| curl-6 said: Oops, sorry haha, I feel pretty old myself these days; I was born in early 1989 so about to turn 37 and noticing more and more of a generation gap with my 20-something colleagues, not to mention the teenagers I teach. Sometimes I actually wish I was born a bit earlier so I got to better experience the 80s-90s. |
Ha, I used to wish I was born a bit earlier to experience the 60s :) I'm from early 74.
I was fascinated with 8-track, my dad always played The Beatles and I was still too young when Star Wars, Star Trek the motion picture and Alien came out, 2001 was 6 years before my time. To experience that first time in the cinema would have been awesome. The 60s sounded like a much better time to live in.
Living through the 80s actually wasn't all that great. At the time it felt like the age of divorcing parents, drug problems lurking everywhere, AIDS, imminent WW3, and all the health hazards, second hand smoke everywhere, leaded gasoline fumes, acid rain, ozone gap, asbestos, Chernobyl. I remember police driving around with megaphone cars to tell everyone to remain indoors with the windows closed when Chernobyl happened. Bullying was also still 'normal' at school, I was a target, my best friend as well who ended up in a mental institution when he couldn't take it anymore. (Game nerds were an easy target...) And of course racism, sexism and homophobia were still the norm. Common bullying was calling us fags and other homophobic slurs, all accepted as normal at school.
But it is great to have lived before the rise of the internet and to have experienced video and PC gaming from the start. That made up for all the negatives of the 80s :) Amiga 500 copy parties and PC expos were magical. And of course the freedom we enjoyed as kids outside, before helicopter parenting became a thing.
Not so great to find out all the casual racism I was exposed to while growing up, a lot of racist children's books, comics, TV shows, movies :/ Plus all the whitewashing of history in school, but that's no different today :/ (Well much less history in school now...)
Nostalgia tends to block out all the negatives, but maybe those negatives enhanced the positives?
