I've seen a lot of discourse recently about how terrible the current world and how things have got worse. It's all utter nonsense though. There's never been a better time to be alive than now.

I've even seen people say they'd prefer to live before the industrial revolution. Lol they have absolutely no idea what life was like then.

Yep, got an infection in your leg, cut it off.  Today, take a few antibiotics.  

Periclean Athens, 5th century BC draws me. In a quiet place though, it didn't end well.
Song dynasty second choice.

in the late 60s or early 70s, to be a teenager in the 80s and enjoy the far superior mainstream music they had back then.

Tho its hard to imagine really, given how dependant i am of the internet nowadays. 

You know you can just listen to that music right now(without cassettes) and not have to live in a time without the internet or video games, right? 

Oh, but i obviously mean more about living in the culture, and growing up in the era. By that logic i dont have to timetravel anywhere, i can just listen, watch, see, play or do anything today, as almost everythign is available now. 

I mean, if you wanted to meet Shakespeare, or I don’t know, Cicero? Then you’d need to actually live in that period. However, yes, the benefits of all previous ages can pretty safely be consumed now in some form or other.

I feel like I'm screwed no matter what.
If I'm born and live in the USA like real-life, I could be a Baby Boomer but I would have to be a mid to late Baby Boomer to avoid the Vietnam draft.
Lead paint wasn't banned in the USA until 1979, asbestos didn't lose most of its uses until 1989. If I'm born around 1956 or on I still have to deal with those. Lead in gasoline wasn't really starting to get phased out until the 1970s and mostly banned by 1996.
There is also Cold War anxiety, but no doom scrolling on computers and phones in my young to middle-aged years.
I also need running water, electricity, and soaps (ideally liquid as an option).
So if I'm put in a corner and have to pick, born around 1956-1961 in a country like the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Western Europe. Shoot maybe even Japan.

No, I'm perfectly happy with the year (1973) and country (West Germany) I was born into.

Grew up in a world with the first home consoles and affordable home computers.

So I enjoyed all the arcade classics (a few in Arcades, but most of them ported to Atari 2600 or C64... and later I enjoyed the original Arcade versions a second time via emulation). I experienced the beginnings and the further development of many game genres, subgenres and gaming hardware. Decades later, I'm still enjoying new gaming features like raytracing and pathtracing and new ways to play like VR games. And I'm looking forward to the technical improvements of the next 3 - 4 decades.

Because I started with Basic, AmigaOS and MS-DOS before GUIs like Windows dumbed everything down, I got a lot of computer knowledge, which is still helpful in the present.

I was there when music became portable with Sony's Walkman and when the CD revolutionized many areas of home entertainment.

As a big fan of movies and TV shows, I enjoyed the beginnings of video rentals in the 1980s... suddenly you weren't limited to the TV program of the few TV channels anymore, but you were able to rent (and/or copy) almost any movie (a few months after their release in the cinemas) and watch them when YOU wanted.

In the 1990s / 2000s new media formats and video/audio hardware with big quality improvements (DVDs, Blu-rays, HD-TVs, surround sound...) became available just when I finished my education and vocational training... so just in time when I had a lot of money to spend on home entertainment hardware, movie collections and games.

When I finished school in the early 1990s it was a great time to find a good job. Job offers were plenty for Gen X... I wrote ~10 applications and I received several offers to choose from. No worries if my career path will be obsolete due to AI replacements in a few years like young people today. I only have to work another 10 - 12 years, so if my career path will be obsolete until then, the financial impact of my early retirement would be minimal.

When I was born, West Germany already had completely recovered from the second world war and has stayed out of any wars since then (except a few career soldiers who chose to participate in NATO conflicts). The cold war anxiety / nuclear anxiety never affected me personally... maybe is was a bit naive, but I couldn't imagine that things get so bad that any country/government starts World War 3 and destroys the whole world. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

The closer to the present, the better. Modern medicine is wonderful, even with all its flaws, and the further you get from the present, the greater the risks. We're probably also living in a very peaceful time in history, relatively speaking, and not only that, most of us probably aren't getting conscripted unlike what would have happened in the past.

If I had to pick a time (and a place) in the past, a relatively peaceful period would be my primary criteria though. I don't think I'm qualified to pick anything in particular, because while I think I have reasonable knowledge of the past, it tends to focus on important events, which tend to be quite turbulent. I also lack the knowledge about everyday life in many times and cultures. Some of the times and cultures that interest me are antiquity as well as the long history of China, or perhaps even Japan, but there's probably much else that's interesting too. There might also be good times in the caliphates of Islam, for example, considering how it sounds like they were some of the more advanced cultures of the world at the time. Of course a major issue is that in most cases dating really far back, the chances are I'd probably be mostly familiar with the place I was born in and not really much else, so I'm not sure how much it would actually matter where and when I was born.