Unless you were black. Or Japanese. Or gay. Or a woman who didn’t want to be a housewife.
I was born in the same year, and my thoughts are much the same. Though we like to romanticize previous periods, for the most part, they were pretty crappy, even for the wealthy. So many modern conveniences today that we take for granted were either obscenely expensive, in a vastly inferior form, or just plain not existent a long time ago. Sure, there’s a few neat things here and there, but in general, life just gets better and better as time goes on.
However, it seems like we might be sort of at a tipping point. I’ve heard it said that kids being born now, for the first time, have a lower life expectancy than their parents. We have major potential issues that I’m quite sure humanity will overcome, but likely won’t come out as well on the other side as well off as we are now. Pollution and global warming are a huge concern. Our reliance on fossil fuels is a huge concern. So, quite frankly, I think we very well may be at one of the best times to live for quite a while in either direction.
Speaking specifically as an 80s kid, I feel like I got in at a particularly sweet spot, but I also figure that most people have an unreasonable connection with the things they grew up with. Random drama and all aside, I loved my childhood, and I don’t really see how it could have been any better with more modern technology. I still had videogames, I still have saturday morning cartoons, both amongst the best of all time in my view, but I also had lots of space. The place where I spent a lot of my youth where I had a ton of space, is not been suburbanized, and looking back, having that space was one of the best aspects of my childhood. So, sure, I might have some new technology, but I’m not really so sure that my childhood would have been enhanced with so much social connectivity at the expense of losing out on so much open space.
1954 kid here, right smack in the middle of the Baby Boom. It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times, but on the whole it was a great time to be a kid.
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Pretty much all the suburbs were new and thickly populated with young families with kids. The reason we didn’t need play dates is that on our street with all of a dozen families, seven of them had at least one kid within a year of my age, and a couple of them had two kids in that range. I wish it were more like that for my son.
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The music. Seriously, has an 8-10 year period in the history of mankind produced so much good music as the 8-10 years after the Beatles came to America?
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“The sixties.” Bad as a lot of the stuff was, the takeaway from ‘the Sixties’ for me was that people could make a difference politically. I still believe people can make a difference politically - as long as either (a) they’re not taking on the big-money interests, or (b) they’ve got tens of billions of dollars.
That was a damned good time to grow up. Yeah, I’m good with it.
Oh yeah: you couldn’t pay me enough to be born before antibiotics, home refrigeration, and vaccines for the most scary of the childhood diseases. I don’t regret having missed the opportunity to come down with diphtheria or something like that.
I was born in the mid-70s. I have almost no memories from that decade yet I’m absolutely fascinated by it. Great music, great movies and I even kind of like the clothes and haircuts!
It seems that many people don’t remember the 70s too fondly but that doesn’t prevent me from wishing I’d been born a little bit earlier and that I’d had the opportunity to experience them as a teenager.
Much as I would I loved to grow up with computers, I am so freaking glad I saw the time period from 1963-2013. I think it was the most amazing half-century in human history, and predict there will be a glut of books on the subject within five years.
I was born in the very last years (depending on which demographer you ask) of the Baby Boom, and have generally been pleased with the times in which I’ve found myself. If I weren’t living in some idealized Star Trek future of the peace and brotherhood of all humanity, this ain’t a bad era in which to make my way through life.
I wish had been born when my grandfather was – 1910. He had the most amazing stories about growing up in NYC in the '10s and '20s and living in Chicago in the '30s. Fought in WWII, lived in Nebraska in the 1950s, lived in Las Vegas since 1962, and died in 2011 at the age of 101.5. He saw almost all of the 20th century and lived far enough into the 21st (with a very sharp mind) to enjoy the technological and medical advances we’ve achieved. That’s a rich life.
Okay, and the fashions of the 1910s- early 1960s were incredible and I would have loved to wear them for real and not as a costume.
Marry me!
Nope I was born in 1990 and my life is ruined now because of the post 9/11 world
I wish I had been born a few decades earlier
I was born in 1972 and I love the timeperiod I was born in. I love the tv and music I grew up with. I was fascinated with the previous decades thanks to Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Grease and American Graffitti. I enjoyed pioneer times with Little House on the Prairie (tv and books) along with the crazy antics of magic in Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.
The 80’s were awesome because of the promise of a future in Space- Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Empire Strikes Back… and New Wave music…MTV! I remember the first time it aired. Microwaves, answering machines, Sun In, the Brat Pack, John Hughes movies as a teen.
Yeah I loved growing up in the seventies and eighties. The 90’s in retrospect were pretty boring. I guess I had to realize that I was officially a grown up when fear came into our families lives after 9/11. My kids were babies and the worries of parenthood became way too real too soon.
Born in 1971. Sure beats 1771, but I’d rather be born today. Life keeps getting better. I envy my kids; they have a great, challenging, interesting life.
Born 1951. I am almost perfectly content with the period I’ve lived through. There’s one reason I wish I had been born in the early 1930s (assuming I could avoid the worst effects of the depression): I would then have been old enough to go to the very start of Second City and its predecessor, the Compass. Severn Darden, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris, and lots of other great improvisers whose names most people wouldn’t recognize. And the only records we have of those times are 3 or 4 out-of-print LPs and some videos which have been shown very rarely. Later, Nichols and May did some LPs that have been reissued on CD, and Darden and Harris did some TV and one or two movies, but that’s it.