Comment by cmollis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmollis | Hacker News Reader

I was born in 1967.. so I remember the 80's very well. First, let me say that it wasn't all great: AIDS was pretty scary (as someone else noted).. no one knew what the hell that was and it was killing a lot of people. There was also the ever-present spectre of nuclear war with Russia...Iran-Contra, 1987 stock market crash.. However, to your point, there was no exhausting news cycle, no exhausting bullshit social media, no in-your-face, constant idiocy from the political class (well, there probably was.. but we didn't hear about it), no 20 years of terrorism and associated wars, no worldwide pandemics that killed millions, no global warming; all of which has scared the living shit out of every person alive (ya know, if you're not completely insane). I grew up in the 80's.. went to high school, and college in the 80's. I remember always being optimistic about the future. Now I'm not so sure.. I have three kids all under 23.. I do not envy what the future holds for them. (which is probably what my parents said about me;)

"Lay ordinate and abscissa on the century. Now cut me a quadrant: third quadrant if you please, I was born in sixty-five."*

Now that I got that out of my system, yea. The 80's were nothing special and kinda sucked in retrospect. Cars were crap, everyone thought we were months away from WW III, if you wanted to learn something, you had to head over to the library and hope the books you wanted were still there. Wikipedia, etc., simply did not exist. Google was not a thing. People made sure they always had change on their person in case they needed to make a phone call (girls I knew would have a dime sewn into their bra for emergencies). I lived in NYC at the time, Times Square was a shithole (no, it wasn't "gritty," it was flat-out nasty).

* OTOH, I think Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones came out in the 80's. And so did Neuromancer and we ended it with "Sex, Lies and Videotape" and the fall of the Soviet Union, so it wasn't all bad.

[edit] just googled it and Time Considered was written shortly after I was born. So much for that!

[second edit]Yeah, I'm old. The book I was thinking of was actually Stars in my pocket like grains of sand which was actually published in the 80's. So win one, lose one :-)

Please explain to people living in towns that had 30+% unemployment and later completely collapsed that the 80s were better and watch them laugh in your face if they don't punch you (see: any mill town in Pennsylvania--Allentown, Johnstown, etc.) ...

While I'm always one to dump on the MAGAs, they have a point in that for a LOT of people, life WAS better because labor jobs (mills, mines, auto factories, etc.) paid for a decent life. Those jobs which were good in the 1960s and 1970s then vaporized in the 1980s.

The thing I remember about living in the UK in the 80's is that there was an economic boom where people became wealthier. Not just the equivalent of dotcom billionaires, but your average blue collar worker.

It was enough of a cultural phenomenon that there was a comedian created a character called "Loadsamoney" - a cockney carpenter that was earning massive amounts of money.

People moan about "boom and bust" economies, but for the last 20 years I think all we have had is "bust" and no "boom".

Hey, fellow 67’er.

My graduation class chose Alphaville’s “Forever Young” as its commencement song. Yah, the one that starts off

> Let's dance in style, let's dance for a while > Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies > Hoping for the best but expecting the worst > Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?

I think that that musical choice perfectly encapsulates what it was to grow up as Gen X.

I would have chosen "We didn't start the fire" (as a younger Gen Xer), but maybe that song was maybe more aimed at baby boomers.

> I remember always being optimistic about the future. Now I'm not so sure.

1968 here...

I was somewhat pessimistic about the world throughout most of the '80s, primarily because of the cold war, Libya, etc.

But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and during the subsequent years in the 1990s, when it felt like Russia was becoming a democracy (in combination with the explosion of the WWW), I became optimistic about society.

I look back on my optimism and it makes me feel naive. :-(

A few extra years here :-)

Post the wall coming down there was a sense of optimism and then came the breakup of Yugoslavia with ethnic cleansing and the siege of Sarajevo. In the same time period - the Rwandan genocide.

So, yes the never-ending nuclear fear mongering (not saying the threat wasn't/isn't real - it is) gave way to a small window of time that looked promising.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

I should also qualify my jaundiced view of the future, with an actual belief that we'll eventually solve some of these problems.. particularly global warming, and energy creation. I have exactly zero faith that we are finished trying to kill one another for money.

Flying internationally was great. Planes felt mostly empty, lines were faster and shoes weren't taken off. Upgrades were more common, even as a child.

On the other hand people sometimes smoked and luggage was sometimes lost.

How cheap were plane tickets during the '80s in nominal dollars?

I should add that, of course, there actually was terrorism.. just not in the US on the scale of 9/11.. (which I had the misfortune of experiencing firsthand in Manhattan).

Thanks for the detailed response. Great points for me to note! I think hope and optimism are what keep us going, even when everything around us is mostly negative.

Also not to forget the worries about the ozone hole.

Born in December '66. The fear of nuclear holocaust was prevalent (The Day After, Threads, etc), but every thing else was pretty good and optimistic. The Ukraine invasion and instability of Russian leadership has brought the nuclear fears back. The danger never really went away, but the present seems actually more dangerous.

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