I am a 22 year old woman living in Chicago. One of the things I hate feeling is “I was born at the wrong time.” I think the time in which you are a teenager and young adult is very formative as to the type of person you will be for the rest of your life. I often wish I got to be 22 maybe ten years ago or even in the late 70s or early 80s where there was no internet, no Who Want to Marry my Dog and other mind rotting television, no 9/11, no airport strip searches, no cell phones glued to your head, no text messaging, no impossible standards for getting into college and grad school, people had more money, no constant reminders of how bad George W fucked us, etc.
And from a way more shallow standpoint, I think it would have been awesome to have been all disco-ed out but more towards the end of the whole movement. I’m thinking gold dress and huge hair.
Here is the opinion part. Please respond with the year you were 22. And if you could do it again, when would you want to be 22 and where? Support your answer I’m interested to see what people say.
I’ve never been able to identify with those who say they wish they’d been born at a different time (either earlier or later). I mean, I understand what they’re saying, I’ve just never felt that way myself.
When I was 22, I was just getting out of the Navy and starting my life. Overall things have turned out better than I expected and pretty good overall. There is a few decisions I might want to make different but not many.
As far as different times, well the late sixties and Woodstock and the music scene would have been more fun but maybe I would have ended up a grunt in Nam or a drug addict. Who knows.
You know, there’s actually very little preventing you from doing this now. With the right occasion, you can be as disco-tastic as you wanna be.
As for me, I’ll be 22 in August. (Oh, hell, I feel so goddamn old now. When my dad was my age, he was only a year away from being a father. I’m not ready for babies!) Life is what you want it to be, and while I’d like to visit other times, I wouldn’t want to stay there. Things are good now, compared to past times, especially when it comes to treatment for my diabetes, which is a huge part of my life. My mindset is now. I don’t especially like the president, but that’s going to change. Like it or lump it – and sometimes I lump it a whole hell of a lot – we’ve got to make do with what we have. We can complain and complain about how our kids are going to be fucked, but we’re the ones that have to find a way to prevent that, not them.
Let’s see…I was 22 in 1990. I had hair down to my ass and I was firmly ensconced in the NY/NJ rock club scene. Every night was another bar, another party, another band, another pocketful of phone numbers. I was about halfway through 10 years of hard living that are a bit of a haze now.
Would I have wanted a different era? Naaa…things worked out very nicely. I grew up on the cusp of the computer revolution, so I was able to make a nice career out of no professional training, just hacking around at home. Now I have a gorgeous wife and a beautiful daughter, and I wouldn’t trade any of it, past or present.
Why was that good? There was no way to get an out-of-print book, it was hard as hell to buy clothes if you were an odd size, you had to rummage through second-hand record stores (usually unsuccessfully) to find anything more obscure than top-40 music, you’d have an argument where you knew you were right and some doofus was wrong and you’d have no way to prove it except to make a special trip to the library. It sucked.
You’ve got to be kidding. Televsion and music in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s reached lower than the Marianas Trench. Have you ever seen One Day at a Time or CHiPs or Kojak or listened to The Knack? God, it was bad.
No, instead we had Iran taking our hostages, and the Red Brigades and IRA running rampant in Europe, and constant scares about nuclear war.
OK, granted, those were advantages . . .
Getting into a top college or grad school has always been competitive. The difference was, if you did get in, it was cheaper. But there wasn’t as much financial aid. And when I graduated during a recession in 1981, I had about as much chance of flying to the moon as getting a job.
Cite? Do you think it was fun when prices went up 10-15% every year, and unemployment was 8-10%?
Oh yeah, because everybody loved Nixon, Carter, and Reagan.
I’ve always thought it would have been cool to come of age in the first generation after the invention of the printing press. The plague might have been a bitch, though.
I was 22 in 1985-86. I have no complaints about being that age in that era, except for a few things we (or was it just me?) didn’t know then (that we know now) about the irreversable harm that can be incurred from certain activities (sunbathing, unprotected sex, to name a few).
What **Freddy the Pig ** said about music and culture and politics… and everything…
I was 22 in 1986.
I’d rather be 22 now than back then. Although I didn’t mind it much back then. I was in University doing my Comp.Sci. program and I was on the bleeding edge of some really interesting DB development as well as seeing Windows OS and the internet take hold, grow and influence culture for the past 20 years.
Still, 22 today seems like a cool thing to be… through the eyes of a 42 year old, anyway.
I am glad I got to catch the high days of Punk music and The Police when they were together.
You think that was bad? Chrissake, in my day, if I said that “this era sucks”, I was given a 20-minute lecture on World War II and the Great Depression. Sarcasm would have been a step up.
I was 22 in 2001. I didn’t mind it much. I wouldn’t want to be born in the past just because I enjoy technology so anytime in the future is automatically preferred. If I could be 22 in 2301 I would’ve picked that instead.
I am 22 in the moment. I feel this is a beautiful time to be 22. I love the artistic capabilities of technology and the potential it brings along with it in helping to understand and enjoy this little world of ours. I love witnessing all of the good that globabilization has brought in being able to understand each other better. Study abroad programs for students are becoming highly accesible and environmental issues seem to be more aware in the minds of younger people.
I feel like humans in general are heading in a better direction, to reach a point of basic right and humanism, but still feel like we are meant to only be able to lift the pool of good only so high. (only the individual moving on from the madness).
It is shit what Bush etc has done to the general moral and viewpoint of the world, but quieting your mind from it and fixing the world which you can touch around you solves this.
I’m satisfied with this time, and it is an interesting OP- I think would jump into another era if I had the power to give it another run.
I was 22 in 1987. Having to type footnoted Term Papers with tables of contents on a Brother Student typewriter is something I need never experience again.
On the other hand, if I could keep my knowledge or even a vague conscience that would forcably tell me yes or no at some major decision points, I would do it again in a second.
