To absolutely long for the 80's again

[bertybertyberty]

I was around 16 during the peak of this era. I was just coming into pop music, walkmans & fashion.

Young, care-free, no responsibilities, slim. It was such an easy-going era. No smart tech. You could phone a company and actually speak to someone without waiting in an endless queue or going through a list of around 10 different options. Shops had extra stock 'out the back' so you could always ask them to check 'out back' for more sizes etc. Less cars on the road. Less rules/regulations/H&S in general, much more easy going (although I recognise that some of the rules nowadays are essential and should have existed back then) Less tech meant less opportunity for scams/thieves/hacking.

Life was generally so much more laid back, casual & easy going. I LONG for these days again so much. I don't actually like modern day and the stresses that come with it. I wanted to make a booking for a day out with the DC the other day, I was on hold for 1 hour 45 minutes. I gave up and hung up.

Anyone else resonate ?

First job I complained about my boss being handsy got the sack.

Local government, handsy deputy treasurer, despite the fact that I was married by then. I kept my mouth shut.

Your lack of comprehension is cringeworthy.

You are ridiculous. She doesn’t have to give you a list. This isn’t a courtroom.

No one has to supply you with a list and it’s pointless as you’d carry on being as awkward and deliberately obtuse as you have been.

You have become very boring.

Of course she doesn't have to give me a list. But she was responding to my post, and disagreeing with me. Then not backing it up.

There was far more individualism for teenagers. These days, they seem to be identikit. We had punk, new romantic, Mods, etc, kids could find their tribe. It seems to focus on the 'identify as' nonsense now. Kids like me also didn't stand out, too poor for the fashion, NHS glasses, not latest 'must haves' didn't mark you out particularly.
There were latest toys, bikes etc but it wasn't rubbed in your face as much.

A common theme I see in these posts are things like:

"We've all become a bit envious and entitled."

"there was hope, you could be upwardly mobile"

"Teen mags were full of crap but there was nowhere near the pressure on girls that there is now"

It's led me to conclude that a large part of the problem is the internet and social media that constantly portrays the image that other women are having better lives, more fun, more beautiful. Even when half the time it's either faked or the best bits (no posts on social media about taking out the bins or doing the laundry).

Then on the old saying that "comparison is the thief of happiness" this makes people feel that their lives are crap and unsuccessful.

It's youth people want to go back to, I think, rather than the decade.

I didn't really enjoy the 80s, cos I was kid and we had no money. Mum definitely didn't, as a sahm with bits and pieces of jobs. She didn't take in ironing, but she took in sewing.

The mid to late 90s were better, because I was a teenager, had freedom and could earn my own money. Don't think I'd want to go back though; there were many boring bits. Would have been nice to be a couple of years older though, and get free uni and a cheap house after.

For my dc, my 90s are like the 60s were for me. Both currently quite enjoy the decade they're living in. Largely because I'm not as poor as my parents were.

Mind you, I did love the 90s (when I was a teenager), but to be fair I had no money. On further consideration, I think my actual favourite time was when I was late 20s/early 30s in retrospect. Cheap travel, affordable clothes, even though I couldn’t afford to buy rent was reasonable, I had fun going to NYC when it was two dollars to the pound and flights were hardly anything! Wish I’d done more and gone to more places in hindsight. Travel is shockingly expensive at the moment and my DD has never gone abroad on holiday (whereas I had gone quite a few times in the 80s even though we weren’t especially well off then.) In fact everything’s bloody expensive now. You pay £5 for a pack of butter and think fondly of the days when we all worried about the “EU butter mountain” rather than global terrorism, pandemics, and climate collapse.

@justasking111

1986 Manchester to Faro flight £100 each

That's £367 in today's money, so like I say, no weekend trips to the likes of Porto or Valencia back then. Would have been far too expensive for the average person.

I sometimes get nostalgic for the 1980s. Then I snap out of it when I remember that if you needed a shit at school you had to wipe your arse with tracing paper.

I don’t need to provide Exhibit A to ‘back up my post’ that some things have got better some things have got worse, anyone with half a brain would know some things get better with the passage of time and some things don’t but even if I did provide you with a list, graph, Venn diagram or a pie chart no doubt you would be contrary just for the sake of it.

🤣 Do read what you wrote. She doesn’t have to give you a list but you are insisting on answers. How silly and hypocritical. Again.

So true. 😅

Ah, to be young again with our lives before us and the world at our feet.

It was the best of times and the worst of times ....

The local sub culture can make a huge difference too. I am forever grateful that the grunge scene was huge in the uni I went to in 90s. The pressure, if any, was to be a cool girl. Looking like you didn't give a shit was more respected than making an effort. Hippie skirts, oversized knit jumpers and doc marten boots. It was perfectly acceptable to end up clubbing in the clothes you wore all day. I was the only one of my friends who even wore make up and I wore a tiny amount to cover blemishes. It was ok to have unwashed or messy hair, ideally cleaned hair that looked like you didn't care how messy it was. As for body hair, no one cared. We didn't try to please the boys and they were usually respectful, taking the piss out of us is a laddish way one minute but always insisting on walking us home to be safe (cos no one could ever afford a taxi). Many days were spent sitting drinking cheap tea or coffee smoking silk cuts and talking absolute shite about the state of the world. We had very little money but didn't need it, we walked everywhere, swapped clothes or went to charity shops, never ate out and there were no beauty expenses.

I do think it isn’t as simple as saying that it’s just a perennial nostalgia for the time one was young, whatever time that was. Obviously most of us do feel nostalgia for childhood for all sorts of reasons; but equally some times do seem to have been better than others. There was a palpable sense of optimism in the 90s that wasn’t there in the 80s, and isn’t around now, for example — between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 people genuinely did feel like globally things were getting better and more hopeful. The fear of nuclear attack, AIDS, things like Chernobyl and safety disasters like the Kings Cross fire and the Herald of Free Enterprise faded away. The Northern Ireland troubles were finally making progress. In that brief period before 9/11, it really did feel like global prosperity and peace were increasing.

Similarly, there has been a real sense of gloom and encroaching despair since austerity, Trump, Brexit, the pandemic, Ukraine, the terrorist attacks in Israel. The world is significantly more unstable and frightening than I can remember for a long time. The early 2010s were marked by austerity and the financial crisis, but Obama was President, Coalition austerity hadn’t quite hit the country massively yet, and on a day to day level things didn’t feel nearly as bad as they have done since 2016. Right now things feel globally as bad as lots of the 80s did, or worse even, because there doesn’t seem much of an end in sight and globally leaders and politicians seem clueless at best and deeply malevolent at worst. I think internet porn and social media in particular are quite worrying in terms of their social impacts right now.

And now we have AI to worry us too! Not yet have I met a single person who doesn’t make that “I’m freaked out by it” face when you mention AI, from teenagers to pensioners (and I know a fair number of techy people in software jobs and so on. Even they don’t like it). Not a single person I’ve asked seems to regard the idea of AI with any form of cheerfulness. Maybe if we all feel instinctively weird about it, it isn’t actually going to be a great thing for us…? For the first time ever I can remember, it seems like a technology that is unremittingly dystopian and doesn’t promise anything we genuinely think will be good (and I’m no Luddite…) This century’s atomic bomb, maybe? And we’re just sitting here, all of us, just letting it happen.

The good:
the high street- if you could afford it- my mum considered TopShop overpriced.
Clothes and makeup were fun. Because we were young.
Body Shop at pocket money prices
Such great music -from New Romantics to Madonna, Kylie and Madchester within ten years
Princess Diana before we realised she (and we) had been had

The bad:
Miners Strike
Falklands War
AIDS
Genuinely believing as a child that nuclear war could happen any time
Misogyny
Homophobia

The 80s were fab 😄

I loved the mid to late 80s and the late 90s!

Just remembering how you had to memorise phone numbers unless you had a pen to hand - but they were shorter than today's mobiles at least.

I had 6 or 7 phone numbers stored in my head. Nowadays it's 2 max!

I used to use a phone box to give a couple of rings to signal to my dad that i needed picking up from Ealing Bdwy station (having got the last train back from central london on the tube) no money needed 😂

We didn’t need to have opinions on the bad though. Yes bad things happened, but they happened ‘elsewhere’, they happened to other people, it was so much easier to find happiness in your close community bubble. I wasn’t worried about shark attacks in Australia or the plight of the indigenous coughbuzzard in Timbuktu. I could learn the lyrics of my favourite chart hit out of Smash Hits, pull my leg warmers up high and dream of summer days and pretty boys. Bliss.

In 1988 i was nearing 20, had a lovely 3 bed semi (although without double glazing, central heating or even fitted carpets), 2 children and a great wage coming in. There was no pressure to have everything matching in my house, most of it was second hand including the bath towels, our tv was a 14inch black and white tv. My children didn't have 100s of toys or huge piles of clothes but they were warm and fed well and that was all we craved. We had an annual weeks holiday to a caravan or B&B. Days were spent on the beach or at the park with a packed lunch. Life was simple and honest, what more does anyone need?

I loved the '80s and feel really nostalgic when I look back or watch anything on TV to do with the '80s. I went from 8 to 18 in the '80s, so they were my formative years.

But as pps have said, I think a lot of that stems from the fact that I was young and had no responsibilities. Well, other than homework/exams and helping out at home. Also, my hormones were raging so I probably experienced a lot of highs (and lows, of course). So many firsts - first crush (first of many ), first boyfriend, first kiss, leaving school and moving on to college etc. Weekends were spent at the roller rink and the swimming pool (in summer). If we had money, we ordered food at the kebab place and sat there for ages sipping our cokes. If we had no money, we'd spend hours hanging around the local shopping centre. We'd flip through the LPs and posters and discuss what we'd buy if we had money. Or wander around the clothes shops. Later in secondary school, we went through a phase of getting the bus to the ice rink. If I ever hear 'You win again' by the BeeGees, I'm instantly transported to the ice rink. They must have been playing it constantly.

I was too young for nightclubs and pubs (unless you count the school disco) and wouldn't have had the money to go drinking anyway.

Having said all that, there were terrible things going on in the world. The cold war was going on and we were terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war. Anyone else still traumatized by 'Threads'? The Troubles were raging up the road in NI and it seemed like every news report featured dead Catholics and Protestants. We were hearing a lot about acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. We had the Chernobyl disaster, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Herald of Free Enterprise capsizing, the Hillsborough disaster etc. Not to mention the AIDS epidemic and the Miners' Strikes.

And here in the ROI the Catholic church had a firm grip on the population. Contraception depended on the willingness (or otherwise) of your GP to prescribe the pill. Divorce was only legalised in 1996 and abortion has only been possible since 2018.

I get the nostalgia. I was a child of the 80s too and had a fab childhood, although with adult perspective I realise it was far from easy for my parents.

However, I much prefer now. Being able to find out anything with a few taps on a screen as opposed to having to trek to a library. Being able to see and speak to friends/relatives who live abroad rather than limit myself to a once-a-month time-limited phone call. The advances in medicine and healthcare. The fact that while the welfare state is shite, people are generally better looked after now than before. The fact that safeguarding is so much more robust and fewer children abused. The fact that domestic abuse is now understood as a crime. There's loads more.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think progress is always linear. I actually believe social mobility is going backwards at the moment and what's happening to our public services is criminal. I also share lots of posters' concerns about how social media can be damaging if not managed well and I don't think we're achieving that at the moment. However, I genuinely believe being able to embrace and enjoy the world we have rather than the world as was is a huge part of being happy.

But it's a great thing to be able to look back and smile too.

I miss those days too, although it took me a very long time to come out because of the impact of the homophobia back then. But everything else, I miss.

@Taytocrisps

The Troubles were raging up the road in NI and it seemed like every news report featured dead Catholics and Protestants

I used to go on holiday to ROI quite a few times in the 80s and could pick up UTV news. Dear lord, it was unrelentingly miserable. Every single day. I'd think how could anyone live there.

Fast forward 35 years. If the people of NI watched a news bulletin on BBC London they'd probably have the same thoughts!

There were certain things about the 80s I loved. My God, no, I wouldn't want to go back there on a personal basis.

The music was fabulous, T.V, etc. amazing. However, I was married young and in an abusive relationship, so personally, it was not a happy time for me. Even with having children.

The 2000s was when my life really began with finally leaving the ex, although going through the fires of hell, I met my amazing 2nd husband