I would have a computer and probably be working as either an RPG programmer (System 36/38/AS400) or as an HVAC mechanic working on controllers and controlling systems.
I would still be a geek and I would probably be enjoying Michelob Dark or Labatt’s Blue instead of the better beers easily found these days.
We had cable and a VCR in the 1970s. Pretty sure I still had them in the 80s
Late 80s, I had a Mac II and several instruments. Sequencers, turntables and mixers, a Prophet 5 and a Yamaha DX-7fd (FLOPPY DISK!!) I would not even know the sun had risen some days, being so engrossed in playing with those toys.
I played basketball and canasta
I read sci-fi novels and hobbyist magazines
I did a lot of darkroom stuff, playing and working. Had two enlargers, one set up for 35mm color (Cibachrome) and one set up for med format cold light B&W. It was easier to have two separate set ups then to switch back and forth on one machine. I had the room for it. Converted the spare bedroom with 1/2 bath to my giant darkroom.
I went out a lot more than I do now. Of course, I was single in the 80s, married now. If married and older then, I would probably entertain a little more.
I was studying Geology at a mostly-white university by the end of the 80s, a member of the Tolkien Society and the Roleplaying club.
So yeah, in apartheid South Africa.
Hell, after 1985, I could even legally fuck white women. Add “flagrant and willful miscegenation” to the list.
As a child in the 1980s I had several cheap consumer computers. As a working adult, I would be have able to afford better equipment, and Compuserve was available throughout the 80s. Of course, I would have been born in the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s (depending on which year of the 1980s I am existing at my current age) and have grown up under deeply different influences and might have had no interest in computers–and possibly not even finished high school, so who knows what I would be doing.
That, of course, is only if I was living in the 1980s without my current knowledge. If I went back to the 1980s with all my memories intact, I’d be violating the hell out of causality. I probably wouldn’t be able to head to the Middle East and track down young Osama bin Laden, but let’s just say that I could make a trip to New York.
I’d be the same age as I am now? Then I’d be asking my parents how come their youngest child is older than they are!
Watching TV (cable, like several other people mentioned). Renting movies, if they’re not playing on pay TV. Reading. Playing video games on my Atari/NES/computer, depending when it is. Writing, either filling up notebooks or on said computer. Filling up sketchbooks with drawings.
So, basically what I do now, only with lower tech.
In the 80s, there was porn and there were Cheetos, right?
Yes. But make sure not to lick the orange dust off your fingers afterwards!
Pizza Hut was still an actual restaurant back then, and there were still Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlors around.
Snorting coke and frequenting the hot nightclubs, probably. That’s what I did the first time.
Let’s see. At my age, in The Eighties, I’d most likely be:
Bwahahah!! Good thing it’s not The Eighties; I am FAR too lazy for all of that. Just writing that made me tired!
Phooey. I was gonna edit my last post but the time expired.
So, to clarify: Before anybody says, “The request was to describe ‘leisure time’”. From what I gather about Yuppies in the Eighties, what I described actually WAS leisure time! :eek:
Driving to the 7-11 on the outskirts of town to buy porn magazines, because what if I was buying porn at the 7-11 near my house and somebody I knew walked in?
I’m retired now and I was retired in the 80’s. Then, there were only two cable channels that ran movies in the afternoon: Lifetime and WGN.