I am interested to know what life was like from the words of people who were still children then or they were from 16-30 years old.
Since I haven’t seen it mentioned, I will point out that smoking was extremely common and everything vaguely smelled of cigerettes until public smoking bans started coming into effect in different areas.
I grew up at the tail end of this period and have a core memory of going to a restaurant in an area that hadn’t yet fully banned public smoking. The hostess of course asks if you want to be seated in the smoking or non-smoking section, and in the non-smoking section everything still vaguely reeked of cigarettes. Then to go to the bathroom you walk through the smoking section which reeks even more of cigerettes (the sections are just different sides of the restaurant with standard restaurant dividers that are only chest height and intended mostly as sound blocks) and just everything had some amount of cigerette smell to it
I recall eating at fast food restaurants and sitting in the smoking section. Just lighting up in a freaking Wendy’s. McDonald’s had branded ashtrays.
My grandmother grew increasingly angry as smoking sections disappeared, then laws came into effect banning smoking in certain public areas. She grew up with everyone smoking everywhere. It was normalized in society during the prime of her life, and if you didn’t have smokes, then you probably either were weird or didn’t have it together.
I was working at Wendy’s when they had those little metal disposable ash trays. I had to take a few to use at home. Crazy to think just how much smoking cigarettes was just everywhere.
1970s and 1980s in rural Virginia, most people didn’t lock their doors and kids ran around outside until dark. Our phone was a party line, meaning if I picked up the phone I might hear a nearby neighbor already on the line having a conversation, so I would just hang up until the line was free. We were comfortable but not wealthy. By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s we had a microwave and a VCR. Video rental stores were starting to be popular. Going out to eat at Pizza Hut was a big deal.
Mid/late 1980s and onward, technology started making a bigger difference. I got a Commodore 64 computer, we moved to a small town and got cable television and MTV, I got a modem for the Commodore 64 and started logging into BBS systems. Those two things definitely expanded my horizons a lot. In the early 1990s a year or two before the Internet got big I played one-on-one Doom with a guy from Norway via modem, that seemed like magic at the time.
1990s and onward more internet, more television, more corporations, more technology, it just got faster and faster. Once we had our magic pocket computers that did phone calls, email, text messages, navagation, etc everything has just been evolutions of that with more storage and faster processors.
It was not strange to see unattended children walking the streets when school was not in session.
there were kids EVERYWHERE.
This freedom is the most powerful memory for me. Starting when I was 5 years old, I was wandering alone in the streets, parks, gullies, and hills of Seattle and Boise, pretending to be an indigenous explorer in the pre-colonial era. My parents had no idea where I was, which was fine as long as I came home before dark.
As an adolescent, my friends and I ran amok in large office buildings, playing a wild version of elevator tag, or turning the state capitol building into a raucous playground until we were chased out. We snuck into school gymnasiums, followed fire trucks for miles on our bikes, and made prank phone calls.
My parents threw parties with live jazz bands, and I would let all the drunk dancers give me “just one sip” of wine from each glass until I was dizzy. Most adults sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me.
School felt like a prison of repetition, and I often abruptly got up and walked out. I forged my mom’s signature on permission slips, but after awhile teachers just stopped asking. I always returned to class for tests, so that I wouldn’t need to repeat anything.
I think kids had more latitude back then, because we occupied a space of insignificance. I felt largely invisible in the world, so I could push boundaries without consequence.
Yes, at 10, just leaving on my bike for the next little suburban area three miles away was an amount of freedom we had that is considered neglect in this atmosphere. Things really started tightening up as we hit the digital age and suddenly every news outlet continuously warned of our murder and molestation.
This is such a salient point about how life has, and hasn’t, changed. Your kids could still very well go out on an adventure nowadays and be fine, as most adults still benevolently keep half an eye on kids. But we’re so damn scared of what could happen that we don’t trust the unknown neighbour.
Take away the phone and you see the world hasn’t changed as much as we fear it has (and in some ways it has, not totally discounting the modern world)
Gonna have to be more specific. What part of life?
You can just talk about your life, how you had fun, what dreams and hopes you had for the future, and so on.
We used to book computer time at the local library and I would walk by myself at the age of 8 to go play Oregon trail on a green monochrome monitor.
I miss the non chain coffee shops that were open 24/7, I miss the non chain stores that were still around, I miss the mall parking lot improvised car shows.
I enjoyed being able to safely fide my bike the 8 miles to school, I enjoyed our little party island, I miss having hundreds of miles of canals to run my little boat on.
I do also remember the race fights in the middle of school during the Rodney King trials, I remember the AIDS scare where we stopped using water fountains just in case.
I enjoyed being able to safely ride my bike the 8 miles to school
Aside from the risk of the authorities treating it as child neglect, do you believe this would be less safe to do now? If so, why?
When I was a kid there was a trail off road that ran all the way to school so I didn’t have to deal with trqffic, its now fully developed so that trail is gone
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Politics was sanitized.
Iran and Iraq fought a brutal war in the 80’s. Absolutely awful, chemical weapons, child soldiers, human wave attacks.
The US was supporting Iraq with Intelligence and selling weapons. Except we were also selling weapons on the down low to Iran.
Congress had banned the executive from supporting anti communist militias in central America. They were psychotic zealots. They burned churches because the priest said the peasants should have rights. They used assassination, torture, and mass rape indiscriminately. The most evil people you can imagine, but they were against the left so the CIA couldn’t keep their hands to themselves.
They sold weapons to Iran that was fighting a hot war with our ally Iraq to use the money to fund the Contras in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Oliver North went to prison. Reagan and his Vice president, Bush, denied knowing anything about it. (Bush was the former head of the CIA)
Bush pardoned North after he was elected in 88. North went on to become the head of the NRA and funnel millions of dollars into supporting Republican campaign funds.
The violence in Central America continued to simmer until it burst into flame again in 2014 and led to a refugee crisis under Obama.
The chickens always come home to roost.
I was a teen in the early 90s. We had the best music. Lot’s of diversity among my friends but that was just normal so I didn’t really notice until the US got super racist and bigoted. Then I was like, “wow! were we all woke the whole time?” It was a better time. Also the local shrubbery was amazing, not like this new gas station garbage we have today. Most of us felt like we had a future. I feel so sorry for kids today, like, we failed you kiddos.
Lot’s of diversity among my friends but that was just normal so I didn’t really notice until the US got super racist and bigoted. Then I was like, “wow! were we all woke the whole time?” It was a better time.
This is very interesting and I like to hear it. I didn’t know the USA got more bigoted
Might be they just didn’t see it because they were a kid.
I grew up with casual racism from my dad and grandfather.
My family was always multi racial but you would also hear hard Rs at family get togethers.
Depends on the part of the country too I’m sure.
It was always bigoted. they were lynching black men until 1981.
Yeah most people tend to srgue thst the usa has been in a continous racism decay, being max racist upon its conception as a country (1600s). I’m still interested in OP’s opinion from their frame of reference - sort of suggests the truth is more nuanced and might be tied to prosperity of the country
The people who argue the USA was “always this bigoted” skip over the entire period between the Civil Rights movement and GamerGate. If your reference point for the past is like, the 90s or 00s, no it wasn’t as bigoted. Not to say there was no bigotry, but it wasn’t acceptable to be outwardly hateful, and most people believed the future would be more progressive.
Well, idk if I would say “more”. The median has gotten less bigoted (people care a little more when you say certain slurs), but I also think that the more conservative people have gotten significantly more bigoted.
we failed you kiddos.
they failed you. Dw OP I trust you’re not to blame
The death of the music industry was, in some ways, a lot like the death of reverse-fox-news.
Now it’s just fox news.
i grew up in a rural area in the 80s and 90s and it sucked balls.
we had to drive 30m+ each way to do anything like shopping or going out. all anyone did was watch TV and we took a trip into the city like 1-2 times a year, as it was a 2hr+ drive each way.
it was really really boring and i ended up doing drugs and drinking because it was the only way to cope with how insanely boring and awful my community was.
thankfully once I got to college it was a lot more fun, because I was around smart and interesting people for the first time in my entire life.
hate communists
Late 80’s early 90’s
It seems, looking back, it was quieter. People didn’t move around as much as they do now. The town was basically shut down by 6pm. Most of the men worked within two miles of home, and most women stayed home.
We would play outside in the afternoons and listen for the church bells. Six bells and it was time for dinner. Everyone sat down every night for dinner with their families.
And just quieter in general. Less vehicle traffic. Less airplanes. Led lights hadn’t been invented yet so you could still see the stars. No cell phones obviously.
More structure, less noise
A lot changed over those decades, so grouping it all together seems a bit too broad.
Without the Internet, you had to find other ways of entertaining yourself. Regular toys and board games and stuff were played with a lot. As an only child, I would sometimes play my board games by myself, acting as 2 players (yeah, sad I know). I remember getting lots of activity books and coloring books when I was really young. Then as I got older I read a lot of magazines and books. The Readers Digest was kept in the bathroom, and I would read jokes or stories from it while on the toilet. Things like Legos could keep you busy for hours. I got a Nintendo and it consumed most of my time. The games were simple, but tended to be difficult, and you would just play it over and over and over again. On Fridays after school you could go to the video store to rent a movie or game as some weekend entertainment. Going to the movie theater seemed to be reasonably priced back then. There were arcade games all over the place, like at the movie theater, inside convenience stores, even in the pizza hut. We used to actually go to the pizza hut and sit down at a table to eat, it was fun. Before cable or satellite TV, there were only like 3 channels, and they went off at night.
Rampant racism, sexism, mental health (PTSD from war) issues. Haze of smoke inside from tobacco smokers and a haze of smoke outside from cars with terrible fuel management and no emissions controls - to say nothing of the lead.
1970s was the end of the postwar economic boom, with several recessions during the period described. It was the time of privatization and government cutbacks.
I was born when Carter was POTUS and recall the Regan presidency.
For my perspective the biggest shift isn’t technology or TV always being in color or even that the bigots went from smiling politeness to objects of derision to unapologetic hypocrites. Rather, it was the absence of the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon.
When I was in kindergarten we had air raid drills – what to do if the bombs started falling. Up until the very first Gulf War we lived with a constant awareness that any day could literally end us all, and most of us became extremely cynical because of it. Irony and punk ruled, and it wasn’t until the USSR fell apart that we all collectively realized that life would actually go on without a nuclear apocalypse.
The 90s were essentially one massive party. The cold war has been won, our long wartime compromises were unnecessary, and this fancy new Internet would bring us a future where we were all rich and happy and at peace.
2001 is just outside of your scope, but the terrorist attacks that year were the end of the 90s just like the fall of the Soviet Union was the end of the multi-decade horror that I was born into.
There are a bunch of other weird little things we could go into, like banking by phone or going to an ATM first and then shopping with the cash, or how cigarettes were everywhere and we thought everyone was cis and straight or “weird”, but that constant slow-burning fear is the thing I remember most.
It was so bad, and we were so convinced that doomsday was coming, that on the day of the 9/11 attacks I remember thinking “what took them so long.”
