In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking back to December 1999 a lot. It doesn’t seem possible that it has been 25 years since the looming threat of Y2K made us fear the world was going to end at the stroke of midnight as we welcomed the year 2000.

The reason December 1999 has been on my mind is my daughter Laura won’t be home for Christmas this year. She was a millennium baby—born in June 2000—so Christmas 1999 was the last time we spent a Christmas without her.

A quarter of a century after we welcomed the 2000s, I thought it would be interesting to look back at how my world, and the world in general, has changed in the past 25 years.

Background on Y2K

Thinking about Y2K made me realize that anyone under the age of 40 will have no idea what it was. Here’s a bit of background.

Computer programs written in the 1900s stored years as two digits. As the end of the 1990s drew near, no-one knew exactly what would happen when the calendar flipped to the year 2000. Would all these programs read 00 as 1900 taking us back in time? Would everything dependent on computer technology stop working?

This was a big problem for governments, businesses, and educational institutions. In the last couple of years of the 20^th century, IT workers were very busy as companies invested billions of dollars rewriting and updating old programs.

Despite the work done to prepare, fear mongers had everyone worried that the arrival of 2000 would see a complete failure of everything from banking systems and supply chains, to healthcare, power generation, and even our water supply. As the date drew closer, there was a certain amount of hoarding happening, although not even close to the scale of what we saw in the early days of the pandemic in 2020.

Obviously, the world didn’t end at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000. The disruption was minimal—mostly going unnoticed by everyone but IT staff who spent their new year’s holiday on standby to fix issues. And here we are 25 years later!

It’s easy to let time pass by without pausing to reflect on how much we accomplish and grow over a longer time period. I had a chance to do that on a professional level earlier this year when I retired from my full-time job. But thinking back to December 1999 gave me an opportunity to reflect on a personal level.

We’ve come a long way

When we counted down to welcome 2000, I had reason to be excited. I was 8 weeks pregnant with my daughter Laura, although we hadn’t shared the good news yet.

Twenty-five years later, it’s hard to imagine a time when I wasn’t a mom. We welcomed Laura into our lives in June 2000 and Colleen arrived in May 2003. My girls have now grown up to be independent young adults. They are my greatest accomplishment of the last quarter century!

Parenthood aside, there are many other things I’m proud of:

• I changed employers after my maternity leave with Laura and enjoyed a successful career with the same employer until my retirement.
• I earned the Certified Employee Benefit Specialist (CEBS) designation in 2003 and have volunteered with the ISCEBS and IFEBP for almost 20 years. In 2023, I had the honour of serving as ISCEBS President.
• I fought a battle with cancer in 2011. Next to motherhood, that was the greatest growth experience of my life. (See this post for what I learned from the experience.)
• Klutzy me learned to curl (although not very well) and somehow managed to get my name on the championship trophy of our recreational curling league.
• In 2016, I joined the adult program at our local School of Rock and took my lifelong love of singing to a new level.
• I started this blog and developed a passion for writing, leading me to make writing a book one of my retirement projects.
• In 2024, I earned the Certified Professional Retirement Coach (CPRC) designation, retired from my full-time job and started a retirement coaching practice.

Despite all the changes, I’m still living in the same house and married to the same husband. In some areas of life, stability is good!

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But we have a lot of work to do

Sadly, I wish I could feel equally positive about the state of the world and humanity 25 years into the 2000s.

The start of the 2000s was unremarkable until September 11, 2001—a date that changed the world forever. Despite the unimaginable tragedy of the events of that day, there was a sense of unity in the days and weeks that followed as people came to grips with terrorism on a scale the world had never seen before. That sense of unity didn’t last.

Fast forward to 2007, when the release of the first iPhone put a world of information at our fingertips. Since then, technology has taken over our world. In some ways, that’s a good thing. In other ways, our reliance on our devices means we spend our lives glued to our screens, often ignoring people and events that are happening right in front of us.

The arrival of social media gave everyone the ability to broadcast their opinions about anything. Along the way, we lost the ability to separate fact from fiction. And we hide behind our keyboards, instead of being brave enough to have civil conversations with people we disagree with.

Social media and paid influencers have also driven our need for consumption out of control, straining our personal finances and the state of our planet.

And enough has been said about the pandemic, so I won’t go there.

Looking forward to the next 25 years

Twenty-five years into the 2000s, our society is more polarized, more negative, and more stressful. Some days it’s hard to stay hopeful and not worry about the state of humanity. What will it take to bring us together and get us on the right path? I wish I had the answer.

I’ve said before that one person can’t change the world, but we can each make our little corner of the world a better place. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with my 24 wishes for our world that I wrote in 2020. We need these things now more than ever. Let’s not lose hope.