I think that by definition if she’s planning your murder then she’s not your soulmate.
(At least, unless you’ve asked her to help you die because, say, you’ve got a painful terminal illness; but that doesn’t appear to be what you meant.)
And let’s not forget that you’d be walking around with untreatable diseases (and parasites) that might eventually kill you, but would certainly make you uncomfortable in the mean time.
At the “unfatal” end of the spectrum, imagine having bad allergies (especially on the prairie) with no anti-histamines.
According to my mother, it was the best of times and the worst of times. It was great right up until she graduated high school in 1929, then her dreams of college were snatched out from under her by the economic collapse and she had to go to work. The Depression stretched out for nearly two decades, only interrupted by the joy of a world war with its rationing, and her being evacuated with two kids from Alaska because of the Japanese threat. That 20 year period stayed with her until she died.
That’s so weird that they’d want to be part of the 80s. Sure, there was some cool music, and interesting fashions, but otherwise SO many things have gotten better since then- pollution, treatment of women, minorities and other groups, technology, the Cold War, medical technology, and so forth.
And society is just… nicer(?) than it used to be. People are generally more sensitive to things like disability, racism, sexism, etc… than they were.
That’s not to say that we weren’t happy back then- people generally were. But it wasn’t some sort of golden age that was obviously better than today- it was just different.
As far as being alive in the 1914-1945 time period, I don’t think it was necessarily bad. @Sam_Stone gets it in one, with the comment that there were time periods that were bad regionally. I mean, living in Belgium during that period would have sucked; major battles in WWI and WWII were fought around there. But living in Texas? Not too bad on the whole- no wars and a lot of economic development. I imagine the same was true in many places in the world.
Nah, it was just like us complaining that the sixties were just so much cooler, far more exciting, etc.
Then the Boomers got control of pop culture, made us awash in Boomer nostalgia, and we stopped thinking this way the 154th time we heard Fortunate Son being used to plug yet another Vietnam movie during Thirtysomething or China Beach.
I always had a bit of mixed messaging about the 1960s. I got the pop culture tale about hippies, counterculture, free love, etc…
And then I got my parents’ strait-laced, crew-cut, Ricky Nelson and Elvis listening, version from them, and pretty much everyone else’s parents.
So I kind of figured that something was going on; there was no way that all these deeply, deeply uncool adults could have been part of the same 1960s that pop culture was describing.
If you were white.
Also likely to help considerably if you were male.
But the overall sense that any time is good for some people in some places and bad for other people whether due to location or other condition is accurate.
Two things were going on:
One, some people stayed straight-laced and crewcut all the way through.
Two, some people, when they had kids, went very much ‘don’t do what I did!’ no matter how much they’d enjoyed doing it at the time.
(Elvis the Pelvis was pretty shocking when he first came out. I remember watching him on a TV special and they kept the camera very firmly above his waist.)
Well yeah. I was meaning all else being equal, Texas during that time period was probably better than parts of Belgium. So for white men, if you want to get picky about it.
All the way through the 1960s was one thing. Through the 1970s, keeping your crew cut was a statement in itself. Look to the Brady Bunch as the template. The 1960s was about hippies. The 1970s, most people were adopting some definition of mod.
I would tend to say that the 60’s, in the USA anyway, ran approximately from 1964 (Beatles, whose soupbowl haircuts were shocking) to 1975 (end of the Viet Nam War.) Other people do pick different dates; but the early 60’s were a whole lot more like the 50’s and the early 70’s in many ways more like the 60’s.
I think this used to be a common view. Not sure I really see it that way anymore.
First, I think there were some significant differences in JFK being elected in the first place. That Ike was a calming influence, but the 1950s were too staid, too many recessions, it’s time to go go go. So that aspect of the 1960s was there very early.
Also I think the predominance of folk music in the early 1960s and its folding into pop-rock later on was necessary for what happened at the end, Woodstock and all that. Even though he wasn’t there, you can’t have Woodstock without Dylan and you can’t have Dylan without folk.
I’m not sure that drawing the line at the very end of the Vietnam War (really we were out by 1973) is particularly relevant. While a few flashpoint events (Kent State) ran into the 1970s, the war was less actively protested (due to Nixon continually drawing down the troops) but more widely unpopular and less open to debate. It fits in with general 1970s themes of disillusionment, cynicism, wanting to chill out and get away from flashpoint events, a troublesome economy, the adoption of mod styles into the mainstream… even future looking events like the groundwork for mass computerization that are identifiable with the 1970s. I have to say with all that the 1975 end of the Vietnam War doesn’t ring true as any sort of meaningful endpoint.
I have to say you have to have been here as it happened. As a young adult I experienced it as searing.
I agree. The 1975 ending was very significant if you were Vietnamese, but as you say, the US was out by 73, so it wasn’t that significant for Americans. Nixon resigning in 74 was a much more significant milepost.
I suspect your access to music would be largely limited to a local band playing one or two popular tunes of the day and a few “oldies.” (Unless, perhaps, you lived in NYC or New Orleans.)
Sorry, did a fast check on my memory online, thought that looked a little late but didn’t bother reading the whole thing through. Yes, '73; though I still think there was a lot of the 60’s rather further into the 70’s, but it was permutating into other forms.