You are too young to remember, but...

[grumbler]

What event in your life is the one that you think of when you separate "old enough to remember" people from "too young to remember?"  That gap between those who understand the importance of the event and those who just never really will, because to them it's "before my time." 

For me, it's the moon landing.  I was just a kid back then, but I remember the excitement/ disappointment/ excitement of the late space race and the satisfaction when the US finally beat the USSR to the moon.  I think that you had to be there.

[Syt]

For me most likely the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent end of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.

Though with new colleagues aged 23-ish entering the workplace 9/11 and life before the internet/smartphones is quickly becoming another watershed.

[DGuller]

For me it's 9/11.  I think it's just impossible to understand how it changed the country, as well as to comprehend the collective trauma, without living through it at a mature enough age.

[Berkut]

The Challenger explosion, probably. If just looking for the youngest, significant event.

[Maladict]

Berlin Wall for me, and to a lesser extent Challenger and Chernobyl.

[Tamas]

For me most likely the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent end of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.

Though with new colleagues aged 23-ish entering the workplace 9/11 and life before the internet/smartphones is quickly becoming another watershed.

I agree with both. I was only 9 when the Iron Curtain fell but I can recall noticing something important going on, and the air of anticipation.

[Syt]

I agree with both. I was only 9 when the Iron Curtain fell but I can recall noticing something important going on, and the air of anticipation.

Growing up as interested in news, and with movies like The Day After, and reading in school books like The Last Children of Schewenborn, plus having US soldiers who guarded nuclear artillery munitions at the local base (and peace protests against them in the early 80s) ... so end of Cold War was pretty big at the time, even though I was only 13.

[Sheilbh]

Not an event - but not having the internet when you were a kid. I think we got it the late 90s but I was already 10+ then and friends have similar memories of being kids without the internet and without a mobile phone.

I think for people just a few years younger, it's a different world.

[Syt]

I was 21 or so when I got internet, so it was a huge change (and, in the 90s, also huge phone bills ).

[The Larch]

The arrival of the internet and cellphones first and smartphones afterwards is definitely a watershed moment for my generation that is commonly shared across the West. Being the last generation that grew up without the pervasive presence of technology around us is definitely something noteworthy.

As for historical events, something that was before my time but only for a few years and I believe can't be comprehended if you didn't live through it would be the death of Franco and the transition to democracy in Spain. My generation was the first one that was raised in complete liberty in Spain for ages, and depending on how you define and value certain liberties, maybe the first one ever.

[crazy canuck]

There has been so much change, it is hard to choose one.  For me the wall coming down is the most significant one.  For a lot of young people, I have to explain what wall I am talking about and why it was significant.  I was in Berlin that August and it is hard to explain just how dreary East Berlin was.  It is also hard to explain how dynamic Budapest was that summer, right in the cusp of throwing off communist rule.

It's a bright line between people old enough to have experienced it and those too young to know what I am talking about.

[Tamas]

Hah, I remember phone lines for residential homes arriving to our village, let alone the Internet.    Now the village is in all but name a suburb with a tiny industrial district as well.

But this reminds me that my parents' generation has seen multiple big shifts. My dad went from riding on horse carts to his family's fields to building his own radio to becoming a satellite TV nerd and now being fairly comfortable with basic internet functions. He won't use a touchscreen smartphone, though.

[Josephus]

I don't remember the moon landing itself, I was 3 in 69, but I remember a year later, in 1970, for some reason the astronauts who landed on the moon did a fly by in a helicopter over our school. I remember we were given Maltese flags and we all stood at the open windows (today, this would be deemed incredibly unsafe) and waved our flags as they flew by.

edit: So, yeah, according to this: https://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2021-12-07/newspaper-lifestyleculture/We-went-to-the-moon-6736238908#:~:text=Those%20astronauts%2C%20Neil%20Armstrong%2C%20Buzz,their%20return%20from%20the%20Moon.


Those astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, carried a small Maltese flag with them to the Moon and back. And the Apollo 13 astronauts famously visited Malta in 1970 after their return from the Moon

[Darth Wagtaros]

The Fall of the Berlin Wall would be a big one. It changed the world.  I kind of feel like the Challenger exploding would be another. Between the build up to the launch and the gradual end of manned space flights I think it also was a defining moment.

[Grey Fox]

On a big picture scale, it is 9/11.

On a more local scale, the 1998 ice storm.