What was life like in the 80s?

[Strangerthanadeadting]

As a recent fan of Stranger Things and having only been four years old at the end of the eighties, I'm fascinated to know what life was like for teens & adults back then.

It's depicted as being so much fun on TV. So colourful, the music is brilliant, the fashion so vivid. It was a time before the Internet, social media, plastic surgery, the Kardashians.

I'm fascinated. I'd love to hear what life was like. What people did for fun, what they ate, how different a working day was, if it really was as glamorous as it looks, if the hairstyles took forever, what people thought the future would be like? Was it a better life? A better time?

@sparkleypen you can stop in 5th year now. In the 80s, in shitsville you could stop whenever the hell you wanted 😂😂😂

Yes there were more free retraining opportunities. My aunt was a teacher and took advantage of free training for office work. Her DH had a good job, so wasn't means tested.
She did the office work for a few years and then went back to teaching.

I remember a,lot of promotion of the dangers of Heroin, lots of grim posters depicting Heroin addicts ,looking pale, with lots of spots and greasy hair , and who could forget zammo in grange hill and his harrowing heroin addiction .

I was at university for most of the eighties (1981-1986). I lived in South Africa so my experience will have been very different in most ways from people elsewhere. But the things that were probably the same were the big perm, neon coloured clothes and jewellery and the cavalier disregard for health and safety (no thoughts given to sun cream, seatbelts, parents smoking in the car with the kids in the back etc).

What was different from other counties of course was the fascist regime and the war, obviously.

A standard nursery snack was (free) milk and nuts & raisins. I’d never heard of but allergies until well into the 90s. (That’s not a dig...they just genuinely didn’t seem as common then).

Yes @OldBeans my family were very anti signing on. Even after my Dad was very very ill he refused to sign on. There was definitely a stigma about benefits even in rough areas.

nut

They were interesting times, very transitional looking back.
I turned 16 in 1980 and sat my O levels. Went behind the Iron Curtain twice to Dresden and Moscow - now they really were grey and depressing and full of deprivation. Of course it was all finished not too long after and a good thing too. Went to music college, lost a couple of gay friends to AIDS in the early days when it was pretty much a death sentence. The rare sight of seeing someone with a "mobile phone" (think a large heavy handbag with an aerial and curly cable)
Leant a lot, grew up a bit.
Probably similar to now but without mobile phones and social media

Sex was something only bad girls did . Everyone in my immediate circle of friends were petrified of getting pregnant , the only options were to have the baby ( the shame it would bring on your family was repeated over and over ) or get a boat to Liverpool . I only remember one girl in my sister’s year getting pregnant at school . We were just too afraid to have sex . I was a virgin until I was almost 22 and in my third year at university.

I thought JSA or whatever incarnation it was then stopped being available for 16 yr olds sometime in the late 80,s @OldBeans and people had to be 18 to claim it?

Lukewarm school milk 🤢🤢🤢🤢 The only way I could stomach it was to save a cola cube in my desk then hold it in my mouth while I drank it. Put me off milk for life.

It was a strange time to be Irish in London. We lived in what was then a very Irish area and my parents were quite scared of anti-Irish (read: anti-IRA) sentiment. They mixed in almost completely Irish circles - social clubs, pubs etc - and we weren’t allowed to discuss the Troubles in front of English people .

Yes DP was unemployed for a bit living at home in the 80s and his dad would not let him sign on.

Definitely not. Unemployment benefit for 16 and 17 yr olds was paid at a lower rate but people were definitely still claiming it when I left school in 1993 @x2boys

@OldBeans being Irish (or of Irish descent) was definitely problematic. Sectarianism in Glasgow was horrific. The running battles between the local protestant and catholic schools were awful. Proper organised arranged warfare.

Me too Roly for some reason known only to them we used to.get school milk at afternoon break after it had been in a warm classroom all day ( no fridges of course ) it was vile and smelled of vomit ,I'm still not a lover of milk and rarely drink it and I'm 46 this year.

The warm milk was awful. And the frozen milk in winter was only marginally better. I still can’t drink full fat milk in any form.

Most folk here left school after their O Grades, so at the end of 4th year, but if your birthday was before the end of February, you could leave at Christmas, so plenty kids were leaving school at 15 with no qualifications. They sometimes had apprenticeships or jobs lined up but not always. School was so rubbish and education so undervalued that they just couldn't wait to leave.
My 6th year had 26 kids, by contrast my ds1 had more than 150 in his.

Yes the ice cold milk wasent much better .Children didn't drink very much during the school day just a glass of two of water with lunch as I recall and of course the horrid milk!

I had an idyllic childhood in the 80s. Living in the Midlands, Dad had a stable job, Mum worked as a cleaner in the evenings so was at home in the day. Nan and Grandad and Aunties and Uncles lived within walking distance, spent lots of time with them.

So much freedom. Always out in the local fields and woods, summer and winter. Mum would whistle us to come in for tea. Stew on a Sunday! Caught the bus into town with friends from aged 10. Always holidayed in a caravan for a week in May with extended family.

Loved fashion and music. Such fabulous music in the 80s.

I was an early starter to clubs, late 14 and regular at 15. Didn’t drink, just loved to dance and hang out with mates.

It was a brilliant decade for me.

I remember being Very confident and sure of myself. Life had a positive vibe and I looked Forward to a bright future. I had a full grant when I went to uni I and rent was very low at £18 a week in the West Midlands. I mostly wore DMs and a lot of black, still do, but lots wore acidic brights. It was a time that some of my friends came out as gay and there was acceptance, without prejudice, unlike a decade earlier when people were
Taunted at the slightest whiff of homosexuality.
But there was hardship, whole towns destitute, poverty and the first time I became aware of the huge gap between the comfortable high spending yuppies and the very poor.

I was 13 in 1980 and loved the 1980's - the fashion, the music and the movies. This is what I remember:

• freedom. On Monday evenings I would go with my secondary school mates to the under 18's night at the local Top Rank and dance to Soft Cell, Human League, New Order, Duran Duran, Wham!, Visage, Japan, Ultravox, Adam & the Ants etc. It was a long way from one side of the city to the other for just 2 hours of fun.
• I had a Saturday job in a department store and earned good money compared to friends. I worked in the music dept. selling vinyl records and cassettes. I would have to keep the turntable going with current tunes and the new 'Now That's What I Call Music' releases made my job easier. At Christmas sales of Foster & Allen, Daniel O'Donnell and Barbara Streisand when through the roof (no, I never understood why!)
• Plastic earrings were great. You didn't get infections in your holes like with cheap metal ones (or green discolouration) and you just washed them at the end of the day to keep them clean. I had a range of colours and sizes!
• The tv drama 'Threads' was terrifying. I lived in a city that was 100% a target in the event of nuclear war the realisation that incineration was inevitable was depressing. That 'what to do in the event of nuclear war' government info documentary was also terrifying.
• I could easily go to corner shops and buy cigarettes and the local video rental store would happily rent out 18 cert films all as an underage teen.
• we had a large chest freezer and my parents visited Bejam monthly to stock it up and buy the most fantastically yummy convenience foods and ice lollies/ice cream. We had a make it yourself ice cream wafer maker and would make huge ice cream wafer treats. 'Ice Magic' also appeared about that time - liquid chocolate sauce that turned hard when if was poured over ice cream. Chocmint was my favourite!
• Commodore 64 home computer. My dad insisted that we needed one and bought it for Christmas in about 1983(?). It was so shit. No one could understand how it worked and we only played PacMan and early Donkey Kong on it.

Oh the memories. So rubbish but sooo fab!

Ice magic! It was fab dh bought something similar a couple of years ago but it just was ent the same😠

I was 9 in 1980. Never even remotely trendy but it didn't seem to matter at primary school. Somewhere in the mid 80's onwards I started listening to John Peel on radio 1. Never looked back. Still hate pop. There was so much great alternative music in the late 80's. Much harder to buy though. I was so happy when a tiny independent record store opened in my home town and I could start buying the records I wanted. We lived near a small town, now very overpriced commuter belt. Clothes shops were aimed at middle aged women, nothing for teenagers. No cafes at all. Not one until around 1988. No where to meet up with friends. I was a very boring teenager and spent most of my time with my nose stuck in a book partly because there was nothing else to do.

@anothernotherone who was Adam Ant revealed to be???