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It's depressing that the god awful "00s" was my entire "20s" and now it is gone and I'm 30. I vote 80s/90s leaning towards the 80s. I miss it!!! I hope the "10s" or whatever they are called are awesome.
I'm with you all on this, but isn't this based on your childhood? So people are going to pick when they were the most happiest which is usually when you were a kid.
I'm with you all on this, but isn't this based on your childhood? So people are going to pick when they were the most happiest which is usually when you were a kid.
Not really. My personal experience during most of the 90s was very traumatic. My father died from kidney failure in 94 and my grandmother the year after. I also had to live under a tyranny of a d*uchebag stepfather during most of the decade.
The personal quality of life did improve for me during the tail end of the 90s and early 2000s (until 2002), specifically when my mother divorced her husband (my stepfather). Also, late 2004 and late 2005 were good spikes for me personally as well. But the overall quality of life from a bigger perspective, i.e. on the outside world, was overall better. My only regret is that I had to live out my teen years and become of age in the socially narcissistic and pop-dominated 2000s.
If it was up to me, I would've been born ten years earlier. Raised as a kid in the 80s, be a teen in the early 90s, attend college in the mid-to-late 90s and graduated in one of the BEST job markets since the Great Depression.
People were just plain happier all around, because of so many factors, in the 80s. You might even call it the calm before the storm.
Although I praised the 80s some I'm not sure happiness was that universal. At one point in the 80s unemployment was as high as it is now. AIDS and crack were becoming epidemic. There was also fear the Japanese were out-competing us. This caused economic upset, but apparently it also caused some hostility to actual Asians as in the case of the non-Japanese Vincent Chin. (Someone mentioned nukes, but as a kid in the '80s I rarely thought about that and I think Gorbachev coming in lessened it even more.)
What was somewhat common in the 1980s though was optimism. I think there was a real, if maybe illusory, sense that a good telethon or hand-holding would make things better. That things would be great again and we could solve our problems. In the 1990s I think there was some fatigue about that even though the 1990s was good in many respects.
The 1990s saw a decline in crack use, treatments for AIDS, and an uptick in US economic competitiveness. However the fall of Communism, in the 1990s, seemed to make many things about the world "feel" (not that they actually were) more unstable. Many of the charities and foundations of the 1980s turned out to be mismanaged. Solving starvation in Africa or "Saving the Rain forest" wasn't as easy as people wanted to believe. Although one of the biggest things might be the disparity. That was an issue in the 1980s, but it was worse in the 1990s yet you couldn't really talk about it in the same way. After all poverty was lower than in the 1980s and the President was Clinton not Reagan. (Reagan was a big villain for the Left in the 1980s. That 1990s capitalism was far more monopolistic and callous, IMO, was swept under the rug a bit) So the middle-class just had to live with doing marginally better while constantly hearing what a boom-age we lived in and seeing even allegedly "poor" TV characters living in spacious homes with fashionable clothes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Fairfaxian
If it was up to me, I would've been born ten years earlier. Raised as a kid in the 80s, be a teen in the early 90s, attend college in the mid-to-late 90s and graduated in one of the BEST job markets since the Great Depression.
That was almost, or just was, my exact situation. And it was fairly good. Although it went sour around 1997 due to personal bad-luck. (I almost died in a wheelchair accident, spent a year housebound, and then once I went out again I had a mental breakdown)
In the 80's the farmers took a beating, the problems of the homelessness was the big hooplah, before the AIDS expidemic...factor in the unemployed and Reagonomics, latch key kids, both parents having to work to make ends meet, and 80's music was really fake and plastic if you look close enough. The Russians are coming!!! The Russians are coming!!!
Any decade can be picked apart...in 15 years we're going to look back on the 00's with rose colored glasses and miss the hell out of 'em.
In the 80's kids played video games, went to the mall and listened to New Kids on the Block and Debbie Gibson.
In the 00's, kids played video games, went to the mall and listened to BackStreet Boys and Britany Spears. The more things change.....
I remember the 1980's being tough. In my part of the country, the mines and glass factories were shutting down. The population was declining and businesses were shutting down. My father lost his job at the glass factory in 1987 and I remember going to bed hungry at times. Remember the movie "All the Right Moves" with Tom Cruise? It took place in Johnstown, PA, and it chronciled the hard life many Rust Belt/Northern Appalachian communities faced in the 1980's. It was a mirror image of Clarksburg, WV, my home town.
Not to sound depressing, but the 1990's were a bit better. By the late 1990's, unemployment declined signifcantly but the higher paying manufacturing/steel plant jobs were replaced with lower paying retail/service jobs.
The 2000's are a mixed bag, but overall for the reasons I mentioned above, the 2000's were better, atleast for me.
The Soviet Union was gone, World War I fed into WWII which immediately started the Cold War and when it was FINALLY over we had WON.
There were no major wars, we sat on top of the world and for the most part, and very unusally, the rest of the world liked us even though we ran the show. Bill Clinton was liked the world over and didn't get fussy over much. The economy was going gangbusters due to the fact we hadn't offshored everything and we picked up half the worlds attention when the USSR died, etc.
Crime was going down down down, gas was cheap, jobs were created by the millions, the dollar was pretty strong, people started traveling a lot more, almost every area of the country was going up up up and we really didn't see any major catastrophies or natural disasters.
It was just such a damn progressive and optomistic time! Everyone seemed happy.
Today you're just waiting for the next bomb to drop.
The 80's were hell. Hair and clothing styles were terrible; IMHO females were 90% less attractive back then (no offense to anyone). The males just looked plain ridiculous. The cars back then were all boxy and ugly (the Big 3 never made uglier cars than in the 80's). Also, vulgarity and violence of human society seemed to really peak in the 80's (just watch any action movie from the decade). Drug usage was also at an all-time high and it turned many cities to s**t. For instance DC was the "Murder Capital of the Country," (not Detroit) and you actually had a 50-50 chance of getting shot if you walked down the wrong street in NYC. The 80's also killed Len Bias (the next MJ), Lefty's career, and Maryland basketball. It's one saving grace is that is it was by far the best decade for rock/pop, especially since the synthesizer entered the picture.
To me there really isn't anything distinctive about the 90's more than being a transition from the 80's to the 00's.
Right now, the world still sucks in general, but it's pretty cool compared to the past. The worst thing in the 2000's was the terrorism (not just WTC/Pentagon either).
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