To think the 70s/80s/90s were better?

[alienbaby]

Okay, so I was born in 1987 so missed the 70s. But I've always kind of fetishised this decade. It seems like it was a great time to be young. Same with the 80s and 90s. Freedom and opportunities but without the more rigid feel we have now.

It was 2006 when I went off and travelled and started living alone, and it was great because we had the internet of course, but it wasnt as pervasive. It meant there was still a kind of mystery about things, like you still had to engage and improvise whereas now you can just sort things out online ahead of time.

Am I just romanticising or do you think too that in a lot of ways the 70s/80s/90s were kind of a "sweet spot" where we had progress but not so much progress that we felt disconnected?

Forgot to say, I'm not in the UK so some of the bad things pps have mentioned didn't apply here.

@felulageller

The 90s was the best decade. Life was cheap. Everyone could get a council house, everyone working could buy a house. Food and fuel were cheap. Music and TV were great.

Going to the cinema was £3 and there were fab films out every week.

I feel sorry for my DC's.

Life was far from cheap in the 90's. Interest rates hit 18% not long after I got my first mortgage. Me and my husband had to get a 2nd job at weekends delivering leaflets. We bad to trek for miles with the children in their peaks just to be able to eat. We were luckier than a lot of our friends though who couldn't pay their mortgages and their houses were repossessed

In their prams

There was a lot that was similar to that list in the UK too. Not quite as brutal but not a lot of fun.

Plus ofc the perpetual thought of the nuclear war that was going to wipe us all out.

And when that faded along came the AIDS to replace it.

Free range childhoods sound idyllic but like you ours was often free range by necessity - no childcare. And kids including us got ourselves into all sorts of bother because kids are fucking stupid and if you leave them to look after themselves they will do stupid dangerous things. Eg recreating Evil Kineevil stunts with a chopper, a load of bricks and an old shed door was never going to end well. Nor was playing on a fucking building site. Or daring each other to go into the nonce's garden (there were nonces everywhere including school, but this one was on our street). Like I said, fucking stupid.

60s born

You where allowed to beat your children and it was classed as chastisement no SS knocking on the door. I got a severe beating for telling a teacher once never did that again I can tell you

Belt or cane given at school for the slightest thing. I was given the belt for asking questions ffs

Once I became an adult I was expected to marry and have kids not work or work till I was pregnant.

Husbands could beat their wives and it was classed as a domestic and the police walked away.

Rose tinted classes for loads of folks me thinks

As a lesbian I had a terrible time being a teen in the 90's, so no!

@A580Hojas
Being gay in the 70s, 80s and 90s was MUCH worse than now. In my liberal school not one person out of the 230 in my year were openly gay. My friend was kicked out of his house for coming out to his parents and twice heavily beaten leaving a gay pub. I lived with some lesbians and none of their parents knew. Another friend only discovered that homosexuality was a thing because of "the kiss" on EastEnders. It was then banned in his house. The TV shows were rife with stereotypes and gay men were either camp and living at home with their Mums or sexual deviants. AIDs led to some hideous moments.
Yes it has a long way to go, and there is much to do, but it is incomparable to now.

@ Saysama

"If you were straight and white, sure. If you were black, brown or gay, you were pretty much fucked. It wasn’t a particularly good time to be a woman or disabled, either"
Aso it wasn't great being working class either!

I think they were better times too. Although there are ups and downs to every decade.
I avoid social media, but a lot of people these days seem to spend their lives staring at what everyone else is doing on there, getting the perfect selfie and staging the best set up photo. I think people lived more in the 70s, 80s and 90s because they weren’t wasting their lives staring at a phone and chasing likes etc. I think if you went back in time and told people in those eras that their lives would revolve around a phone in your pocket they would think you were crazy.

There were a lot of downsides.. attitudes to women, paedophiles, marital rape being okay, homophobia, attitudes to single mums, bullying being accepted, lack of technology for solving crimes etc.

YANBU. Things were so much better in the 80s and 90s. Everything is so depressingly shit now and life has got infinitely worse for anyone who isn't rich.

You could get away with a lot more back then. These days there is CCTV everywhere, you can't even vomit in the street on a night out without worrying it'll come back to haunt you. Things were laid back, even in the 90s, because although there was more CCTV it was still recorded on videotape and not stored indefinitely.

I was born in 74, can´t really remember the 70s. The 80s were ok but I loved the 90s. I was a 18 in 92 and so many possibilities. I really enjoyed that decade.

I think a lot of it is rose-tinted glasses. Sorry! I'm an Irish child of the 80s and we had terrible unemployment and violence in the North and some very conservative attitudes (ie no divorce till 95, so women could be legally tied to abusive men). Also MH issues were very poorly understood - I can think of relatives who might have had very different lives if they'd been properly diagnosed and supported. And while we didn't have climate change worry to the same degree, everyone lived with the potential threat of nuclear war or a terrible nuclear accident (Chernobyl could have easily been much worse) so there was a sense of existential threat if you chose to focus on it.

In the 1980’s the parents of my gay friend offered to pay for psychiatric treatment to deal with it.

Though thinking about climate change, there was actually a lot of environmental anxiety out there, particularly around over-population (many over-heated predictions of inevitable mass famine by 1999 or whatever). I don't think we loaded those worries onto kids in quite the same way though, which is interesting? Or maybe the lack of doom scrolling / 24 news meant we could step back from it and live our day to day lives more easily?

Being a teenager in the 80s was brilliant. Discos in village halls, great (terrible!) fashions, great music. There is even a song, “Christmas was better in the 80s” - and it really was.

Also, everyone thinks the decades they were born in and around are the best, so it's kinda biased viewpoint,

I don't - born in the 60s, teenager in the 1970s - it was fucking awful, the decade style forgot. LA lot of popular music was just wank - the Fucking Bay City Rollers - a lot of 50s throwback twats like Alvin fucking Stardust and Showaddywaddddy Mud etc - just fucking useless.

Most 80s music hasn't stood the test of time either IMHO.

arrrgghhh.

I liked the Bay City Rollers! Hated LA soft rock and prog rock.

I think some 80’s music has stood the test of time. Not mainstream stuff though. My dd likes The Smiths.

My dcs are really envious of Top of the Pops. We have watched all the re-runs - we are now on 1991. Ds can’t believe that TOTP was an event . You’d talk about it at school the next day. An appearance on TOTP could make a record or group. And the charts were varied . You got things you hated, things you loved, and the odd right out of nowhere novelty song too. That doesn’t happen any more. Everyone stays in their lane, like the US music scene. You’re not exposed to all kinds of stuff and can avoid, say, country music. People of my age all know The Coward of the County or Lucille!!

@CookPassBabtridge

There were a lot of downsides.. attitudes to women, paedophiles, marital rape being okay, homophobia, attitudes to single mums, bullying being accepted, lack of technology for solving crimes etc.

^this. Peodophillia was basically treated as a bit of a joke in the 70s - and as kids we were expected to dodge adults with a bad reputation - talk about victim blaming. There was more freedom in some ways but a lot less help and sympathy when/if things went wrong. Medical techniques have improved incredibly - a lot a things that wer a death sentence then are treatable or even curable now.

@HarrietsChariot

You could get away with a lot more back then. These days there is CCTV everywhere, you can't even vomit in the street on a night out without worrying it'll come back to haunt you. Things were laid back, even in the 90s, because although there was more CCTV it was still recorded on videotape and not stored indefinitely.

You…miss being able to vomit in the street without consequences? Or have I misunderstood?

I was born in the 70s. I think it depends what's happened in your life. I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in the 70s and 80s, they have a much better childhood, opportunities and education than I did and I was by no means deprived of anything parentally or in any other way. I never understand the rose tinted glasses, when you look back at attitudes in the past I can never understand why people hanker after them. I've never been a person to look back wistfully though, what's past is gone and it's always time to move on and live in the present. The only thing Id prefer my kids didn't have to deal with, that I avoided, was social media but we have lots of discussions about this. In that respect I agree things were more free back then.

@DottyHarmer We’re watching TOTP 1991, as well! Watched all the 1990 ones last year and it’s really interesting how dramatic the shift in music seems to have been over those 12 months. 1990 was still very 80’s, no? 1991 is great fun, but some of the stuff is dire. 😂The KLF were on the last one and DP and I went down this weird wiki rabbit hole, brushing up on their weirdness (burning a million quid, the anti-Turner prize, etc). It was certainly all very of its time!

For those watching old episodes of TOTP, I assume there are a number of episodes that can't be shown or have been edited due to presenters/artists that can no longer be shown due to their criminal records.

There will also be a number of TV shows from the 70s that couldn't be shown nowadays due to their racist/homophobic attitudes, and a number of 80s shows haven't aged well.

Things were not all rosy in the 70/80s, much behaviour/attitudes then would be frowned upon now (hopefully)