Hello,

I'm writing a piece of fiction which involves a character who grew up in the 70s/80s. I was born at the tail-end of the 80s, so I don't remember anything of it, and I was wondering if people here might be able to help me.

My main question is - Do you think the world/society today is better or worse than it was in the 1980s, and why? (from a serious, philosophical point-of-view!)
Obviously, now we have better technology (TVs, computers, internet, etc) and medical advances, but my focus is more on society.
I'm particularly interested in the opinions of people who were teenagers in the 1980s.
I know you all may have a romanticised, nostalgic view of the 80s, but please try to be as objective as possible! :)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

Different is the word.

IMHO:  good - socially... now its easier to meet and know people thanks to the Internet and msn and facebook etc.
          bad - young people these days must be the shallowest and emptiest human beings that have ever existed.

laboral - good - there are lots of whole new job carreer possibilities with companies more into "human factor"
            bad  - lots of good and not so good jobs are being outsourced to 3rd world countries


kids today are more pampered than in the 70s/80s.... i don't thing thats a good thing
also, seems to be more contact between a young person and his TV/computer than with his family

as a whole, society seems a little more complicated today than in previous decades

I don't think the 1980s as a general era were better than now. We still had crime to all lengths and degrees, I think it's more out in the open now with the birth of internet and 24 hour media channels. In the UK, we had massive unemployment levels (especially in the early 80s) possibly worse than the reccession we are fighting out of now, I know my dad was out of work for most of that decade.

I think society has the potential to be better than the 1980s with it's advances in technology. It's how society chooses to embrace that technology that could be a factor.

The one-two punch was the atomic bomb detonated in the 1940s and Milton Friedman economics, given undeserved credence in the 1970s.  Society has been on an inexorable crash course with obliteration since then. 

The 1980s were better than today because we were farther back on the crash course, but we were still on the crash course nonetheless, and deep down, we all kinda knew it.  Sarah Palin is what you get when you dumb down Ronald Reagan.
::)

 bad - young people these days must be the shallowest and emptiest human beings that have ever existed.


kids today are more pampered than in the 70s/80s.... i don't thing thats a good thing
also, seems to be more contact between a young person and his TV/computer than with his family



Off topic..I can't let this one go sorry. My cousins are twenty-three, twenty and seveteen and fyi neither of them are shallow or empty. I'm a young person and I am not either, so I think that statement was completely unfair and has nothing to do with the question.

Off topic..I can't let this one go sorry. My cousins are twenty-three, twenty and seveteen and fyi neither of them are shallow or empty. I'm a young person and I am not either, so I think that statement was completely unfair and has nothing to do with the question.






It's also true that in the '80s, the older generation said we were more pampered than they, and in the 1950s, their elders said the same thing about them, and so on through the ages.  They said, at the same time, we were less innocent and our popular culture was crass and soaked in sex.  How scandalous Madonna wore her panties on the outside of her clothes.  Well, at least she wore panties...
;D

Yesterday, I watched a football game.  A commercial centered around The Who's My Generation changed the line "Hope I die before I get old" to "don't wanna die before I get old".

Tonight, I went through a little stroll down the memory lane of the Cold War, and it occurred to me that the kids of the 60s hoped they'd die before they got old.  As a child of the 80s, I knew I'd die before I got old.

Well, much like The Who, who performed at a halftime show last night, I got old before I died.

In one sense, the 10s are better than the 80s, in that we lived to see them.  In another sense - and perhaps it's the same thing that drove angry 60s hippies to become complacent materialistic yuppies with the end of the Vietnam War and the draft - when the Cold War ended, so did our raison d'etre.  We were willing to eat neutrons so as not to live under Soviet domination.  Because our system was better than theirs.  I mean, they had more people in prison per capita.  Their secret police eavesdropped on everyone.  They used torture.  Well, we all know how that turned out - we didn't beat the Soviets, we became them, at least on the three metrics I've used in this post. 

But much like the generation of the 60s, my generation didn't sell out, it bought in.  But compared to waking up to a bright flash and centuries of darkness, we discovered, much like the yuppies, that buying in wasn't so bad after all.  What's the moral high ground really worth when I can look back on 10 -20 years of material prosperity than I thought any of us would get?  My childhood hobby of playing with computers - which in the 80s were things that were useful only for playing video games, storing your home recipes, and maybe doing boring accounting with - turned into a career. 

Back in the 80s, everyone I knew who was old enough to have a job hated it.  The worst-case scenario was getting nuked.  The best-case scenario was having a job I hated, and playing with computers during my off-work hours.  Today, my boss pays me to do the sort of thing that I'd be doing for the fun of it anyways.  And if around a third of that money goes to a government that's gracious enough to tolerate its citizens whining about it on the Intertubes, well, the moral high ground over the no-longer-existent Soviets can take a hike.  Like the boomers before me, I didn't sell out, I bought in.

But it sures beats the alternatives I thought I had in the 80s.

we didn't beat the Soviets, we became them


Thank you  --  We have an inept government at the beck and call of giant criminal syndicates.  Our Premier is good at propaganda speeches so we'll feel optimistic about a proverbial five-year plan.  Our central government likes the idea of social programs for the millions of poor people in the cities and the countryside, but does a piss-poor job administering them.  We're broke, everybody knows it, but the government won't admit it.  And we like to invade Afghanistan, which is going to break our back in a few years.  One thing our government is really good at...watching us.

Sounds kind of like the USSR in the 1980s, but we don't have to stand in line for soap and john paper.
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/08/rudolf.gif