchner@mas.to, which I only know thanks to Clive Thompson who is a tireless consumer and explainer of all things tech and shiny!)

Between our jobs and our side hustles and our sick parents and kids, however, we haven’t totally figured it out yet.