When was the best time to be alive?

[ohfook]

If right through history you had to pick a point somewhere in between say the Stone Age where there was no technology at all, life was exceptionally tough and people didn't have any rights right up to now where we have every convenience known to man but we live so out of tune with nature and we're watching the planet burn in slow motion. Where do you think the sweet spot was? The point where we had enough to make our lives easier but we weren't producing so much that it was actively destroying our planet?

Feel free to take other factors like wars or disease into account too if you like, but you don't have to!

I don't have an answer, I just posted this because I was reading about the Ancient Maya and thought it seemed like quite a nice life until I heard they sacrificed children.

and look at abortion rights in the US now, going backwards.

1996 to 2007 were in general good years.

I was in the workforce in the 80s ( been there since mid 70s) and we didn't have half the workforce off sick with "mental health issues"
Trust me, it was virtually unheard of

I agree with you . I think being born in the 1960s we have hit the following decades at the right age - late 50s now we are stable enough to cope with cost of living crisis and were less impacted by Covid and all that brought than people of other generations .

I agree that as a woman it has to be now, to within a few decades or so.

From an aesthetic point of view, though, I find a lot about the modern world very ugly and this isn’t the time I’d choose to live in. Expanses of tarmac and concrete, plastic, lack of decorative features. Pylons, wires and bloody phones masts. I fantasise about being around in the mid- to late 19th century - as long as I had a certain amount of money. Beautiful buildings, fabrics, etc., and the natural world was less compromised than it is now. It was a time when travel was more available too, yet the world wasn’t so small that everything was homogenised. All the convenience of mass production, choice and greater comfort than previous periods, but still in balance with quality and craftsmanship.

1981-1998.

Anyone born in a first world country post WWII has had a better life than 99% of all humans that have ever lived.

Music was fab then

From a female rights perspective now.
From a quality of life possibly those born around the 1940's.
Lots of jobs and employment potential.
Many were in a position to own their own homes.
They didn't have to care (in the main) for their parents due to a lower life expectancy plus had their children younger so not caught in the 'caring' trap. Grew up with the NHS and have fully benefited as a result.

We lived down the road from a psychiatric facility which got closed because of "care in the community". So as a child, I'd see these lost, frightened, often
raggedy looking ill people wandering about, completely lost as their support had been withdrawn.

I had two classmates who lost parents to suicide.

if you grew up in a rough part of London, it's probably standard to know something about drugs.

The 80's!!

I liked the period late 90s until 2008. People didn’t seem to be using food banks, lots of opportunities, jobs seemed easy to get.
Coincidently , that was the Blair era.
Things changed after the economic downturn and we had austerity.
From 2012-2015 things got a little better than everything went downhill from then.

Such an interesting question, depends so much on your age as to how you perceive each decade i.e carefree and young

Personally I think the 1990s. Modern medicine, no Brexit, no Coronavirus, cheaper housing and the seasonal weather did what it was supposed to do. Good music and things just ‘felt’ promising if I remember rightly - like the U.K. was quite an exciting place to be.

Oh and no bloody social media.

The 90’s..! Brilliant time to be alive, miss it so

Mid to late 80s. Great music and things seemed simpler and an air of anything was possible.

Fascinating question. I do love how many people are voluntarily using the internet to say how much better life was without the internet

I think we have to establish, when declaring decades ago much better, whether we're wishing we could transplant those days and live in them now, the same age as we are now. If I were born when my grandparents were, then I would have died in my early 20s, as I have a medical condition for which the drugs were not then available.

Then again, looking from a perspective of today, if I had been born when my grandparents were and been perfectly healthy, I would almost certainly be dead now anyway, as the youngest was born 100 years ago.

If it's not asking an impossible question, would you prefer to be the age you are now and live now in 2022, or would you wish that you had been born in the earlier decades of the 20th century, with the understanding that you would now either be dead or otherwise fast approaching the end of your life?

I realise that you can't reconcile it that simply, as if you'd been born in, say, 1900, you would have lived when you did (not much alternative, really!) and would never have expected the 2020s to ever have been yours to know. I find it weird enough to think that (unless something goes tragically wrong), my DS will see decades that I never will.

I suppose, if you're going to live at all, you have to start the finite clock ticking somewhere!

Agree. In 2016, men were men and women were women. You might of encountered a cross dresser but anyone suggesting you could choose your gender would’ve been laughed at.
A breastfeeding woman wasn’t called a breastfeeding person. Women had safe spaces.

Many people choosing the years which coincided with Tony Blair's premiership. Remember Cool Britannia? Personally I can't stand the guy.

Ah that’s how I remember 90s London too. Glad to hear a stranger say the same.

I was in the workforce in the 80s ( been there since mid 70s) and we didn't have half the workforce off sick with "mental health issues"
Trust me, it was virtually unheard of

I started work in 1975, although not in the UK, and I agree with this. I loved the 70s and 80s, and even the 90s. Things seem have to have gone downhill since then.

@EmmaAgain22 lol, I did grow up in a rough part of London & would walk past pimps & prostitutes (who were often out if their heads) on the school run & have the joys of their clients checking me out in my school uniform. I also saw the impact of drugs & associated crime so have never ever touched them. My childhood memories aren't centred around that though & as.a child I didn't have a full understanding what was going on.

I don't think we ever recovered from the 08 crash, wages stopped growing then & if you were younger & not on the housing ladder yet, it became much harder. Austerity meant no investment in people or public services.

Our food banks opened under the last Labour government, just after the crash. I agree, we've never really recovered.