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Everything pre-95 was the greatest of times as far as human interaction, patience and being in touch with nature. The access and use of technology has all but destroyed those three elements of life.
One thing the 80s {and 70s and 60s} has on the 90s,00s,10s is it had WAY better music. You can't even compare the great music of the 60s/70s/80s to the crap of 90s/00s/10s. In Canada most stations play the great stuff that I was born with and getting the more modern music is actually much more difficult with far fewer stations playing it.
You know the music sucks when your kids prefer the music you grew up on. This is the first time since the invention of the radio & records that the kids are more likely to listen to ther parents music. I can tell you no one in the 1960s/70s/80s were doing the "Chattanooga Cho-Cho" or "Swing" when we were growing up.
Being born in 1964 and growing up in that time you, like today, always wonder what the world will look like in 30 or 40 years but never in my wildest imagination did I ever think that the music I was listening to would still be the most popular. In 30 years when the 90s/00s/10s are just a faint memory and the music completely forgotten, they will still be playing the classics from my youth. There is no two ways around it, the music was better.
For music, Hip Hop and R&B was way better in the 90's then it is today. You can't even put them in the same category. I dare say, the 90's might have been the peak of R&B and there are plenty of classics from the 90's that people still listen to today and prefer to today's noise oops I mean "music". R&B barely even exist today and Hip Hop is nothing but mostly mumble rap now days.
Nothing anyone ever said bothered my mother more than hearing the words "good old days." She always insisted that our current time is the best time, and that we see the past thru rose colored glasses. She lived until her late 80s.
Its usually easy to determine how old someone is when the talk about what decade was "better" or "best" - generally the decade that they were in their early 20s, when someone else was still taking care of them (generally parents), or the decade just prior to their teen years that they "missed out" on.
Based on most people's actual experience, their "quality of life" usually improves every year once they get past their late 20s, and doesn't decline until age and health become a factor, independent of the decade. (Sometimes these health issues are self inflicted - alcohol, drugs, smoking, food, lifestyle, etc).
One of the most interesting threads on the forum. 7-year-old thread still going and the poll shows that 70% of voters think the 80's and 90's were definitely an all-around better era. What this thread represents is what I’ve been seeing as a general trend in this decade. The feeling of nostalgia and the desire to go back to the past is curiously strong these days and not just among a certain age of people. If you think about it, it’s pretty odd that so many people feels like going back to a close past that has just recently ended. This is a phenomenon that you would expect from people in times of something like an apocalypse - a widespread natural disaster or nuclear war - whishing to go back when the bomb had not yet been dropped. The strangest thing is that all of the statistics show that our era is the most peaceful so far, we have incredible technological advances, etc.
Our society should enjoy the benefits of this era and look forward into the bright future. Yet the majority of people above the age of 20 feels that something is not right today.
Of course there was always a tendency in every era to wonder back into the good old days, but it was mainly the old folks in their 70s and 80s being nostalgic about their childhood. Another type of nostalgia – which the movie Midnight in Paris presents - was the desire to go back into a totally different century.
The nostalgic trend of these days is a totally new type and on a whole another level.
The heartfelt longing for such a close past is a very peculiar and new thing in the history in my opinion. It doesn’t matter who you ask, the majority of people will tell you that they would gladly go back to the 90s in a heartbeat. You’ll get the same response from twenty-something guys and middle-aged folks. And it’s not only a tendency in America, we have the same ’viral’ nostalgic Facebook posts and forum topics in Europe everywhere. This is a worldwide penomenon.
I will say it out loud: I feel that something has broken along the previous 10-15 years. And I say this as a twenty-something year old guy, not as a middle-aged folk. It’s just not normal that people sit by each other in crowded places with heads down like robots. It’s not normal to attend a friendly dinner and half of the company is burried into their smartphones. The best I could describe what I feel: it’s like people are never fully there in the moment anymore.
Even the cities and the cars have started to lose their uniqueness. The USA was a whole different planet compared to Europe even when I was a kid in the 90s: totally different style of cars, different stores and brands, different vibe. Nowadays when I'm in NYC, I feel like I could be in any generic Western European metropolis - same cars, same shops, same people, same atmosphere. I could cry when I watch videos of NYC from the 80s and 90s - a totally different world. It's truely pathetic how the most exiting cities in the world are getting more and more generic.
Open your eyes: eveything is becoming generic, even the people. What the hell is happenning?
I voted for the 80s-90s, but it's mostly a vote for the latter 1990s. It's not just that many aspects of life were objectively better then (especially economically), but there was a feeling of optimism I haven't seen since and don't expect to see again. 9/11 definitely changed everything, and none of it for the better. It gave people an attitude of accepting having their freedoms taken away in the name of safety which I feel has ruined many aspects of life in America.
Then there's the fact that somewhere in the 2000s is when we started to shift from technology being a tool and source of hope to it being a ubiquitous force that feeds fears. From the internet creating "echo chambers" of ideas that allow extreme political views (on ALL sides) to grow to the now-proven fact that all the technology in modern cars is causing a lot more accidents than it prevents, technology seems to have crossed the fine line between helping and harming society. Of course, that Pandora's box was already wide open in the 1990s, but we were still mostly innocent to it.
And yes, as others have pointed out, the longing for the '80s and '90s is not limited to people who were young then. My parents feel the same way about the world being a better place in the '90s that I do, and also feel it was a better time than the '70s when they were in their 20s.
Everything pre-95 was the greatest of times as far as human interaction, patience and being in touch with nature. The access and use of technology has all but destroyed those three elements of life.
I get what you're saying.
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