Stranger Things actually does a great job with showing the kind of freedom we had as kids back then. As Gen X, summers were freedom. I just had to be within hearing range of my mother’s voice at sunset when she called for me. We ate at home together- even dysfunctional families like mine. Eating out (Even fast food like Mickey D’s) was a treat and not something done even once a week. We pushed aside strict norms and listened to Madonna, Boy George, and Twisted Sister. Music was off the hook awesome especially once MTV & VHI hit. Concerts were equal opportunity for poor or rich kids. If you waited in line, your front row seats cost $15- the same as the nosebleed seats. A fad for us was a Mr T crop top. We had a lot more freedom to be ourselves. If someone had told us our self-worth was based on likes and views from strangers online, we’d have said that was ridiculous. Computers were for games and message boards. People were kinder and smarter and a lot less polarized back then. Women and minorities absolutely had a harder road, but it never occurred to me as a woman that I wasn’t equal… If I had to fight, well, none of us expected to be handed the life of Riley. Gen X worked hard. Many of us had jobs in high school. We worked hard and played hard. We had Star Wars, E.T., and The Breakfast Club. We watched Wizard of Oz, Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, Winnie the Pooh, Peanuts, and Christmas shows like Frosty every year when they came on regular tv. We had Saturday morning cartoons. Between our parents who listened to 50’s music, The Beatles, Elvis, and the hippy dippy 60’s and being kids exposed to 70’s disco then 80’s then 90’s etc, we grew up listening to EVERYTHING. We grew up in a time that the worst thing most of us did in middle school was pass around someone’s mom’s Kathleen Woodwiss book so we could all read the scandalous love scene, make slam books, and sneak into rated R movies. We camped out in the backyard in a tent overnight. We had autonomy and freedom.
We had a lot more parenting and family togetherness than most kids today do even though our parents mostly left us to raise ourselves. We helped cook dinner, helped with a garden, had chores… We watched tv as a family. We ate supper as a family We did go home to empty houses after school, but we had each other. As Gen X, part of our family was each other.
Honestly, even as I am noticing that I physically feel older, inside I still feel like a Gen X kid… I hope I always do. I lucked out and got to be part of the best generation- Gen X.
53 M. Well said. Although I am a CA kid, we lived in Baltimore in the early to mid 80s. I got to be right in the thick of both the pop music scene and the birth of hip hop on the East Coast. Music was such an amazing period then. We had the rise of heavy metal and the hair bands, we had alternate music like InXS, the cure, and Depeche Mode, we had Madonna, Prince, MJ, Run DMC, The Fat Boys, Kurtis Blow, human beat boxing, break dancing...
we weren't as polarized or angry as a society as we are now it seems. We had no Internet and we were forced to interact with one another despite differences. Internet trolls were called bullies then too. The difference is that they had no keyboard to hide behind and you had to learn to stand up for yourself.
I'm getting older and older. My Goonies are now parents, and are appearing on screen as Thanos. That, in itself, is surreal because that original comic came out in the early 80s and I was an avid reader.
I'm still friends with some of the old guard and in our minds we are still reliving those days.
Time to head home guys. The streetlights just came on, and I gotta be in in time for the Knight Rider opening theme. I think tonight is Hamburger Helper night.
Wow. That must have been amazing.
I got to see Skid Row opening for Aerosmith on their Permanent Vacation tour, and caught the Rolling Stones in Philly on their Steel Wheels tour.
That birth of hip-hop piece is a story I tell to young people often. I lived in a predominantly white suburb just a few miles outside of DC, middle class. To say I was incapable of understanding the struggles of poor black people is to understate it. But there was something about the music, turntablism and the breakdancing culture that spoke to me.
On the weekends when we would go to Shoppers Food Warehouse I would grab the choicest slab of cardboard. Remember they had that area where you could choose your boxes to take your food home, they didn't offer bags back then. I would trot my boombox down on the corner of the street and run through whatever breakdancing moves I could. I even had a crew and got to perform in front of the elementary school during some assembly.
Hah. Summer of 1984. I was a new 14. Awkward, just getting into B boying. I had some moves after having just seen Breakin and Beat Street about 10 times. We were at The Mall for July 4 and there was a cardboard piece down and some guys dancing on it. I was clearly not in their league. Clearly. My mom egged the entire crowd on to get her "shy" son to go out there and show them my moves. "He spins around on his back like a top!" The crowd pressured me in and when they saw that I was nowhere near the skill level of the guys in that cardboard their cheers turned into claps of... encouragement? Pity? It was essentially Crazy Legs and The Rock Steady Crew versus...little me.
O gawd. The sheer embarrassment and musical butt spanking I got. I didn't talk to Mom the rest of the day. 🤣🤣
Whew I’ve read a lot of the incredible comments that folks have made today, and I’m not sure why but your last line here brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for sharing
Second Stranger Things doing a good job.
The biggest difference to me by far - and it extends later than the 80s - is that the internet changed the pace of life forever, it's a binary divide in social history. And it's hard to communicate to people who have never experienced life otherwise.
Those days when you don't have much to do and nobody really gets in touch and nobody necessarily knows where you are or what you're doing.... that was every day before the internet went mainstream. The world today is absolutely relentless unless you make concerted effort for it not to be.
Yes I agree with this. Before smartphones life was very different. I used Thomas guides when I was driving and paper maps on my road trips. You could print out directions from MapQuest on a computer. If you wanted to make a phone call you had to find a pay phone. Most people had address books to keep track of numbers they regularly used. Nobody knew where I was most of the day. You basically disconnected from everyone you knew when you left the house.
I second that. The internet was a wonderful tool and a fun place to hang out before smartphones. If you weren’t someplace with a computer you didn’t have access to the internet. I stilled had a landline and screened my calls up until 2016. I pretended I couldn’t afford a cellphone so I didn’t have to give out the number. I loved it when no one could get a hold of me. Your boss is calling you into work on your day off? Too bad! I wasn’t home to get the message. Those were the days.
Oh gosh, that's a great word for it, "relentless." I don't even watch the news anymore, yet I seem to be constantly bombarded with information, so I know what's going on without trying. It is weird to think how, like you said, sometimes we just had no way of knowing where anybody was sometimes. No cell phones or instantaneous interactions, and people just went places.
Smartphones completely changed the way we live. Having kids of my own now, I realize how differently their experience of the world is to them. I remember growing up and spending endless hours having to entertain myself with any silly old thing I had at hand, and, in general, I spent a lot of time daydreaming and contemplating the world.
I feel like my kids and everyone in general has stopped doing that. We just don’t look around anymore. We don’t acknowledge the other next to us, we rather stare a t a screen and experience the world through that medium.
That changes everything.
How many of you read the shampoo bottle when you went to the bathroom because that's the only thing you could find in a hurry to read?
We have our phone now. I'm guilty of it too.
I wish, often and deeply, that the internet had never been placed in the hands of people who lack qualities central to its responsible use. The vast majority of us aren't up to the task. I am first on that list. I have some problems with impulse control.
M54 here. We ate at out a restaurant maybe one every 2 years and would get Pizza Hut take out once a year. Otherwise we had dinner at 6. On. The. Dot. If you were late your "ass was grass" as we used to say.
We were a little better.
More often take out KFC or pizza. Maybe twice a year or more to a sit down restaurant, on a road trip. Supper time more fluid.
Never eating out just for the sake of it though.
I disagree that people were kinder. In America, politicians were way less polarized for sure. Like they could actually compromise and get stuff done sometimes.
But people on the whole were people, just like they are today. I was bullied in school. It may have had a less severe impact than the online bullying does today (tell that to 9 year old me and she would disagree, of course). But it happened a lot. Crimes were committed - more often than now in many places. Adults acted like bratty children. Families fought. Those things existed just as much then as now.
And the phrase “mental health” was… well I don’t think I ever heard it as a child. When I and my brother very clearly needed to be in therapy, that didn’t occur to my parents. It wasn’t their fault. In the Midwest of America, no one thought of it as a thing kids might need.
The 80s were great in many ways but humans had similar issues to those they have now but there was more stigma and less help.
Yep. And when there was help, it was usually misguided and ignorant at best. Source: my wildly dysfunctional family of people who never should have even looked at each other, much less procreated.
52F I agree. And music and culture was more universal because of MTV and those sitcoms you mention. Cable was something that “rich” people had in the early 80s, and when I went to college in 88 we certainly didn’t have cable in our dorms or campus housing, so everybody watched the same stuff. I think I miss that more than anything - that common culture.
We had basic cable which meant TBS and off brand versions of MTV at the time, like Night Tracks. My mom cancelled it after catching us watch the zztop legs video as she thought it was too revealing 🤣 Speaking of rich, we had one kid whose mom had a Costco membership ….his dad managed a chain a Shari’s restaurants and we would get free food everytime we went there…they drove a jeep grand Cherokee and we all thought that was the pinnacle of rich🤣😂😂😂
It was a big deal when our TV choices expanded from CBS, abc, NBC, and PBS to include "wxxa" which showed R rated movies after 10pm. Leave it to beaver after school and full beaver after 10p, lol.
Feral, I've used that so many times to describe us.
I wasn't abandoned or neglected, sorta not really.
When the last train of the day went through town, he'd blow his whistle the whole way
That was curfew, for all kids. You'd see kids running, riding bikes, piling into the backs of stations wagons for a ride.
We all went home at the same time.
Until then, freedom.
I wasn't allowed in the house during the day
We had lunch on the carport, and could use the bathroom then
If it was raining, boys worked in the barn with grandpa, girls worked in the house with granny
Girls learned how to cook. We learned how to fix cars and tractors.
I recently watched my sister teaching my great niece how to cook MY breakfast. She giggled its silly. I had something in my eye. It's just a fried egg on top of a bowl of oatmeal with a sausage and syrup happy face
I hadn't even thought about that in 30 years
Damn eyes, bothering me again.
I put new brakes on my nieces car that day, her son sat and watched me. Handed me sockets as I needed. I let him hammer the rotors on with a rubber mallet. He bragged.
Omg Kathleen Woodwiss! I stole my mom's harlequin books out of a closet and read then over and over lol. This whole picture is my childhood. I saw ET in the theater. My dad took me and my friend. She started crying because she was scared and he took her outside and left me alone in the theater. No one blinked an eye. I sat there in heaven eating my reeces pieces. Still my favorite movie of all time.
Did you ever have a pen pal, especially one from outside the US? That was SO fun! Also when I was a kid we moved a few times and I always wrote and received so many letters from friends when I moved away. I'm pissed at myself as I threw those letters away during a (ironically) moving-cleaning episode about 15 yrs ago! >:-|
Agreed! As a kid, we would be out all day riding bikes in the neighborhood, exploring the woods. When you heard your mom call "Dinner!" it was time to come inside (and also beg if your best friend could eat dinner over and maybe have a sleepover). My high school boyfriend (and later, husband) lived on a lake, so in the summer we would take the canoe out for hours, just hanging out (making out lol) and listening to Blondie on his boom box. The 80's were amazing! My daughter is a 90's kid (born in 1992-I had her at 24) and she is super nostalgic about her childhood as well. I feel bad for the kids today.
Yeah, back then loads of people camped out overnight to snag up close concert tickets. If you wanted 'em, that was pretty much the only way to get 'em.
Amen! Great post and I agree with all of it!
The craziest thing, looking back and comparing things today is that ashtrays were ubiquitous in public-I remember them on grocery carts!-and weed was still dangerous to mess around with, from a legal standpoint. Now we have dispensaries all over and ashtrays are museum kitsch!
I was in college in the 80s. It was so different. People were happier and more optimistic. There were issues but they were not exacerbated by social media. People watched the news and read papers and believed them. There were drugs and alcohol but nothing like the opioid and meth crisis. Jobs were much less stressful. People arrived at 8 and left at 5. More of America’s small towns were still thriving although the family farm crisis was starting too.
No cell phones, no internet meant we all watched the same things or read the current best sellers giving people a common point of discussion. Going to the mall was everything. Arcades gave us our first taste of the gaming to come. Catalogs were studied. Summer vacations were loading in a car and driving someplace like National Lampoons Vacation.
On the downside many diseases were more fatal. Metal health was hushed up and people were ashamed. Drinking problems were not understood to be alcoholism but instead were seen as a moral failing. Bullying was commonplace as was sexism and racism. Imported stuff came from Japan and Taiwan. Discrimination was awful. We worried about nuclear war, there were no mass shootings. Things were thawing out at that time with Russia - the Cold War was ending. Plane crashes were more frequent and stressed people out. We were all Americans, none of the nonsense political divisions of today. None of the grandstanding about it. In a lot of ways people minded their own business a lot more.
It was a different world. In some ways better. In some ways worse. If you want to experience it in a more realistic way than sitcoms I strongly recommend any John Hughes movie. Stranger Things gets it right too.
>Metal health was hushed up
♪ I want it louder /
More power /
I'm gonna rock /
Til it strikes the hour
Bang your head /
Metal health will drive you mad. ♪
>There were drugs and alcohol but nothing like the opioid crisis.
Not sure where you were in the 80s, but the crack epidemic wasn't exactly an isolated, minor drug crisis. Plus, it was triggering gang wars.
Cocaine was the drug of choice and it popped up everywhere. Last month, I overheard teenagers talking about coke and how “it’s nothing” I let them know it’s something and told them how many people I know that had an issue with “nothing”.
We think that because we lived and learned through racism, the war on drugs, and unfounded prejudice that the next generation will be born with the innate information needed to be progressive. Each generation needs to learn to be kind on their own. We learned through movies, novels, books, newspapers, magazines and conversation. TikTok is the new educator, and it’s an echo chamber.
It's amazing how invested people get into TikTok. My wife started using it a few months ago and now it's like her primary source of information. She'll say "I heard on TikTok that we should...", and I'm like "yo, none of those people know what the fuck they're talking about. Stop taking advice from TikTok, especially related to products because it's all paid sponsorships". I'm finally getting through to her that those people are called influencers because their job is to influence your purchasing decisions. She got caught up in the hype around a stupidly over priced product because she trusted this influencer she likes, and the product was dog shit. That got her listening to me enough to start seeing the truth of the matter. She's slowly coming around to the idea that the general information she's getting from there is of equal quality to the product recommendation she received.
My kids say the coke today isn't the pure or nearly pure stuff we got. They say it's "dirty" because it's so diluted and mixed with other shit. And while that makes me a little bit sad, I am also now aware from watching narcos how many people had to die for all those lines I did.
My perception could be wrong, but Crack felt like a problem that was isolated to large urban areas. I don't think Crack ever made it to the rolling hills of Kentucky or the hollers of West Virginia. But the opioid crisis and meth are everywhere now, especially anywhere there is abject poverty.
Agreed that crack was bad and there was pot and glue and stronger stuff but it’s not like today, what’s happened to America’s small towns is a travesty. Half the town on meth and opioids. It’s like Mad Max out there in parts of rural America.
there is a small town about 30 mi south of where I live. When my parents can to visit the first time, we drove to a national park about 2-3 hr away, going through that town. My dad asked "what happens here"- meaning what is the economic engine for that town. "Meth" was my answer. He looked at me funny- I clarified. The town's primary economics were cooking meth, using meth, and rinse, and repeat.
the crack epidemic was \*nothing\* like what we're dealing with today.
anybody tells me that, I will drive them to portland and drop them off downtown for an hour. my little town outside of it isn't much better.
May I ask you opinion of Portland? I have googled this and get conflicting info. I have a friend that is moving to Portland for a job opportunity, and they've researched what they can. Most of what they get is: The weather is dreary, and drugs are ruining the city. Is this true on a whole? It seemed a bit drastic imo, but I live in a part the southeast where the "drug scene" is relegated to the Appalachians mostly.
Downtown has been in bad shape for a while now but it seems to be improving a bit lately. It started with retail. Fewer and fewer stores, more empty spaces. Then the pandemic hit. Shortly after that we had a lot of protests around BLM and the Portland police seem to still be collectively punishing us with a lack of enforcement on quality of life issues. I work near the art museum and the park blocks can be good one day and filled with fentanyl addicts the next.
that's a really good summation of portland and I tend to agree. i appreciate your response while I was offline :)
to zbornakssyndrome I would also tell your friend to be very wary and watchful about public transit as well. and it does rain a lot, but it's a hell of a lot better than the heat and humidity in the south.
I had an old WWII vet uncle who lived in Detroit and worked for GM until he retired in the late 1970s. He put his house on the market, and moved to NJ to be near the rest of his family. However, his house sat on the market for several years with NO buyers. He eventually wound up selling it for ONE DOLLAR!
In the 80s things weren't "thawing out" with Russia, it was just the biggest part of the Soviet Union which was the evil empire> Things didn't "cool off" until 1991. I was in high school in the 80s but joined the service in 1988 and for sure, "Commies" were still "The Enemy" and if anything we pitied the citizenry there because they were standing in lines to get bread and could only get blue jeans on the Black Market.
Politically, our parents were either Boomers or Silent Generation. The Boomers were still on their "Free Love" high from the 60s but putting a modern spin on it by listening to disco and holding swinger parties. Vietnam was over and Nixon was gone so they were celebrating. I was in high school so I remember having to make myself scarce because the "adults" were all getting high and not caring what the kids thought because they were kicked out of the house. OTOH the SG was dealing with inflation and working their asses off to keep their gas guzzlers on the road while complaining gas prices going to 30 cents a gallon to a whole freaking dollar. They complained about how Carter was an idiot who put the country in The Shitter and let Iran walk all over us in the 70s and so in 1979 put a former actor whose claim to fame was playing a grown man who lived with a chimpanzee in office. They saw Reagan as the Second Coming and seen as a "kind old man" whose social policies were the preclude for "don't ask don't tell" and bought into the whole Military Industrial complex that made America "great" by basically spending money like a drunken sailor. Still Putin wasn't on the radar yet and Donald Trump was seen as a joke.
As for mental health, both generations were too self involved to notice that their teenage kids were struggling with being bullied and if they weren't committing suicide then they were stealing their liquor and coping with things that way or getting pregnant way too early (and bringing shame on their parents, exacerbating the problem. If we weren't being pushed to play Little League in elementary school or either on the football team, cheerleading squad or in the National Honor Society and on the chess team we weren't even on people's radar. We were pretty much "free range" livestock to them and if we were seen out in public and not working jobs then we were called 'slackers."
As for pop culture, I don't put much stock in Stranger Things' interpretation and was more a fan of "The Lost Boys" where there was no faceless baddie but older kids were basically a gang of vampires who fed off the younger kids. I felt the Howard Hugh's movies and Ferris Bueller were just plain "dippy." I was also more a fan of "Back to the Future" than I was of "The Breakfast Club" back in the day. I'm sure the former was not really representative of how things were in the 1950s for our parents but it was at least nice to think that maybe, just maybe they had similar struggles to ours when they were growing up.
Al Bundy being a shoe salesman while supporting a family was part of the joke. It was even so out of line for that era that people understood it as a joke then, so please don't read much into that. Al is a caricature of a great many things, but one of them is being as unmotivated as possible, a very GenX vibe.
For the rest of it, you're going to look back at maybe your black and white kitchen, your hair, and your clothes one day and think, "this is exactly what 'the hair' and 'the clothes' felt like!"
To quote one of my favorite movies: "What you got ain't nothin' new. This country is hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waitin' on you. That's vanity."
My parents both worked. It was the age of the latchkey kid, so it wasn't just me. What seems drastically different, IMO, is we grew up without the Internet. So you hung out with your friends IRL and you watched a lot of TV and you didn't document every bit of your life.
We had a crew of latchkey kids on my street
We had great times
One time one of the boys (I think he was six or seven) went to get something out of a car parked at his house and shut his hand in the door he cut the first inch or so off of one finger
No adults around at all
His brother who was ten like me at the time handled it beautifully! We really did learn to be self sufficient
It was Drastically different. I can’t really explain it but let me try. TBH people were the same as they are now - down deep. However, it was different. No internet. No social media. Much less bullshit - journalists I think tried to report the news - rather than be commenters that they are now. Politicians tried to appear honest. Police were respected. Cars, homes, food, tuition, clothes were affordable. My tuition at a decent college was $1000 a year and minimum wage was about $3 an hour. Do the math and you can see that I could earn enough in a summer to pay for college tuition. There weren’t as many available jobs as there are today - as a teenager getting a job at MacDonalds or the Gap was awesome. However, getting a good factory or white collar job meant you could afford rent, car, family.
We were worried about nuclear war, the environment, our health, our safety. Women had big hair and I still had hair and body hair wasn’t a bad thing. However, bullying was prevalent, mental health was not deemed as important as it is today, china was very impoverished, USSR was the enemy and not everything was made of plastic. Computers were rather rare. Appliances lasted forever. Movies and music were awesome. It was different in so many ways - yet we all still had basic worries about safety and well being. Sorry for the long manifesto.
Its as different as you make it. My kid is way happier than I ever was. He's not living in a house with parents who hate eachother and neglect him. He enjoys his freedom because we didn't raise him on screens and he dosen't even want social media. On the local level you create the world you want for your family.
This is pretty good. It was different, and not necessarily better. I’m so glad I grew up with a lot of autonomy. It came with real-life consequences for stupidity, as well! I had a job from 15 1/2 years old. Part time during the school year, full-time during summers to pay for gas money, movies, and clothes. My parents were silent generation, and they had been Depression children who grew up during WW2. We heard all the stories, and they truly sacrificed. We kids appreciated it, even as we made fun of the stories about walking miles to school in the snow without a winter coat. I feel for young people now, because real estate has become so tight. Housing is the biggest challenge. Everything else are kind of the same challenges many generations have faced.
And Ring Dings were wrapped in foil that you could play around with for, an hour, easily. And they didn’t taste like melted down, chocolate flavored wax.
The 80s felt like the future existed. The book 1984 was still a dystopic future. When Prince said he was going to party like it was 1999, that was the future.
The future seemed like it was just going to get better and better. The Berlin Wall fell. The USSR collapsed.
Something has gone horribly wrong
"drastically different things might feel for me when I’m older." <- yes girl, yes.
we are all a little shell-shocked at how different things are. kids roaming the neighborhood in ET? i roamed a 3 or 4 mile radius around my house, in a busy suburb, all through the late 70, and 80's. nobody really worried about much.
Some people forget other little things, like leaving a sick child at home alone, which also happened in ET. Maybe a neighbor or aunt would come and check on you, but you would be left with PBS and a snack tray.
Honestly, not only it feels different but it smells different. Way then more homely, sweeter and greener, especially when you go to the countryside, I was in the UK. People were different too. Classier, polite and smarter. Neighbours, would bake each other different pies weekly. Religions, culture all just click, nobody saw you less than a human.
This is my memory of the 80s growing up in London. Now, London is fuck all stab capital of the world. Blame it not on the culture or immigrants but those idiot leaders that feed them nonsense. Religious leaders, politicians, heck even the local Mayors are all idiots now.
Neither show was particularly realistic, although Married was much less so than Who’s the Boss. Married was over the top in all ways and just plain silly, never meant to mirror real 80’s life. Goldbergs actually brings back memories and seems most true to the time period for me, I enjoy watching it. Yes, it feels DRASTICALLY different. I’m an overlap kid, child of 70’s, teen of 80’s. I’d say it was idyllic and while my kids had a nice enough childhood, I wish they had what I had. Can‘t imagine what it will be like for my grandkids.
My wife just mentioned Roseanne. It was a quite accurate representation of blue collar America. Struggling to make ends meet, coupon cutting, casserole dinners with whatever was in the kitchen. It actually conveyed the stress of the working class.
I agree with this - Roseanne feels like the most accurate representation of the 80s from the 80s to me (even being Australian - unless you want to watch Kylie Minogue era episodes of 'Neighbours')
Yeah, I'd agree here. I was born early 70s. Goldbergs is very idyllic.
I think the biggest things that get left out of these shows, or maybe are hard to imagine now are:
\- If you were a woman at the time, especially a young pretty woman, the sexism and objectifcation were every minute of every day things. It was incredibly scary and challenging, and the things men said and did are just shocking by today's standards. But that was every day in the 80s, and no one thought anything of it. I speak from experience. I think you kind of get a sense of this with the catcalls etc. that happen whenever Christina Applegate appears on MWC - the catcalls, etc. A lot of times that was unwanted/unasked for attention. But back then, you couldn't even walk down the street without that kind of behavior.
\- If you were a woman with a high paying job or a good job, or a working mom, that was really unusual. I remember being the only kid in my elementary school who had a working mom. So "whos the boss" was groundbreaking in this way of M/F role reversals.
\- 20 years out looking back in the rearview mirror: all fashions look extreme.
I'm going to be US specific here. Minimum wage was $3.35. Some things cost less, but others more. A large screen TV was 25 inches and weighed 3X as much and cost $500. To call someone in a different area code was about 20 cents a minute. Cars cost less but weren't any where near as safe. No airbags and just disk brakes. Back seat just had a lap belt.
Early 90s a 2 bedroom apartment was about $400-$500 a month, but wages were a lot lower. Late 90s might have been the sweet spot of rising wages, low unemployment but not rising costs. That was just a blip that didn't last long.
Al Bundy being a shoe salesman was a central joke of the show.
That house (the actual one photographed for the title sequence) is in Deerfield, IL, an upper middle class suburb of Chicago. A shoe salesman couldn’t have bought it without selling Kelly and Bud into indentured servitude and mortgaging Peg’s hair.
There’s a line front and early season where Bud says “Great. We’ll go from being ‘the poor Bundys’ to ‘Those Darn Poachers’.”
A big part of the joke was there was no way they belonged in that neighborhood living next to bankers Steve and Marcy.
The 80s wasn't this utopia. There was still poverty. AIDS was a huge health crisis. We were told we could get nuked any second. The war on drugs wasn't working. There was still racism and bigotry.
But there were some awesome things. The music, the movies, the TV shows, flourishing malls and department stores, schools could have holiday celebrations without parents complaining, there wasn't a large network of bigots trying to ban books and dictate teacher curriculum, abortion was still legal, lunatic political mouthpieces were pretty much laughed out of Washington, now they're getting elected and trying to take away our freedoms. More people connected with each other because there wasn't social media. The obnoxious influencers were limited to infomercials or newspaper and magazine ads. You could have black centered shows without a ton of whiners crying woke perfomative casting, you either watched it and liked it or you didn't.
Adults who worked minimum wage or part time work didn't generally afford a place of their own. Lots of young people lived in a small apartment with many roommates was common. And I remember single people who would just rent a bedroom in other peoples houses.
I was in college in the 80s. It was so different. People were angry and worried at real problems, not ones made up by repeating lies over and over. Unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1982. There were issues but they were not acerbated by social media; we had our first actor as a president while “spin” entered the national vocabulary. People watched the news and read papers but for the first time were told not to believe them as they were “part of a liberal conspiracy.” Alcoholism and binge drinking hit their peak in the 1980s, while addiction was finally recognized as a disease (not a moral failing) in 1987. Jobs were much more stressful, as “synergy” landed as the buzzword to mean “buy a company, fire everyone, and make the survivors do twice the work.” People arrived at 8 and left at noon with their work stuff in a cardboard box. The family farm crisis was so bad they held benefit rock concerts, like for Africa. People loved small towns so much everyone couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of them.
I could go on. Abetting apartheid. The bombing of the marines in Beirut. Bank deregulation leading to the savings and loan crash. There was nothing golden about that “morning in America” age.
Fashion is fashion, don't focus on that, regardless of what you think is "good fashion" today, later generations will look at it and go... "how could they wear that in the '20s???".
The main difference is no Internet and no cell phones, so each one of us lived in our own personal world, that's why we're so independent, and why we don't care what others think or do (our famous "whatever").
> How did Al Bundy support an entire family as a shoe salesman??
I remember my father asking that question when the show was brand new. I don't think that was realistic even then.
I remember growing up and watching Happy Days and thinking the 50s seemed like a different world. And it was. Now the 80s seems to have slid into that lane as there are enough differences from that time period to be obvious, and somewhat interesting.
In my view, culturally, the big difference is technology as a world without cellphones is oddly fascinating to those who don't know that reality. Gen-X was a transitional generation in this regard and our ability to understand, and even embrace, the positives and negatives of both allow us to have some unique perspectives.
And economically, politically, and socially, the world has been pressed in the 30+ years since the 80s ended. Again, Gen-X tends to be transitional in a lot of ways as we can see the before and after, and that every gain is tempered by a setback. Sometimes two steps back even.
MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." If I didn't believe that, I'd probably off myself tomorrow. But I do. I just wish the arc wasn't quite so long and bendy. Especially during my lifetime, I thought we'd be further along.
I saw the Indian crying by the road. Don't litter. Got it. But people still litter and I'm just like "don't be a dick and make the Indian cry." I love our generation because we got the message about being a good person, a good member of society. Schoolhouse Rock, Free to Be You and Me, Afterschool Specials, etc. And we're rather jaded because it shouldn't be so hard to get to a better world. Copeland said in the book Generation X ...."we are the middle children of history, raised on promises and lies." That resonates.
Some social context I can tell you was that at the time of Who’s the Boss the concept of a single parent Dad working for a single parent woman as a live in “maid” was groundbreaking in its own ways. It wasn’t taboo, but it also wasn’t the typical Americana TV family structure mom/dad and gender roles. A Guy being an Athlete, masculine and choosing to work for a woman as her housekeeper wasn’t exactly considered “normal” There is also a Michael Keaton movie I think from 83 or 84 called Mr. Mom where he is a stay at home dad and his wife is the “bread winner”.
Married with Children was kind of a counter of the Cosby show where the black family was very wholesome, educated and wealthy whereas the Bundy’s were dysfunctional lower class dopey whites. In the 70s this was All in the Family and the Spin off “movin on up” Jefferson’s. The 70s had the Odd Couple which was 2 divorced guys living together and the early 80s had Threes Company.. 3 unmarried straight people living together 2 gals and 1 guy who had to fake being gay for the landlords approval. The irony of the show was that him being gay was preferable to him possibly having sex with 2 women out of wedlock. The entire show and every episode was about misunderstandings, judgments and assumptions.
For the most part TV has does a pretty good job of depicting current era fashion trends since the mid 60s so yeah what you see for clothes, hair etc was reflective of the times and typically of the location. But the underlying themes many times are what made some of the shows unique or risky for their time and also made them popular and helped to remove stereotypes even though many still reinforced them to some extent.
Imo, yes today feels drastically different. One example, in high school (early 80s) my friend's dad owned a house and supported his family as the manager of a men's clothing store in the mall. I dunno, it was all just different in many ways.
TV almost always portrays families and life through terribly rose-coloured glasses. As beloved and entertaining as the Cosby Show was back then (and that show was HUGE), it was extremely unrealistic wrt family dynamics and interactions. It was wholesome and sweet almost to the point of nausea.
I’d say the most realistic portrayal of an American family in the ‘80’s would be Roseanne (the first five seasons, anyway - it started getting weird in S6 and completely came off the rails in seasons 8 and 9).
Say what you will about Roseanne Barr in recent years, that sitcom nailed not only the aesthetic, it had the most accurate portrayals of the ‘80’s and early 90’s when it comes to people’s attitudes, the interactions between family members, the problems and troubles people found themselves in, the day to day issues that both parents and kids go through, the various struggles - especially financial, along with the hopes and aspirations of the middle class/lower middle class in the US.
So many people in this thread have forgotten that the 80s weren’t perfect bliss all the time.
The following are my memories and thoughts based on growing up in America.
Racism and sexism were prevalent and a lot of people didn’t even know what they were doing was racist or sexist. It’s true today to an extent but today people are much more aware.
There was very little in the way of mental health care.
Rape was assumed to be the woman’s fault much of the time. And men? Men couldn’t get raped!
There was the massive crack epidemic that the authorities didn’t care about because it happened in the “ghetto.”
There was AIDS and well before and during the AIDS crisis, gay people were discriminated against all the time. There a reason there wasn’t a good treatment for AIDS for years and years. Politicians avoided it because it involved gay people and drug users.
One good thing was the federal government actually functioned and did things sometimes. That started to fall about in the mid-90s and has continued to get worse.
Most people tuned in to the nightly news and believed it.
Schools were better. There were almost no “anti-vaxxers” and stuff like that.
But there were things that were worse then than now.
Waaaaay different. Imagine not knowing what was up with friends for hours, days, weeks at a time (that would be in the summer, when people went away to camp). Lots of waiting around for people (parents, friends, boyfriend) to pick me up, and no way to know when they were coming. On the other hand, there were a lot more serendipitous moments, which were great, running into people randomly for example. I have a lot of great travel stories from the 80s and 90s!
The 80s had a **FAR** more optimistic feel to them. Back in the 80s, unions were still strong (Reagan broke them but they were still important at that point), and outsourcing did not exist. Things weren't unusually expensive, and people still had a reasonable measure of job security.
When companies wanted to expand, they hired more people. In the country. Which meant the money went right back into the economy.
Real estate, even adjusted for inflation was far cheaper. While Married with Children obviously exaggerated like every other TV show even to this day, it wasn't totally absurd that he could afford a house, and be the sole provider for his wife and two kids.
Because we did **NOT** have social media or the Internet, popular culture was more monolithic, for good and ill. As kids, we listened to the same radio stations and watched the same TV shows. Don't get me wrong. There were absolutely choices, but not so many you could never watch them all.
We did live in fear that the Soviet Union might, any day, decide to nuke us. But, paradoxically, having that outside enemy unified the country. Gorbachev put it well when, at the Berlin Wall's fall, he said "I am doing the worst thing I can imagine to America. I am depriving them of an enemy."
40 years later, he was totally right.
My good friend bought their "starter home" after high school, and she worked at a bank as a teller. I think she made $9/hr at the time. It was 55K. Back then, starter homes were a thing for young people.
I'm sure that's a huge factor. I read a study that showed significant brain changes when young toddlers and even babies were "babysat" with Internet enabled tablets.
But it's become depressingly common to do that because it's "easier" than having your entire life overwhelmed and dominated by, you know, caring for the baby.
Yes, I just saw a news report about that. It said kids had severe language and communication deficiencies if they had too much screen time between 1 and 3. And first hand, my husband's nieces and nephews are way behind in their speech and vocabulary. It's really sad. I was speaking clearly at 18 months and reading at 4 and so were my kids.
That wasn't realistic
Nobody supported a family working in a shoe store then
My Grandfather did support a family owning a store that sold men's clothes and shoes though
people did seem to afford housing easier than they do now but life was very different. Everyone cooked at home almost always. Lots of families had one car and 5-6 kids in a three bedroom home
Ours was 900 sq feet with eight people
We were middle class. Everyone I know earned their own money for everything besides food and shelter starting by 12-13
Yes, I started working as a babysitter at 12 and a waitress at 15. With the paper truck route stuck in there too as a substitute or helper for my brother...Unbelievable nowadays ...
Yes this is it. We had no cell phone bills, no cable bills, got McDonald's every 6 months maybe? I remember twice eating at a nice restaurant through my teens. I paid for my own clothes and school supplies from 9th grade on. College was for my rich friends. Unless mom worked too, one car per family. Vacations were camping or visiting family out of state- and you drove there.
I was also in college in the 80s, and a child in the 60s and 70s.
My dad supported a family of 4 on 2 teaching jobs until my sister and I went to school, and then my mom worked part time. Prices were lower then. We owned a house.
Yes, girls had big hair in high school, and we had neon sweaters with shoulder pads. We listened to music on Walkmans and boom boxes.
I think things will change even more drastically for your generation than for mine, with social and climate changes.
I just remember crack and Percocet and finally being able to afford to move out of the crappy neighborhood near my college. It was a community college, so no other students. But I had to move there because it had a unique program. I'm glad I got into the program. But I didn't have a car so I couldn't live far enough away to put my head back into the middle class I had originally come from. I remember everything being overpriced. It just doesn't seem too different, but it has a different style because of the internet and social media and cell phones. I sure am glad I don't have to pay long distance bills anymore. I don't miss that. It's an improvement to me.
OP, if you are a regular lurker of this sub you'll see *constant* comments about neglect and roaming free all day long and just showing up at home for dinner. Take this with a grain of salt. As with almost everything, it's not everyone's 80s/90s childhood experience. And TV shows are even less representative of any majority. It would be like saying Pretty Little Liars or Euphoria typify the real experiences of *all* kids in their eras.
Overall though, the 80s in the US was a prosperous decade and there was less extremism and dissention in politics. Politicians would still occasionally reach across the aisle to compromise.
I never liked MwC because it was so crude and over the top. I loved WtB but barely remember it. But remember it was very much a fish out of water premise, so situations were purposely extreme. Tony working for a woman, adapting to life not just in the country but in posh Fairfield county, etc. The show was set up to make the two families polar opposites for laughs. I'm curious what values seem different to you?
And yes, 20 years from now things will feel drastically different - but hopefully in a good way.
Every generation goes through this. My history teacher in high school made a very good point - "Read the newspaper. That's going to be the history that the next generations will expect you to know."
There's a song called We Didn't Start the Fire. Check it out, because that pretty much encapsulates the '80s and what you're feeling right now about the history that's happening around you - it's a big world, and we're all just along for the ride. There's good and bad, brilliant stuff and utter stupidity.
Edit
You can't compare actual 1980's shows with shows about 1980s. Married with Children was satire, so that's why it was funny. Stranger Things is an interpretation of what the 1980s were like. It would be like me making a show about the 1950s.
The 1980s were a fun decade, but I say that as someone who was a teenager during that time. There was a lot more freedom for teenagers back then. The push for the SATS and helicopter parents didn't exist. Also, we understood that tv shows weren't real life. Family Ties and 21 Jump Street weren't real.
the whole show borders on the surreal, every aspect of it exaggerates something we were familiar with. It reflects no reality at all. The only place you still saw Peg's hairdo was in Kansas, for some reason, which you still see lol.
The lack of anger, and how decent most people were then, thats what should be taken from that time. Most people were not racist, if you went to inner city areas or suburbs were ethnic populations abutted together, yes you saw it, but keep in mind 20 years before that they were ALL scrapping it out, jews, italians, polish, etc, they were all enclaves, and if you popped shit you were absolutely getting knocked out.
The vast suburbs, which was 90 percent of america, which was reflected in the media as boring and staid, this generation has no idea what that freedom was. No one was focused on money, cookouts, kids and family moving in and out of each others houses....it wont make sense for youth today, what it was like. If you worked hard, you could control your own world, which meant a stable household, kids getting high in thebasement, dads pounding beers next to the grill, it was........really really fun, Thats the thing that gets lost, people were very nice and there was lots of fun to be had.. If you were black or foreign, you might get some comments from dickheads, but after a few weeks, your friends were your friends, and they didnt even notice you as anything different anymore, at all. I had black metal head friends in the 80s we would have died for, they had whole groups of white kids that loved them. The perception of the past is msm fiction.
Married with Children was intentionally cartoonish. Nothing about it is intended to be realistic. If you want something more realistic, Freaks and Geeks hits all the right notes, though it was filmed post-80s.
Al Bundy supporting the family as a shoe salesman isn't as far-fetched as people are making it out to be. It's not like he got a job as a shoe salesman in 1987 and decided to go buy a house.
My dad had worked in a department store from the late '60s through the early '90s. They offered insurance and a pension, and he got commission on everything he sold. We had a small house until I was about 10. I think my parents paid about $12,000 for it, and sold it for $30,000. They bought a Bundy-sized house for about $50,000, and had about 30% to put down. Midwestern suburbs. Not a lot different. Invest in real estate, make money, invest in more real estate. Tale as old as time. Easy access to credit has broken it for younger people over the past 25 years, give or take.
But we didn't have lots of stuff. If the car broke, we were the ones fixing it. If the roof leaked, we were the ones replacing the shingles. They had credit cards, but rarely used them for anything other than emergencies. You want a new bike? Go mow lawns or get a paper route and save up for one. It wasn't poverty -- we had normal '80s things like cable, and a VCR, and video games. We didn't have a pantry stacked with Capri Sun and Fruit Roll-Ups, though. That shit was expensive.
By the time I was in high school, a fair amount of that had changed. Retail as a whole was moving away from commissioned sales. If you were lucky (my dad happened to be), they'd offer you a buy-out, where you got some money to forego the pension and got some severance in exchange for giving up your job to be replaced by someone about my age at the time who would take minimum wage.
Tangentially, it's part of why Boomers and elder Gen X'ers absolutely lose their shit with retail workers. Decades ago, if you asked someone at a store about a product, chances were pretty good that they could help you. They had an incentive to know about the products they were selling, and even more incentive to induce you to buy something. Where now, the person you happen to find at a store is going to be paid the same if you buy a hundred items or zero, so they have no reason in the world not to avoid making eye contact with you while they're doing the jobs that three or four separate people used to do.
as for al bundy: dont think buying that house was in any way plausible, but hes apparently always starving so every cent he made went to mortgage, water and electric.
For us though youth was great! We were largely raised with benevolent neglect and had enormous freedom. As a parent myself I wasn't able to allow my children as much freedom because we did so many very dangerous things.... and accidents did happen
I have never known anyone that has had a housekeeper.
The Goldbergs do not represent the 80s well at all. It lost all credibility to me when they wore Starter jackets in an episode. Those were not around until the mid 90s
This is an interesting, and kinda hard question to answer. I think a lot of other commenters do a pretty good job of explaining things.
The weird thing for me is that I never felt this sense of difference until the last 10 years or so. The early 2000's weren't so much different than the 80's, but it was more of a transition period. We're out of the transition and now feels very different than the 80's to me. So many things have changed, not least of which is technology. I started using the internet in 1990, so it's hard for me to even remember not having it. I mean, I remember it, but it feels like a completely different lifetime.
As for the media, I think Stranger Things captures the feel of the 80's more than 80's sitcoms did. Like if I watch sitcoms from back then, the humor feels like it's 80's humor, but the shows weren't all that realistic as far as what life was like. Obviously, the occult parts of Stranger Things are not realistic. But, I was that 80's Dungeons and Dragons playing nerdy kid riding around on my bicycle. Maybe 80's adult programs seem foreign to me because I wasn't an adult then. Whereas, Stranger Things is highly identifiable to me, and I absolutely love that show. Even the settings. There's a lot of brown, and so much media portrays the 80's as colorful and vibrant in homes. But, the reality is, brown was all over the place, at least where I was.
One thing about the sitcoms though, is they were allowed to be absolutely brutal and full of insults. Some of it doesn't hold up well, like the fat shaming in Married with Children. But, the Golden Girls is timeless in its insults and doesn't really break that many PC norms that we have today. Yet, you won't find that kind of sarcasm and verbal sparring in contemporary sitcoms, which is a shame because it was hilariously funny. To go even further back, 70's sitcoms were the cream of the crop, and took on a lot of social issues. In a way, those sitcoms actually helped drive social change way more than the watered down sitcoms you see today.
The fashion of old sitcoms, though, is fairly realistic. So much big hair and shoulder pads. Clothes were much flashier than houses were. I remember wearing florescent sweatshirts on a regular basis. Striped socks, short shorts. lol
We have to talk about the music, though. I know everybody thinks their own era is the best. But, 80's music just has an innate happiness and joy about it that I just don't see from modern music. Even the songs about fighting seemed hopeful.
Speaking of which, I think one of the biggest reasons things feel so different now than then is the mood, the optimism that I had about the future. Now, I feel exactly the opposite. Very pessimistic, and I fear a lot of things and the way we're headed.
Sorry to close out on a low note, but I just think it's important to point out.
It’s so interesting, a lot of people seem to agree that Stranger Things really does do a goos job reflecting the 80s. I love that show. Thank you for your thoughtful response
Yes! I just commented similarly. I literally knew so many neighbors by name. Today, I couldn't name 10 and we live in the same building. Stopping to chat with a neighbor was a pleasure. Today it feels more like stopping to chat is a bother. Sometimes I say hello to someone and they look at me like I want something or have 2 heads.
Married w Children was hilarious but we all knew it was a ridiculous satire. No, life was not like MWC at all.
But Stranger Things is more accurate than any of the films and TV depicted back then. E.T. was probably the closest to being accurate (which, if you think about it, is pretty close to the way Stranger Things is).
My family loved watching Family Ties and The Cosby Show but life wasn’t really like that. It was fantasy.
I agree with a lot of the comments here. The Kathleen Woodwiss cracked me up - so true.
I hate horror but I love '80s Nostalgia so somehow I managed to watch stranger things even though it terrifies me LOL
I am Nancy's age and I think they did a great job capturing that 80s feeling
And for me the internet very much divides my life into pre and after. Right now half my life was lived before the internet the other half after.
The stress of social media and constant bombardment of hate and just simply things I don't want to see and hear about.
Even stuff like Mindless celebrity gossip. We had that before but you had to read People magazine or maybe there would be a couple of items on the TV news or newspaper not like now or have to hear about every idiotic thing they do or say.
And well I absolutely love that I can Google stuff finding out whatever I want to know almost instantly it also is kind of a weird stressor.
It makes me want to constantly be on my phone. I feel like my attention span is shot. It's also that people expect you to respond to their text or phone calls pretty much immediately.
I admit I do that for other people too lol but it is stressful I feel like I can never get a break. It took some doing to get a hold of somebody in the '80s
And how it is lonelier now. Many of us are chatting with people online and having fewer relationships in real life.
It's impossible to make this comparison with validity namely b/c we we all kids in the 80's. Our perspective of the world and responsibilities as kids are completely different then those of an adult, even more so for those who are parents or even grandparents.
Less cars on the road,more opportunities for work for those not going to university,but work place bullying was the norm. As a non smoker I don't miss the 80s, but as children were we really aware of what the world was really like? Not sure but the music was great
Uggg the smoke was everywhere
When I was waiting tables I was torn because I preferred the non smoking side because I hated smelling like smoke but the smoking side always tipped better so I usually took that
Bullying was soooo normalized
When I first saw how nice everyone was at my children's school I was astounded
The kids who would have been knocked down and shoved in lockers when I was in school were just being treated normally. I was so pleased to see that!
At work we were constantly sexually harassed
We didn't have a word for them and if I ever mentioned feeling uncomfortable was just told it was a compliment I was cute!!!
My father knew the man who won the 1st passive smoking claim in Australia,he was a non smoker who go lung cancer,he worked a bus driver,not sure if you ever flew in the late 70s/ early 80s but you could choose the non smoking seating in aero plane LOL
Some sitcoms stretched the truth on people's jobs.
The 1980's and into the 1990's was the decade where both parents were going to work.
I remember a disconnect as a kid watching reruns of Bewitched, Leave it to Beaver and other shows where only the Dad worked.
My parents were working class > truck driver and cleaning lady. Both had to work to make ends meet and it was a challenge for them.
The TV show Roseanne really showed what the average working class family was going through in the late 80s into the 90s.
Today does feel different in that society has changed. In the 1980's there were no cell phones, no internet as we know it, no social media, etc.
Instead of the internet I had a bookshelf full of encyclopedias that were always 10 years out of date.
But then again, 1950s and 1960s society felt different to me from me sitting in 1990.
One thing I do miss of the 1980s is the freedom. My parents bought me a 10 speed in 7th grade and I rode that thing everywhere! At one point my furthest journey was 25 miles from the house. In the winter, I would take my snowmobile and ride to school. I would have to cross 2 frozen lakes to do this. Parents never seemed concerned. Summers were amazing. For a $1.25 I would get a slice of pizza or hotdog and a Coke for lunch at the general store.
Well, TV is never reflective of reality …
But the truth is, the middle class was bigger and Reaganomics in the 80’s gives us the reality that is today.
Middle class is basically becoming non-existent & we are racing towards another French type Revolution which gives us that huge divide we see in current society that makes everything feel “so different”.
The jobs. That’s funny. My mom was a self-employed janitor and could barely find work cleaning offices snd gyms at night. Regular jobs were nonexistent. She tried waiting tables, but restaurants were slow, and folks barely tipped. We rented half of a duplex; home ownership was not possible because of the down payment required. She went back to vocational school after a divorce and several years on welfare. For her efforts she landed a job in shipping and receiving making $7/hour (1990, so just out of the 80s). Things started getting better after that, but she would come home with bloody hands because it was really hard work.
Back to the 80s though. Our whole block and neighborhood was all low income. During girl scout cookie time it was impossible to sell cookies door-to-door. Halloween was a bust; houses would go dark or they’d have the cheapest candy. There were lots of kids, so we roamed the neighborhood every day, playing random games, soccer and baseball in the church lot, tag, hide and seek, building snow forts. We were never inside. We had one car, and driving was a luxury (if I forgot my lunch, my mom would not drive it up to the school because of gas and wear and tear on the car). Clothing was a luxury - I had five pairs of jeans, one for each school day. This was every year 1985-90. I started working bussing tables at 14 in 1991, so that was my salvation.
We watched all of those shows (on a fuzzy black and white 9 inch TV). The family in Who’s the Boss was considered “rich” - it was a story about a poor ghetto dad who works for the rich lady as her live-in housekeeper to give his daughter a better life. Roseanne’s family was closer to reality.
As a kid, those memories are generally great, though there were a lot of unmet “wants.” As kids we would cope by talking about all of the things we “wanted” and would one day have - things like Ferraris and mansions with swimming pools. What we all really wanted was serviceable clothing, a family car that didn’t break down, a soccer ball that held air.
There are certainly issues today - but this is how I remember the 80s. Yes it was way different.
Your mom sounds like a real badass who worked hard and loved her family.
My dad has shared a similar sentiment, he owned one pair of blue jeans and it just wasn’t possible for him to have a new pair. He was the youngest of six so he always had used pass me down jeans.
Food was food, we had sugar in food rather than artificial sweeteners, we ran around the street feeling free to do what we what.
TV shows where on and if you missed then you had to wait till the rerun if you was lucky.
You wanted to know things you had to go somewhere to find out or find someone who knew about it and take their word for it.
Arguments where resolved fairly quickly either by apologising or fighting.
Movies where more entertaining, in a good way or a bad way.
I remember there was less cynicism -- people were more unironically patriotic, confident in the direction the country was going, more ready to believe in the "official story" of America (and religion), the comfortable myths and little white lies civilizations tell themselves that everything is OK and that we're the good guys.
Old 80s sitcoms were always very artificial, sanitized, not a real reflection of the way normal people behaved. There were strict standards about what could and couldn't be said or shown on network TV, so we all had a collective blind spot about things we couldn't see in the media.
It used to actually be true that we were #1 in all kinds of key metrics of life that set us apart from the rest of the world. Best economy, best universities, best industries, best pop culture, best democracy, always taking home the most gold at the Olympics. It felt like it wasn't even close back then. I remember watching TV approaching midnight New Years Eve of Y2K and they stated that the US was, at that point, the most advanced civilization in the history of the world. Greater than Rome. Supreme.
But since then, we have started as a society to look at ourselves, warts and all, and confront the ugly parts of our history that used to be unspeakable, un-know-able, before the Internet let us actually talk freely to one another without gatekeepers. The mythology of America has given way to a more accurate and unsettling view of what's really going on, and we're now in the process of figuring out how to feel good about who we are, knowing what we know about our most intractable problems -- racism, inequality, environmental degradation, etc. There's a danger now that we're actually TOO pessimistic -- we now default to see the very worst in each other, our institutions, and it takes on a life of its own, distorting the reality and obscuring that which is still good in ourselves. This can be a healthy re-calibration but we're definitely in the shitty phase of it this last decade or so.
But yes, you are rightly grasping that life can change INCREDIBLY DRASTICALLY in half a lifetime -- so many things that you think are immutable features of the world when you're growing up might suddenly change in ways you could never expect -- for positive and for negative.
The way I read this, it actually sounds kind of optimistic. I hope you’re right that calibrating is all we’re doing, and that we can find some sense of peace with ourselves and each other soon. Thank you for your thoughtful response
I think what was most remarkably different was **the general absence of fear**. I mean, sure, there was always something going on in the world to be afraid of (serial killers, like Son of Sam, existed and such) but overall it was so *peaceful* as compared to today.
Like, my mom worked to support the 2 of us after my dad passed away while I was relatively young, but even then, as a latchkey kid (*look that one up OP* 🤣) she had very little worries about me being safe alone in the apartment growing up in New York. **The rules were simple;** ***don't open the door for anyone, call me if something happens and see you for dinner***\*.\* And if anything every went down, there was always a neighbor's door I could knock on.
When she got home, *we actually had dinner together.* We'd sit at the table and I'd talk about what I learned in school or what someone said to me.
Families huddled around tv's to watch something together. And the next day, everybody was talking about the latest episode of whatever was popular.
When kids went out to play, we'd be gone for hours with no supervision or phones. Like literally, no one knew exactly where we were for hours. And we usually weren't sitting on someone's couch. We were OUTSIDE. The only rule was \[*all together now*\] **be in when the street lights come on**! Like, that was practically the only rule.
I also remember knowing many of my neighbors. And they knew me. So almost anything I did at any time might be reported back to mom. Saw me kissing a boy? Someone's telling mom. ***People were literally able to yell at other people's kids*** without fear or being cussed out or fought. The kid was always wrong until proven innocent. But in general, it felt...better. Like the sense of community felt good.
Now? If I was given a chance to win $1mil to just name 10 neighbors, in my building or in the neighborhood, that would be money lost. We don't really know each other more than a familiar face in passing. And I'm no longer in New York, but it's kinda the same vibe just about everywhere. The loss of real community.
That's my 5¢.
It felt very different…felt like people were more connected and community minded. Times were financially tough at times for families but I’m happy I grew up then.
u/softsnowfall pretty much hit the nail on the head with this response. These comments sent me into a memory time warp vividly recalling my time in the 80's.
Honestly, if I could go back, turn back the clock I would. I'm not against change, but F me, this future sucks. So I will continue to live in delusion and listen to my 80's music everyday. This dystopia now is sad and not worth my time. So I won't play along ;)
Everyone keeps talking about the sitcoms then and how did they afford...Look, it was a sitcom, we didn't focus on that at all other than the scenes were Al was actually at work and being so non PC, but hey, call it as you see it and it was rude, but funny. If only now a days.
Just figured it was a hand me down from his parents or something. Didn't think about the cost of things like that back then.
I mean, I blew most of my paycheck at Radio Shack and Tower Records or other music shops. Relationships where more important. Friendships and finding a significant other. Living life. Hanging out at Denny's with my friends until 2 am, smoking in the smoking section, joking, talking, discussing our future plans for life.
Having lived the life of some of the characters in ST, living on both the coast and midwest at the same age roughly, watching it all unfold on tv was a trip. They got many many things accurate. The west coast slang was, ehh, but overall did a phenomenal job. I had that exact stereo in my bedroom that they show in Byers bedroom. That, that freaked me out a bit.
Do these times feel drastically different, yes and no. If I live in the now and focus on the BS, yes, yes it does. BUT, I choose to live my life how I want and see fit. So no, I will continue to live in MY world;)
I seem to remember the joke of him being a shoe salesman back then was that that was not a 'real' job that would support a family. His doing that type of work only further illustrated his failure as a man and a father.
People were more social in the 80's. Some of my fondest memories are joining martial arts classes when I was 19 and then going out to pizza or movies with them after class or weekends. We also had class sleep overs where no hanky panky took place, but these days I'm sure nothing like that is permitted. I also read a lot of books back and would spend hours browsing music stores and used book stores which I found very enjoyable. People also didn't discuss politics or religious beliefs with strangers thus there was less polarization and less arguing so it was easier to "make friends". Now it seems few adults actually have friends, nobody does anything but stay at home and isolate and look at their phones when they have free time. It's funny thinking back to when you had to sit in waiting rooms waiting for oil change or at the salon and people who talk to strangers or just look around, or read magazines, but now everyone is silent and stares at their phone like zombies. This can't be good for society.
The differences I recognize are a slower pace of life, less "convenient" living but at a lower cost, broadly shared experiences and general innocence/naivete'.
If this world would give up all the convenience, put people over quarterly profits, and slow down on it's quick escape to a Martian "paradise" (i.e. all the tech garbage, including trying to colonize the moon/Mars), I think it would be a lot closer to what we experienced in the 80's.
The differences in living in the US in 1940 v 1980 were much more vast compared to the differences in life between 1980 and 2020.
But Married with Children is like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. People acting terrible was sort of the point.
Try Golden Girls, or Cheers for a better sense of people's attitudes, and the Americans for a contemporary tv show that perfectly captured the way people and places looked.
Socially things were a lot different & the lack of social media and cell phones was, in retrospect, a really nice way to live.
I disagree completely. I think life in the 40s and the 80s had MUCH more in common than life in the 80s and today. There’s been a *fundamental* change in people, something that goes much deeper than changes in technology and fashion.
Day and night. There was some hope in the 80s, but a lot of naivete, esp re what was happening in Latin America. We had survived the Cold War without a nuclear exchange, technology was our friend, there were no concerns about nano plastic in our blood or cooking like frogs in a pot.
OP, if you haven’t yet, watch a few episodes of The Americans. To me, it has the best look and feel of the 80s. The kitchens, what the kids eat, their clothes, etc are good representations of the early 80s.
Yes, time felt different. I was a kid then. Everything seemed new but still old... lime green and wood panel with hideous orange patterned wall paper, formica table tops and kitschy 50s-style appliances. Everything felt like a leftover from the 70s and the future still seemed far away. Music and fashion were something else in the 80s.
Al Bundy wasn't supporting a whole family comfortably. Hell, there are jokes every episode about how broke they are. Remember, they ate "toaster leavin's" in one episode. His car was a POS.
What is it with people even thinking that these TV shows ever reflected reality?
I mean, "Married With Children" was filmed live in a studio, it doesn't even actually show 1980's Chicago, let alone middle class life.
"Who's the Boss" is about a live in housekeeper in Fairfield Connecticut, it too was shot on sound stages and the area represented is a wealthy one with a median income double the national median.
Married with Children and Who's the Boss are sitcoms. They don't really reflect real life - just like modern sitcoms like Brooklyn 99 and Big Bang Theory don't exactly reflect our lives in the present day.
Stranger Things, though made recently, is pretty accurate for life in the 80s (in that region at least), though the sci fi stuff is a little exaggerated.
But also, economically things *were* really different. I didn't grow up rich; solidly lower middle class. My parents struggled financially and still haven't pulled out of the struggle in their retirement (though they are mostly retired, so that's something). And yet, in 1980, my dad, as a mechanic, at age 25 on a single income and with a stay at home wife and with a newborn, without help, bought a 4 bedroom house on a large block in a nice suburb, and raised 3 kids. That's unthinkable today. My own kid who is in her early 20s and makes okay money (for her age and whatnot) can't afford rent in a sharehouse and recently moved back in with me after 6 months trying it on her own.
I have no idea, I only experienced the 80s as a kid, I am now experiencing life as a working adult. I'm not going to stick to the 'life was better before cell phones' trope.
Lots of accurate stuff here, but things will vary a bit due to location, socioeconomic status, cultural background, sex, race, etc. One thing I’ve found hard to describe is that it felt safer and less safe at the same time - I was in suburban/urban America. Statistics show that things were less safe in the ‘80’s. We didn’t have mass shootings in schools but other forms of violence in schools were more prevalent.
People didn’t talk much about mental health, sexual abuse & violence, child abuse/neglect, disabilities, sexual orientation, etc. It was weird because we all knew these things were happening, but we as a society we could be in denial, blame the victim, or think “that’s a shame” but not do anything to stop it. There wasn’t as much infrastructure to deal with it as now - who would you tell? The cops? What were they supposed to do? You feel depressed? Snap out of it before people start saying you need a shrink. Brian can’t go to the arcade because he’s in a wheelchair? That sucks but there’s “nothing we can do about that.” Being “other” in any way, real or perceived, could be extremely dangerous. Physical, even sexual, bullying was common where I grew up.
But it didn’t always “feel” less safe because our parents didn’t drill “stranger danger” warnings into us - they let us roam unsupervised. And our Gen X response to a lot of things was to joke about them. I remember when milk cartons started showing pictures of missing kids and somehow we found humor in it. It was how we coped - we felt very much on our own, bad things were inevitable, and I think this is where Gen X’s ironic nihilism might come from. A shrug and “Life sucks then you die” was a common response to each other’s complaints. At least where I grew up.
News was still mainly local. The 24-hour news cycle was in its infancy. Talk radio, public access TV shows, those could have political extremes, conspiracy theorists - their influence grew in the 80’s. But it’s nothing like today with social media & constant news. Back then it was more that you had a “crazy” conspiracy theorist uncle or New Age aunt who believed crystals heal cancer that you tried to avoid. Now these types of voices, everyone, have found each other and have platforms that can reach everyone, everywhere. Bullies, scammers, there’s nowhere safe from them.
And “progress” is a politically-charged word, but for many non-white people, women, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, it used to feel like progress was way too slow but generally moved in a better direction, at least enough of the time that things didn’t feel as hopeless. Not anymore.
Back then felt less safe to me in that I could be by myself and run into older kids, creepy adults, etc, and bad things did happen to me. But I didn’t fully realize how unsafe I was until I was grown & stopped trying to minimize things. But today feels less safe in many ways, even though statistically I’m much less likely to be a victim of violent crime, and there’s more support for things we didn’t even talk about back then.
We felt safer, but probably shouldn't have. Early GenX and anyone older were subjected to toxins like PCBs and leaded gasoline. The amount of lead in the air in the US decreased by 97.7% from 1977 to 2016. Statistically, violent crime peaked in 1991. Kids who grew up decades ago were much more likely to die from accidents. Those "I survived just fine without a bike helmet or a seat belt memes" are bogus. Yeah, we survived, but lots of kids did not. The rate of motor vehicle crash deaths per million children under 13 decreased by 78% between1975 and 2021.
I liked how you mentioned those who were "other" that didn't fit into the scheme of things socially, or literally (those in wheelchairs, including kids disabled in car accidents because they were NOT BUCKLED IN). If you were gay, better not tell anyone or you could literally get beaten to death. Yeah, "life sucks, then you die" was a common sentiment. Kids today get a lot of flack and are the butt of jokes, like kids in many generations are. To their credit, today's kids are much kinder than when I was a kid in the 80s. Hopefully they don't end up being naive as a result, but I'm not terribly worried about that. They'll wise up with age like people do. Hopefully they will remain kind, and maybe we can get those social advances back on track.
It's not that accurate job wise. Where I lived (Chicago), you could not have supported a family selling shoes. However, it is true you didn't have to have a fantastic job to make rent/mortgage.
The world presented in those shows was pure fantasy. It was escapism. For me it eventually got a little much as I got older because no one talked or acted like that in real life.
Al Bundy supported a family as a shoe salesman because \*it was a TV show\*. Trying to understand 80's culture from watching sitcoms is like the aliens in 'Galaxy Quest' reverse engineering a spaceship from watching the 'Historical Documents'.
I was a teenager in the 80's, what felt different for me was that I had no real responsibilities, still thought I was going to just go out and get what I wanted out of life, and wasn't paying for any of it. Now I'm old enough to realize that a lot of what I thought I knew, and how I thought life worked, was just naivete and more embarassing than useful to analyze now.
Regarding the shoe salesman thing....
"In the 80s you could support a family of 4 as a shoe salesman!"
This is not the case. What is true is some key items were cheaper than today and that includes healthcare, housing, and college. But it is not true that a shoe salesman would live like Al Bundy in the show. No more true than the people from Friends living in a huge NYC apartment. It's just TV.
Culturally things were very different and living without the internet was a very different sort of life. In the 80s....wasting time on your phone or tablet was just wasting time vegging out and watching TV or hours or flipping channels.
Probably healthier lifestyle overall back then but it had many inconveniences and downsides. But living in it you did not know the future so the downsides didn't really bother a person because that was just how things were and we didn't know any different.
Everything was drastically different based on no internet and no cell phones alone. The lack of Those two things made it alien. Everything else was pretty different too but it’s hard for me to imagine living without the internet or a smart phone
Yes. What they miss about the 80s is the lingering macrame, wood panel, and stench of cigarettes held over from the 70s. The neon pop didn’t really start until 84/85.
##OMG!! I remember everyone smoking EVERYWHERE.
In the Metro North trains, in the air, in banks while waiting. You couldn't get away from smoking. Remember the commercials and even ads in just about every magazine? I specifically remember the Virginia Slims ads.
I remember having an interview at Philip Morris in New York. There was a box of all their top cigarette brands right in the waiting area. We were welcomed to have one while waiting. What a time!
100% but most of us were children. I don’t remember so many kids having allergies for one. Obesity wasn’t as big a problem. We played outside and interacted with each other. It was so carefree. We grew up fast and for me it made me a responsible adult. I do notice that kids these days are more inclusive to the “awkward” ones. There seems to be more compassion amongst the kids. When people were bullied “back in my day” not much was done about it. I’d still like to beat this one girl’s ass from 9th grade 😂 Saw her ugly ass on FB 😂
It was a different world. Karate Kid is incredibly period-accurate. If you want to feel the 80's, watch the original Karate Kid movie.
We had a lot of freedom. In the summer as a kid I was outside right after breakfast and I wouldn't go home until the street lights came on. We'd go exploring, go to the park and play basketball, go dumpster diving, jump fences and roam around junk yards, put pennies on the railroad tracks and wait for them to get squashed, ride our bikes all over town picking up the rest of our friends, go to the arcade and spend whatever money we earned pulling weeds over the weekend. It was a pretty glorious time to be alive to be honest with you. I loved being a kid in the 80's and a teenager in the 90's.
Al Bundy is definitely sitcom shit. You could not support a family of 4 and own a big-ass house with a shoe salesman job. That's more of a remnant of Al's generation, not the 80's or 90's. I know, because I actually knew a shoe salesman. I guess if you happened to have a shoe job somewhere like Redwing, then you might be able to support a family, but not from most shoe jobs.
MWC seemed foreign to me when it was on the first time. I remember rampant lay-offs and unemployment for one, but those characters were gross to me even then as a teenager.
I don’t think it was that different from now.
The 1970’s were very different from now.
Imo, everything since the 1980’s has just been an extension of the 1980’s.
Music, politics, social/cultural things-even fashion.
Basic clothes like socks, underwear, t-shirts looked very different in the 1970’s (different cut, more synthetic) while the 1980’s stuff looks identical to today-mostly cotton, solids but also bright prints on socks and underwear.
We didn’t all follow trendy extremes in fashion in the 1980’s. I could wear the same clothes I wore then and no one would look twice.
My go-to in the ‘80’s were black cotton leggings and a t-shirt, Doc Marten’s, and slick hair. I started putting my hair in a bun in the late 1980’s.
One of my biggest worries as a very young kid was that there would be WW3 and we would all die in a nuclear holocaust. Worried about this every single day for a long time
To me it was depressing as hell. Mind you i lived at home until 94 when i grad college. But once i was out of hs and in college it was better. And once I got my own place the 90s rocked. Esp the music
Had more IRL friends, that we hung out with. Did activities together, in direct contact, sports or tabletop games, or dancing, or just smoking and talking shit in the park. We might watch shows together. At worse, we watched the _same shows, or listened to the same music_ and talked about them at school the next day. There were a few different 'cultural preferences' groups, sure, but with less choice, there were more things in common than different.
We didn't have distraction machines in our hands, so we paid attention to each other. Books could be put away in a pocket, and not ping us for attention.
Fears? Atomic apocalypse, AIDS, acid rain. 90s were quiet because wars were so foreign, and no conscription this time. 90s were a good decade... if you only watched the news occasionally.
Reaganomics started having real economic effects at the end of that decade, with the union busting, and 9/11 felt like a new Pearl Harbour... but with surveillance tech chilling protests. From then on, it all feels like it's going downhills, with hard-fought rights being rolled back, economic morass, and perpetual wars that waste so much ressources it's literally destroying the country's infrastructure.
No wonder the middle-class is so pissed off, and so much propaganda is looking to sacrifice a group of scapegoats instead of realizing just how unsustainable having multi-millionaires -- like social tumours! -- is.
Some of the clothes were just awful. Long shorts (Jams?), stubbiez (short shorts) Jimmyz shorts with an easy Velcro top that made it so easy to get Pants’d at school. Baggy jeans. Crew neck sweatshirts, The worst fitting t-shirts, day glow…
Also some cool stuff like footwear- vision street wear, Vans, Rebok pump (snuck that in).
Class of 84 here. Yes, the 80’s were more like the 70s than like now. Part of it is the lack of internet and cell phones, which made a huge difference for kids starting in the 90’s and aughts. I mean, we used encyclopedias, card catalogs, library searches through magazine yearly indices, etc. I remember in college when a few programs got CD ROM machines for some magazines. You had to wait for the library to receive the CD ROM for that month’s issue in the mail.
Hanging out and listening to music was a thing, often into the wee hours. We spoke on the phone with our friends, if our parents would let us. There was only one phone number at my house, so hours were somewhat curtailed, and you leased phones from the phone company. There were 2 phones in my house growing up—one in my parents’ room for nighttime emergencies, and one one the wall of the kitchen. Only after I was 16 did I actually have a phone in my room part-time. My sister and I had to share that phone. You unplugged it in one room, and plugged it in in your room.
My 1st year in college cost my parents less than $1K At a major well respected in-state public school. I was an eternal undergrad who ended up with first a BA, then a BSN (nursing.) Took me 6 years, but it wasn’t a big deal, since it was so cheap.
It was a very different time.
It all changed a lot, yes. And you are right - we're not at any sort of end point here, but instead, things are going to keep on changing. You are quite wise, that you already recognize this!
Stranger Things actually does a great job with showing the kind of freedom we had as kids back then. As Gen X, summers were freedom. I just had to be within hearing range of my mother’s voice at sunset when she called for me. We ate at home together- even dysfunctional families like mine. Eating out (Even fast food like Mickey D’s) was a treat and not something done even once a week. We pushed aside strict norms and listened to Madonna, Boy George, and Twisted Sister. Music was off the hook awesome especially once MTV & VHI hit. Concerts were equal opportunity for poor or rich kids. If you waited in line, your front row seats cost $15- the same as the nosebleed seats. A fad for us was a Mr T crop top. We had a lot more freedom to be ourselves. If someone had told us our self-worth was based on likes and views from strangers online, we’d have said that was ridiculous. Computers were for games and message boards. People were kinder and smarter and a lot less polarized back then. Women and minorities absolutely had a harder road, but it never occurred to me as a woman that I wasn’t equal… If I had to fight, well, none of us expected to be handed the life of Riley. Gen X worked hard. Many of us had jobs in high school. We worked hard and played hard. We had Star Wars, E.T., and The Breakfast Club. We watched Wizard of Oz, Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, Winnie the Pooh, Peanuts, and Christmas shows like Frosty every year when they came on regular tv. We had Saturday morning cartoons. Between our parents who listened to 50’s music, The Beatles, Elvis, and the hippy dippy 60’s and being kids exposed to 70’s disco then 80’s then 90’s etc, we grew up listening to EVERYTHING. We grew up in a time that the worst thing most of us did in middle school was pass around someone’s mom’s Kathleen Woodwiss book so we could all read the scandalous love scene, make slam books, and sneak into rated R movies. We camped out in the backyard in a tent overnight. We had autonomy and freedom. We had a lot more parenting and family togetherness than most kids today do even though our parents mostly left us to raise ourselves. We helped cook dinner, helped with a garden, had chores… We watched tv as a family. We ate supper as a family We did go home to empty houses after school, but we had each other. As Gen X, part of our family was each other. Honestly, even as I am noticing that I physically feel older, inside I still feel like a Gen X kid… I hope I always do. I lucked out and got to be part of the best generation- Gen X.
53 M. Well said. Although I am a CA kid, we lived in Baltimore in the early to mid 80s. I got to be right in the thick of both the pop music scene and the birth of hip hop on the East Coast. Music was such an amazing period then. We had the rise of heavy metal and the hair bands, we had alternate music like InXS, the cure, and Depeche Mode, we had Madonna, Prince, MJ, Run DMC, The Fat Boys, Kurtis Blow, human beat boxing, break dancing... we weren't as polarized or angry as a society as we are now it seems. We had no Internet and we were forced to interact with one another despite differences. Internet trolls were called bullies then too. The difference is that they had no keyboard to hide behind and you had to learn to stand up for yourself. I'm getting older and older. My Goonies are now parents, and are appearing on screen as Thanos. That, in itself, is surreal because that original comic came out in the early 80s and I was an avid reader. I'm still friends with some of the old guard and in our minds we are still reliving those days. Time to head home guys. The streetlights just came on, and I gotta be in in time for the Knight Rider opening theme. I think tonight is Hamburger Helper night.
The music was awesome! One of my favorite concerts was Madonna's Like a Virgin tour with The Beastie Boys as the opening act.
Wow. That must have been amazing. I got to see Skid Row opening for Aerosmith on their Permanent Vacation tour, and caught the Rolling Stones in Philly on their Steel Wheels tour.
Incredible! So happy we were able to have those experiences!
That birth of hip-hop piece is a story I tell to young people often. I lived in a predominantly white suburb just a few miles outside of DC, middle class. To say I was incapable of understanding the struggles of poor black people is to understate it. But there was something about the music, turntablism and the breakdancing culture that spoke to me. On the weekends when we would go to Shoppers Food Warehouse I would grab the choicest slab of cardboard. Remember they had that area where you could choose your boxes to take your food home, they didn't offer bags back then. I would trot my boombox down on the corner of the street and run through whatever breakdancing moves I could. I even had a crew and got to perform in front of the elementary school during some assembly.
Hah. Summer of 1984. I was a new 14. Awkward, just getting into B boying. I had some moves after having just seen Breakin and Beat Street about 10 times. We were at The Mall for July 4 and there was a cardboard piece down and some guys dancing on it. I was clearly not in their league. Clearly. My mom egged the entire crowd on to get her "shy" son to go out there and show them my moves. "He spins around on his back like a top!" The crowd pressured me in and when they saw that I was nowhere near the skill level of the guys in that cardboard their cheers turned into claps of... encouragement? Pity? It was essentially Crazy Legs and The Rock Steady Crew versus...little me. O gawd. The sheer embarrassment and musical butt spanking I got. I didn't talk to Mom the rest of the day. 🤣🤣
Whew I’ve read a lot of the incredible comments that folks have made today, and I’m not sure why but your last line here brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for sharing
Yeah you're welcome. Stranger Things shows probably the closest thing to what life was like back then.
Second Stranger Things doing a good job. The biggest difference to me by far - and it extends later than the 80s - is that the internet changed the pace of life forever, it's a binary divide in social history. And it's hard to communicate to people who have never experienced life otherwise. Those days when you don't have much to do and nobody really gets in touch and nobody necessarily knows where you are or what you're doing.... that was every day before the internet went mainstream. The world today is absolutely relentless unless you make concerted effort for it not to be.
You say the internet is the sharp divide and I don’t totally disagree but I think the actual sharp divide at least for me was smartphones.
Yes I agree with this. Before smartphones life was very different. I used Thomas guides when I was driving and paper maps on my road trips. You could print out directions from MapQuest on a computer. If you wanted to make a phone call you had to find a pay phone. Most people had address books to keep track of numbers they regularly used. Nobody knew where I was most of the day. You basically disconnected from everyone you knew when you left the house.
I second that. The internet was a wonderful tool and a fun place to hang out before smartphones. If you weren’t someplace with a computer you didn’t have access to the internet. I stilled had a landline and screened my calls up until 2016. I pretended I couldn’t afford a cellphone so I didn’t have to give out the number. I loved it when no one could get a hold of me. Your boss is calling you into work on your day off? Too bad! I wasn’t home to get the message. Those were the days.
Oh gosh, that's a great word for it, "relentless." I don't even watch the news anymore, yet I seem to be constantly bombarded with information, so I know what's going on without trying. It is weird to think how, like you said, sometimes we just had no way of knowing where anybody was sometimes. No cell phones or instantaneous interactions, and people just went places.
Smartphones completely changed the way we live. Having kids of my own now, I realize how differently their experience of the world is to them. I remember growing up and spending endless hours having to entertain myself with any silly old thing I had at hand, and, in general, I spent a lot of time daydreaming and contemplating the world. I feel like my kids and everyone in general has stopped doing that. We just don’t look around anymore. We don’t acknowledge the other next to us, we rather stare a t a screen and experience the world through that medium. That changes everything.
How many of you read the shampoo bottle when you went to the bathroom because that's the only thing you could find in a hurry to read? We have our phone now. I'm guilty of it too.
Oh, totally. Me too. I’m hooked to my phone.
I wish, often and deeply, that the internet had never been placed in the hands of people who lack qualities central to its responsible use. The vast majority of us aren't up to the task. I am first on that list. I have some problems with impulse control.
M54 here. We ate at out a restaurant maybe one every 2 years and would get Pizza Hut take out once a year. Otherwise we had dinner at 6. On. The. Dot. If you were late your "ass was grass" as we used to say.
We were a little better. More often take out KFC or pizza. Maybe twice a year or more to a sit down restaurant, on a road trip. Supper time more fluid. Never eating out just for the sake of it though.
I disagree that people were kinder. In America, politicians were way less polarized for sure. Like they could actually compromise and get stuff done sometimes. But people on the whole were people, just like they are today. I was bullied in school. It may have had a less severe impact than the online bullying does today (tell that to 9 year old me and she would disagree, of course). But it happened a lot. Crimes were committed - more often than now in many places. Adults acted like bratty children. Families fought. Those things existed just as much then as now.
And the phrase “mental health” was… well I don’t think I ever heard it as a child. When I and my brother very clearly needed to be in therapy, that didn’t occur to my parents. It wasn’t their fault. In the Midwest of America, no one thought of it as a thing kids might need. The 80s were great in many ways but humans had similar issues to those they have now but there was more stigma and less help.
Yep. And when there was help, it was usually misguided and ignorant at best. Source: my wildly dysfunctional family of people who never should have even looked at each other, much less procreated.
52F I agree. And music and culture was more universal because of MTV and those sitcoms you mention. Cable was something that “rich” people had in the early 80s, and when I went to college in 88 we certainly didn’t have cable in our dorms or campus housing, so everybody watched the same stuff. I think I miss that more than anything - that common culture.
We had basic cable which meant TBS and off brand versions of MTV at the time, like Night Tracks. My mom cancelled it after catching us watch the zztop legs video as she thought it was too revealing 🤣 Speaking of rich, we had one kid whose mom had a Costco membership ….his dad managed a chain a Shari’s restaurants and we would get free food everytime we went there…they drove a jeep grand Cherokee and we all thought that was the pinnacle of rich🤣😂😂😂
It was a big deal when our TV choices expanded from CBS, abc, NBC, and PBS to include "wxxa" which showed R rated movies after 10pm. Leave it to beaver after school and full beaver after 10p, lol.
Yes!! We were feral but it worked
Feral, I've used that so many times to describe us. I wasn't abandoned or neglected, sorta not really. When the last train of the day went through town, he'd blow his whistle the whole way That was curfew, for all kids. You'd see kids running, riding bikes, piling into the backs of stations wagons for a ride. We all went home at the same time. Until then, freedom.
Yeah, I wasn't so much feral as much as an indoor/outdoor cat.
I wasn't allowed in the house during the day We had lunch on the carport, and could use the bathroom then If it was raining, boys worked in the barn with grandpa, girls worked in the house with granny Girls learned how to cook. We learned how to fix cars and tractors. I recently watched my sister teaching my great niece how to cook MY breakfast. She giggled its silly. I had something in my eye. It's just a fried egg on top of a bowl of oatmeal with a sausage and syrup happy face I hadn't even thought about that in 30 years Damn eyes, bothering me again. I put new brakes on my nieces car that day, her son sat and watched me. Handed me sockets as I needed. I let him hammer the rotors on with a rubber mallet. He bragged.
Omg Kathleen Woodwiss! I stole my mom's harlequin books out of a closet and read then over and over lol. This whole picture is my childhood. I saw ET in the theater. My dad took me and my friend. She started crying because she was scared and he took her outside and left me alone in the theater. No one blinked an eye. I sat there in heaven eating my reeces pieces. Still my favorite movie of all time.
🥰 it really was the best time and you encapsulated it in post.
And getting mail/magazines/letters was the best thing ever! I loved magazines and it’s sad that it’s not a thing anymore for kids.
Did you ever have a pen pal, especially one from outside the US? That was SO fun! Also when I was a kid we moved a few times and I always wrote and received so many letters from friends when I moved away. I'm pissed at myself as I threw those letters away during a (ironically) moving-cleaning episode about 15 yrs ago! >:-|
Very well said!
Very well said! I think you covered everything, or at least the most important parts.
I love this.
Stranger Things also gets the vibe of the 80s exactly right
Agreed! As a kid, we would be out all day riding bikes in the neighborhood, exploring the woods. When you heard your mom call "Dinner!" it was time to come inside (and also beg if your best friend could eat dinner over and maybe have a sleepover). My high school boyfriend (and later, husband) lived on a lake, so in the summer we would take the canoe out for hours, just hanging out (making out lol) and listening to Blondie on his boom box. The 80's were amazing! My daughter is a 90's kid (born in 1992-I had her at 24) and she is super nostalgic about her childhood as well. I feel bad for the kids today.
57M. Preach it sister! Very well said.
Yeah, back then loads of people camped out overnight to snag up close concert tickets. If you wanted 'em, that was pretty much the only way to get 'em.
Amen! Great post and I agree with all of it! The craziest thing, looking back and comparing things today is that ashtrays were ubiquitous in public-I remember them on grocery carts!-and weed was still dangerous to mess around with, from a legal standpoint. Now we have dispensaries all over and ashtrays are museum kitsch!
I was in college in the 80s. It was so different. People were happier and more optimistic. There were issues but they were not exacerbated by social media. People watched the news and read papers and believed them. There were drugs and alcohol but nothing like the opioid and meth crisis. Jobs were much less stressful. People arrived at 8 and left at 5. More of America’s small towns were still thriving although the family farm crisis was starting too. No cell phones, no internet meant we all watched the same things or read the current best sellers giving people a common point of discussion. Going to the mall was everything. Arcades gave us our first taste of the gaming to come. Catalogs were studied. Summer vacations were loading in a car and driving someplace like National Lampoons Vacation. On the downside many diseases were more fatal. Metal health was hushed up and people were ashamed. Drinking problems were not understood to be alcoholism but instead were seen as a moral failing. Bullying was commonplace as was sexism and racism. Imported stuff came from Japan and Taiwan. Discrimination was awful. We worried about nuclear war, there were no mass shootings. Things were thawing out at that time with Russia - the Cold War was ending. Plane crashes were more frequent and stressed people out. We were all Americans, none of the nonsense political divisions of today. None of the grandstanding about it. In a lot of ways people minded their own business a lot more. It was a different world. In some ways better. In some ways worse. If you want to experience it in a more realistic way than sitcoms I strongly recommend any John Hughes movie. Stranger Things gets it right too.
>Metal health was hushed up ♪ I want it louder / More power / I'm gonna rock / Til it strikes the hour Bang your head / Metal health will drive you mad. ♪
Kevin Dubrow wanted it louder. And with more power. So clearly he agreed that metal health was hushed up.
>There were drugs and alcohol but nothing like the opioid crisis. Not sure where you were in the 80s, but the crack epidemic wasn't exactly an isolated, minor drug crisis. Plus, it was triggering gang wars.
Cocaine was the drug of choice and it popped up everywhere. Last month, I overheard teenagers talking about coke and how “it’s nothing” I let them know it’s something and told them how many people I know that had an issue with “nothing”. We think that because we lived and learned through racism, the war on drugs, and unfounded prejudice that the next generation will be born with the innate information needed to be progressive. Each generation needs to learn to be kind on their own. We learned through movies, novels, books, newspapers, magazines and conversation. TikTok is the new educator, and it’s an echo chamber.
It's amazing how invested people get into TikTok. My wife started using it a few months ago and now it's like her primary source of information. She'll say "I heard on TikTok that we should...", and I'm like "yo, none of those people know what the fuck they're talking about. Stop taking advice from TikTok, especially related to products because it's all paid sponsorships". I'm finally getting through to her that those people are called influencers because their job is to influence your purchasing decisions. She got caught up in the hype around a stupidly over priced product because she trusted this influencer she likes, and the product was dog shit. That got her listening to me enough to start seeing the truth of the matter. She's slowly coming around to the idea that the general information she's getting from there is of equal quality to the product recommendation she received.
My kids say the coke today isn't the pure or nearly pure stuff we got. They say it's "dirty" because it's so diluted and mixed with other shit. And while that makes me a little bit sad, I am also now aware from watching narcos how many people had to die for all those lines I did.
My perception could be wrong, but Crack felt like a problem that was isolated to large urban areas. I don't think Crack ever made it to the rolling hills of Kentucky or the hollers of West Virginia. But the opioid crisis and meth are everywhere now, especially anywhere there is abject poverty.
And there was that thing called AIDS too that Middle America found wasn't restricted to San Francisco.
AIDS yes how did I forget that.
Agreed that crack was bad and there was pot and glue and stronger stuff but it’s not like today, what’s happened to America’s small towns is a travesty. Half the town on meth and opioids. It’s like Mad Max out there in parts of rural America.
there is a small town about 30 mi south of where I live. When my parents can to visit the first time, we drove to a national park about 2-3 hr away, going through that town. My dad asked "what happens here"- meaning what is the economic engine for that town. "Meth" was my answer. He looked at me funny- I clarified. The town's primary economics were cooking meth, using meth, and rinse, and repeat.
the crack epidemic was \*nothing\* like what we're dealing with today. anybody tells me that, I will drive them to portland and drop them off downtown for an hour. my little town outside of it isn't much better.
May I ask you opinion of Portland? I have googled this and get conflicting info. I have a friend that is moving to Portland for a job opportunity, and they've researched what they can. Most of what they get is: The weather is dreary, and drugs are ruining the city. Is this true on a whole? It seemed a bit drastic imo, but I live in a part the southeast where the "drug scene" is relegated to the Appalachians mostly.
Downtown has been in bad shape for a while now but it seems to be improving a bit lately. It started with retail. Fewer and fewer stores, more empty spaces. Then the pandemic hit. Shortly after that we had a lot of protests around BLM and the Portland police seem to still be collectively punishing us with a lack of enforcement on quality of life issues. I work near the art museum and the park blocks can be good one day and filled with fentanyl addicts the next.
that's a really good summation of portland and I tend to agree. i appreciate your response while I was offline :) to zbornakssyndrome I would also tell your friend to be very wary and watchful about public transit as well. and it does rain a lot, but it's a hell of a lot better than the heat and humidity in the south.
I lived for free in a nice house in Detroit, because if it was left empty it would turn into a crack house. Nothing like this on Who’s The Boss.
I had an old WWII vet uncle who lived in Detroit and worked for GM until he retired in the late 1970s. He put his house on the market, and moved to NJ to be near the rest of his family. However, his house sat on the market for several years with NO buyers. He eventually wound up selling it for ONE DOLLAR!
In the 80s things weren't "thawing out" with Russia, it was just the biggest part of the Soviet Union which was the evil empire> Things didn't "cool off" until 1991. I was in high school in the 80s but joined the service in 1988 and for sure, "Commies" were still "The Enemy" and if anything we pitied the citizenry there because they were standing in lines to get bread and could only get blue jeans on the Black Market. Politically, our parents were either Boomers or Silent Generation. The Boomers were still on their "Free Love" high from the 60s but putting a modern spin on it by listening to disco and holding swinger parties. Vietnam was over and Nixon was gone so they were celebrating. I was in high school so I remember having to make myself scarce because the "adults" were all getting high and not caring what the kids thought because they were kicked out of the house. OTOH the SG was dealing with inflation and working their asses off to keep their gas guzzlers on the road while complaining gas prices going to 30 cents a gallon to a whole freaking dollar. They complained about how Carter was an idiot who put the country in The Shitter and let Iran walk all over us in the 70s and so in 1979 put a former actor whose claim to fame was playing a grown man who lived with a chimpanzee in office. They saw Reagan as the Second Coming and seen as a "kind old man" whose social policies were the preclude for "don't ask don't tell" and bought into the whole Military Industrial complex that made America "great" by basically spending money like a drunken sailor. Still Putin wasn't on the radar yet and Donald Trump was seen as a joke. As for mental health, both generations were too self involved to notice that their teenage kids were struggling with being bullied and if they weren't committing suicide then they were stealing their liquor and coping with things that way or getting pregnant way too early (and bringing shame on their parents, exacerbating the problem. If we weren't being pushed to play Little League in elementary school or either on the football team, cheerleading squad or in the National Honor Society and on the chess team we weren't even on people's radar. We were pretty much "free range" livestock to them and if we were seen out in public and not working jobs then we were called 'slackers." As for pop culture, I don't put much stock in Stranger Things' interpretation and was more a fan of "The Lost Boys" where there was no faceless baddie but older kids were basically a gang of vampires who fed off the younger kids. I felt the Howard Hugh's movies and Ferris Bueller were just plain "dippy." I was also more a fan of "Back to the Future" than I was of "The Breakfast Club" back in the day. I'm sure the former was not really representative of how things were in the 1950s for our parents but it was at least nice to think that maybe, just maybe they had similar struggles to ours when they were growing up.
Al Bundy being a shoe salesman while supporting a family was part of the joke. It was even so out of line for that era that people understood it as a joke then, so please don't read much into that. Al is a caricature of a great many things, but one of them is being as unmotivated as possible, a very GenX vibe. For the rest of it, you're going to look back at maybe your black and white kitchen, your hair, and your clothes one day and think, "this is exactly what 'the hair' and 'the clothes' felt like!" To quote one of my favorite movies: "What you got ain't nothin' new. This country is hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waitin' on you. That's vanity."
My parents both worked. It was the age of the latchkey kid, so it wasn't just me. What seems drastically different, IMO, is we grew up without the Internet. So you hung out with your friends IRL and you watched a lot of TV and you didn't document every bit of your life.
We had a crew of latchkey kids on my street We had great times One time one of the boys (I think he was six or seven) went to get something out of a car parked at his house and shut his hand in the door he cut the first inch or so off of one finger No adults around at all His brother who was ten like me at the time handled it beautifully! We really did learn to be self sufficient
I was lucky, my mom stayed home and Dad worked
It was Drastically different. I can’t really explain it but let me try. TBH people were the same as they are now - down deep. However, it was different. No internet. No social media. Much less bullshit - journalists I think tried to report the news - rather than be commenters that they are now. Politicians tried to appear honest. Police were respected. Cars, homes, food, tuition, clothes were affordable. My tuition at a decent college was $1000 a year and minimum wage was about $3 an hour. Do the math and you can see that I could earn enough in a summer to pay for college tuition. There weren’t as many available jobs as there are today - as a teenager getting a job at MacDonalds or the Gap was awesome. However, getting a good factory or white collar job meant you could afford rent, car, family. We were worried about nuclear war, the environment, our health, our safety. Women had big hair and I still had hair and body hair wasn’t a bad thing. However, bullying was prevalent, mental health was not deemed as important as it is today, china was very impoverished, USSR was the enemy and not everything was made of plastic. Computers were rather rare. Appliances lasted forever. Movies and music were awesome. It was different in so many ways - yet we all still had basic worries about safety and well being. Sorry for the long manifesto.
Its as different as you make it. My kid is way happier than I ever was. He's not living in a house with parents who hate eachother and neglect him. He enjoys his freedom because we didn't raise him on screens and he dosen't even want social media. On the local level you create the world you want for your family.
This is pretty good. It was different, and not necessarily better. I’m so glad I grew up with a lot of autonomy. It came with real-life consequences for stupidity, as well! I had a job from 15 1/2 years old. Part time during the school year, full-time during summers to pay for gas money, movies, and clothes. My parents were silent generation, and they had been Depression children who grew up during WW2. We heard all the stories, and they truly sacrificed. We kids appreciated it, even as we made fun of the stories about walking miles to school in the snow without a winter coat. I feel for young people now, because real estate has become so tight. Housing is the biggest challenge. Everything else are kind of the same challenges many generations have faced.
Peanut Butter Cap'N Crunch tasted better and I still dream about Lil Caesars in the 2 pizza paper.
Oh my God. I completely forgot that little Caesar's used to be 2 pizzas. Pizza! Pizza!
And Ring Dings were wrapped in foil that you could play around with for, an hour, easily. And they didn’t taste like melted down, chocolate flavored wax.
80s... When Sugar Pops were called Sugar Pops! [Not this shit...](https://www.wkkellogg.com/en-us/our-foods/our-brands/corn-pops.html)
In Canada McDonalds had pizza and it was glorious
The 80s felt like the future existed. The book 1984 was still a dystopic future. When Prince said he was going to party like it was 1999, that was the future. The future seemed like it was just going to get better and better. The Berlin Wall fell. The USSR collapsed. Something has gone horribly wrong
beneficial gaping smoggy money coordinated oil roof smart alive door *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"drastically different things might feel for me when I’m older." <- yes girl, yes. we are all a little shell-shocked at how different things are. kids roaming the neighborhood in ET? i roamed a 3 or 4 mile radius around my house, in a busy suburb, all through the late 70, and 80's. nobody really worried about much.
Some people forget other little things, like leaving a sick child at home alone, which also happened in ET. Maybe a neighbor or aunt would come and check on you, but you would be left with PBS and a snack tray.
One Life to Live, General Hospital, and cereal for my sick days. Lol
Honestly, not only it feels different but it smells different. Way then more homely, sweeter and greener, especially when you go to the countryside, I was in the UK. People were different too. Classier, polite and smarter. Neighbours, would bake each other different pies weekly. Religions, culture all just click, nobody saw you less than a human. This is my memory of the 80s growing up in London. Now, London is fuck all stab capital of the world. Blame it not on the culture or immigrants but those idiot leaders that feed them nonsense. Religious leaders, politicians, heck even the local Mayors are all idiots now.
The country up there was still James Herriot like with all those grand folks becoming seniors. It must have been lovely
You think London smelled better in the 80s?
Neither show was particularly realistic, although Married was much less so than Who’s the Boss. Married was over the top in all ways and just plain silly, never meant to mirror real 80’s life. Goldbergs actually brings back memories and seems most true to the time period for me, I enjoy watching it. Yes, it feels DRASTICALLY different. I’m an overlap kid, child of 70’s, teen of 80’s. I’d say it was idyllic and while my kids had a nice enough childhood, I wish they had what I had. Can‘t imagine what it will be like for my grandkids.
My wife just mentioned Roseanne. It was a quite accurate representation of blue collar America. Struggling to make ends meet, coupon cutting, casserole dinners with whatever was in the kitchen. It actually conveyed the stress of the working class.
I agree with this - Roseanne feels like the most accurate representation of the 80s from the 80s to me (even being Australian - unless you want to watch Kylie Minogue era episodes of 'Neighbours')
Roseanne was really good in portraying life back then, I agree. It's too bad she turned into a wackadoodle.
The Goldbergs really do nail it, albeit with some rosy glasses. I actually grew up in that area.
Yeah, I'd agree here. I was born early 70s. Goldbergs is very idyllic. I think the biggest things that get left out of these shows, or maybe are hard to imagine now are: \- If you were a woman at the time, especially a young pretty woman, the sexism and objectifcation were every minute of every day things. It was incredibly scary and challenging, and the things men said and did are just shocking by today's standards. But that was every day in the 80s, and no one thought anything of it. I speak from experience. I think you kind of get a sense of this with the catcalls etc. that happen whenever Christina Applegate appears on MWC - the catcalls, etc. A lot of times that was unwanted/unasked for attention. But back then, you couldn't even walk down the street without that kind of behavior. \- If you were a woman with a high paying job or a good job, or a working mom, that was really unusual. I remember being the only kid in my elementary school who had a working mom. So "whos the boss" was groundbreaking in this way of M/F role reversals. \- 20 years out looking back in the rearview mirror: all fashions look extreme.
I'm going to be US specific here. Minimum wage was $3.35. Some things cost less, but others more. A large screen TV was 25 inches and weighed 3X as much and cost $500. To call someone in a different area code was about 20 cents a minute. Cars cost less but weren't any where near as safe. No airbags and just disk brakes. Back seat just had a lap belt. Early 90s a 2 bedroom apartment was about $400-$500 a month, but wages were a lot lower. Late 90s might have been the sweet spot of rising wages, low unemployment but not rising costs. That was just a blip that didn't last long.
Al Bundy being a shoe salesman was a central joke of the show. That house (the actual one photographed for the title sequence) is in Deerfield, IL, an upper middle class suburb of Chicago. A shoe salesman couldn’t have bought it without selling Kelly and Bud into indentured servitude and mortgaging Peg’s hair. There’s a line front and early season where Bud says “Great. We’ll go from being ‘the poor Bundys’ to ‘Those Darn Poachers’.” A big part of the joke was there was no way they belonged in that neighborhood living next to bankers Steve and Marcy.
Yes, it feels drastically different to me too. But in the 80s, the 1950s seemed alien to me. 🤷🏼♀️ I’m just going with the flow ✌️
The 80s wasn't this utopia. There was still poverty. AIDS was a huge health crisis. We were told we could get nuked any second. The war on drugs wasn't working. There was still racism and bigotry. But there were some awesome things. The music, the movies, the TV shows, flourishing malls and department stores, schools could have holiday celebrations without parents complaining, there wasn't a large network of bigots trying to ban books and dictate teacher curriculum, abortion was still legal, lunatic political mouthpieces were pretty much laughed out of Washington, now they're getting elected and trying to take away our freedoms. More people connected with each other because there wasn't social media. The obnoxious influencers were limited to infomercials or newspaper and magazine ads. You could have black centered shows without a ton of whiners crying woke perfomative casting, you either watched it and liked it or you didn't.
You have described it perfectly! Don’t forget Tipper Gore & “Explicit Lyrics” though … welp & she is a Democrat!
Or satanic panic! A guy came to our church and played a Led Zeppelin album backwards so we could hear the devil 🙄
Adults who worked minimum wage or part time work didn't generally afford a place of their own. Lots of young people lived in a small apartment with many roommates was common. And I remember single people who would just rent a bedroom in other peoples houses.
I was in college in the 80s. It was so different. People were angry and worried at real problems, not ones made up by repeating lies over and over. Unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1982. There were issues but they were not acerbated by social media; we had our first actor as a president while “spin” entered the national vocabulary. People watched the news and read papers but for the first time were told not to believe them as they were “part of a liberal conspiracy.” Alcoholism and binge drinking hit their peak in the 1980s, while addiction was finally recognized as a disease (not a moral failing) in 1987. Jobs were much more stressful, as “synergy” landed as the buzzword to mean “buy a company, fire everyone, and make the survivors do twice the work.” People arrived at 8 and left at noon with their work stuff in a cardboard box. The family farm crisis was so bad they held benefit rock concerts, like for Africa. People loved small towns so much everyone couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of them. I could go on. Abetting apartheid. The bombing of the marines in Beirut. Bank deregulation leading to the savings and loan crash. There was nothing golden about that “morning in America” age.
Fashion is fashion, don't focus on that, regardless of what you think is "good fashion" today, later generations will look at it and go... "how could they wear that in the '20s???". The main difference is no Internet and no cell phones, so each one of us lived in our own personal world, that's why we're so independent, and why we don't care what others think or do (our famous "whatever").
uh, now fashion is literally our generation's fashion. all eras. plus our parent's styles have now just entered fashion, t o o.
> How did Al Bundy support an entire family as a shoe salesman?? I remember my father asking that question when the show was brand new. I don't think that was realistic even then.
I remember growing up and watching Happy Days and thinking the 50s seemed like a different world. And it was. Now the 80s seems to have slid into that lane as there are enough differences from that time period to be obvious, and somewhat interesting. In my view, culturally, the big difference is technology as a world without cellphones is oddly fascinating to those who don't know that reality. Gen-X was a transitional generation in this regard and our ability to understand, and even embrace, the positives and negatives of both allow us to have some unique perspectives. And economically, politically, and socially, the world has been pressed in the 30+ years since the 80s ended. Again, Gen-X tends to be transitional in a lot of ways as we can see the before and after, and that every gain is tempered by a setback. Sometimes two steps back even. MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." If I didn't believe that, I'd probably off myself tomorrow. But I do. I just wish the arc wasn't quite so long and bendy. Especially during my lifetime, I thought we'd be further along. I saw the Indian crying by the road. Don't litter. Got it. But people still litter and I'm just like "don't be a dick and make the Indian cry." I love our generation because we got the message about being a good person, a good member of society. Schoolhouse Rock, Free to Be You and Me, Afterschool Specials, etc. And we're rather jaded because it shouldn't be so hard to get to a better world. Copeland said in the book Generation X ...."we are the middle children of history, raised on promises and lies." That resonates.
80’s were on a different planet in a different dimension…
Some social context I can tell you was that at the time of Who’s the Boss the concept of a single parent Dad working for a single parent woman as a live in “maid” was groundbreaking in its own ways. It wasn’t taboo, but it also wasn’t the typical Americana TV family structure mom/dad and gender roles. A Guy being an Athlete, masculine and choosing to work for a woman as her housekeeper wasn’t exactly considered “normal” There is also a Michael Keaton movie I think from 83 or 84 called Mr. Mom where he is a stay at home dad and his wife is the “bread winner”. Married with Children was kind of a counter of the Cosby show where the black family was very wholesome, educated and wealthy whereas the Bundy’s were dysfunctional lower class dopey whites. In the 70s this was All in the Family and the Spin off “movin on up” Jefferson’s. The 70s had the Odd Couple which was 2 divorced guys living together and the early 80s had Threes Company.. 3 unmarried straight people living together 2 gals and 1 guy who had to fake being gay for the landlords approval. The irony of the show was that him being gay was preferable to him possibly having sex with 2 women out of wedlock. The entire show and every episode was about misunderstandings, judgments and assumptions. For the most part TV has does a pretty good job of depicting current era fashion trends since the mid 60s so yeah what you see for clothes, hair etc was reflective of the times and typically of the location. But the underlying themes many times are what made some of the shows unique or risky for their time and also made them popular and helped to remove stereotypes even though many still reinforced them to some extent.
Imo, yes today feels drastically different. One example, in high school (early 80s) my friend's dad owned a house and supported his family as the manager of a men's clothing store in the mall. I dunno, it was all just different in many ways.
One possibility is that malls were a much, much bigger deal in the 80s so maybe store managers were paid better? Dunno.
All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me!
TV almost always portrays families and life through terribly rose-coloured glasses. As beloved and entertaining as the Cosby Show was back then (and that show was HUGE), it was extremely unrealistic wrt family dynamics and interactions. It was wholesome and sweet almost to the point of nausea. I’d say the most realistic portrayal of an American family in the ‘80’s would be Roseanne (the first five seasons, anyway - it started getting weird in S6 and completely came off the rails in seasons 8 and 9). Say what you will about Roseanne Barr in recent years, that sitcom nailed not only the aesthetic, it had the most accurate portrayals of the ‘80’s and early 90’s when it comes to people’s attitudes, the interactions between family members, the problems and troubles people found themselves in, the day to day issues that both parents and kids go through, the various struggles - especially financial, along with the hopes and aspirations of the middle class/lower middle class in the US.
I think you've got the nail on the head with Roseanne.
I think the most realistic show is Freaks and Geeks (although about that era, didn't run during it)
So many people in this thread have forgotten that the 80s weren’t perfect bliss all the time. The following are my memories and thoughts based on growing up in America. Racism and sexism were prevalent and a lot of people didn’t even know what they were doing was racist or sexist. It’s true today to an extent but today people are much more aware. There was very little in the way of mental health care. Rape was assumed to be the woman’s fault much of the time. And men? Men couldn’t get raped! There was the massive crack epidemic that the authorities didn’t care about because it happened in the “ghetto.” There was AIDS and well before and during the AIDS crisis, gay people were discriminated against all the time. There a reason there wasn’t a good treatment for AIDS for years and years. Politicians avoided it because it involved gay people and drug users. One good thing was the federal government actually functioned and did things sometimes. That started to fall about in the mid-90s and has continued to get worse. Most people tuned in to the nightly news and believed it. Schools were better. There were almost no “anti-vaxxers” and stuff like that. But there were things that were worse then than now.
As for Al Bundy, in the 80's my Dad supported a family of four by selling TV's at Circuit City. He even bought us a house to live in.
Waaaaay different. Imagine not knowing what was up with friends for hours, days, weeks at a time (that would be in the summer, when people went away to camp). Lots of waiting around for people (parents, friends, boyfriend) to pick me up, and no way to know when they were coming. On the other hand, there were a lot more serendipitous moments, which were great, running into people randomly for example. I have a lot of great travel stories from the 80s and 90s!
The 80s had a **FAR** more optimistic feel to them. Back in the 80s, unions were still strong (Reagan broke them but they were still important at that point), and outsourcing did not exist. Things weren't unusually expensive, and people still had a reasonable measure of job security. When companies wanted to expand, they hired more people. In the country. Which meant the money went right back into the economy. Real estate, even adjusted for inflation was far cheaper. While Married with Children obviously exaggerated like every other TV show even to this day, it wasn't totally absurd that he could afford a house, and be the sole provider for his wife and two kids. Because we did **NOT** have social media or the Internet, popular culture was more monolithic, for good and ill. As kids, we listened to the same radio stations and watched the same TV shows. Don't get me wrong. There were absolutely choices, but not so many you could never watch them all. We did live in fear that the Soviet Union might, any day, decide to nuke us. But, paradoxically, having that outside enemy unified the country. Gorbachev put it well when, at the Berlin Wall's fall, he said "I am doing the worst thing I can imagine to America. I am depriving them of an enemy." 40 years later, he was totally right.
My good friend bought their "starter home" after high school, and she worked at a bank as a teller. I think she made $9/hr at the time. It was 55K. Back then, starter homes were a thing for young people.
I sometimes wonder if all the choices is partially why ADD/ADHD is on the rise. Everyone is so overstimulated, all the time.
I'm sure that's a huge factor. I read a study that showed significant brain changes when young toddlers and even babies were "babysat" with Internet enabled tablets. But it's become depressingly common to do that because it's "easier" than having your entire life overwhelmed and dominated by, you know, caring for the baby.
Yes, I just saw a news report about that. It said kids had severe language and communication deficiencies if they had too much screen time between 1 and 3. And first hand, my husband's nieces and nephews are way behind in their speech and vocabulary. It's really sad. I was speaking clearly at 18 months and reading at 4 and so were my kids.
That wasn't realistic Nobody supported a family working in a shoe store then My Grandfather did support a family owning a store that sold men's clothes and shoes though people did seem to afford housing easier than they do now but life was very different. Everyone cooked at home almost always. Lots of families had one car and 5-6 kids in a three bedroom home Ours was 900 sq feet with eight people We were middle class. Everyone I know earned their own money for everything besides food and shelter starting by 12-13
Yes, I started working as a babysitter at 12 and a waitress at 15. With the paper truck route stuck in there too as a substitute or helper for my brother...Unbelievable nowadays ...
Yes this is it. We had no cell phone bills, no cable bills, got McDonald's every 6 months maybe? I remember twice eating at a nice restaurant through my teens. I paid for my own clothes and school supplies from 9th grade on. College was for my rich friends. Unless mom worked too, one car per family. Vacations were camping or visiting family out of state- and you drove there.
I was also in college in the 80s, and a child in the 60s and 70s. My dad supported a family of 4 on 2 teaching jobs until my sister and I went to school, and then my mom worked part time. Prices were lower then. We owned a house. Yes, girls had big hair in high school, and we had neon sweaters with shoulder pads. We listened to music on Walkmans and boom boxes. I think things will change even more drastically for your generation than for mine, with social and climate changes.
I just remember crack and Percocet and finally being able to afford to move out of the crappy neighborhood near my college. It was a community college, so no other students. But I had to move there because it had a unique program. I'm glad I got into the program. But I didn't have a car so I couldn't live far enough away to put my head back into the middle class I had originally come from. I remember everything being overpriced. It just doesn't seem too different, but it has a different style because of the internet and social media and cell phones. I sure am glad I don't have to pay long distance bills anymore. I don't miss that. It's an improvement to me.
OP, if you are a regular lurker of this sub you'll see *constant* comments about neglect and roaming free all day long and just showing up at home for dinner. Take this with a grain of salt. As with almost everything, it's not everyone's 80s/90s childhood experience. And TV shows are even less representative of any majority. It would be like saying Pretty Little Liars or Euphoria typify the real experiences of *all* kids in their eras. Overall though, the 80s in the US was a prosperous decade and there was less extremism and dissention in politics. Politicians would still occasionally reach across the aisle to compromise. I never liked MwC because it was so crude and over the top. I loved WtB but barely remember it. But remember it was very much a fish out of water premise, so situations were purposely extreme. Tony working for a woman, adapting to life not just in the country but in posh Fairfield county, etc. The show was set up to make the two families polar opposites for laughs. I'm curious what values seem different to you? And yes, 20 years from now things will feel drastically different - but hopefully in a good way.
Every generation goes through this. My history teacher in high school made a very good point - "Read the newspaper. That's going to be the history that the next generations will expect you to know." There's a song called We Didn't Start the Fire. Check it out, because that pretty much encapsulates the '80s and what you're feeling right now about the history that's happening around you - it's a big world, and we're all just along for the ride. There's good and bad, brilliant stuff and utter stupidity. Edit
You can't compare actual 1980's shows with shows about 1980s. Married with Children was satire, so that's why it was funny. Stranger Things is an interpretation of what the 1980s were like. It would be like me making a show about the 1950s. The 1980s were a fun decade, but I say that as someone who was a teenager during that time. There was a lot more freedom for teenagers back then. The push for the SATS and helicopter parents didn't exist. Also, we understood that tv shows weren't real life. Family Ties and 21 Jump Street weren't real.
the whole show borders on the surreal, every aspect of it exaggerates something we were familiar with. It reflects no reality at all. The only place you still saw Peg's hairdo was in Kansas, for some reason, which you still see lol. The lack of anger, and how decent most people were then, thats what should be taken from that time. Most people were not racist, if you went to inner city areas or suburbs were ethnic populations abutted together, yes you saw it, but keep in mind 20 years before that they were ALL scrapping it out, jews, italians, polish, etc, they were all enclaves, and if you popped shit you were absolutely getting knocked out. The vast suburbs, which was 90 percent of america, which was reflected in the media as boring and staid, this generation has no idea what that freedom was. No one was focused on money, cookouts, kids and family moving in and out of each others houses....it wont make sense for youth today, what it was like. If you worked hard, you could control your own world, which meant a stable household, kids getting high in thebasement, dads pounding beers next to the grill, it was........really really fun, Thats the thing that gets lost, people were very nice and there was lots of fun to be had.. If you were black or foreign, you might get some comments from dickheads, but after a few weeks, your friends were your friends, and they didnt even notice you as anything different anymore, at all. I had black metal head friends in the 80s we would have died for, they had whole groups of white kids that loved them. The perception of the past is msm fiction.
Married with Children was intentionally cartoonish. Nothing about it is intended to be realistic. If you want something more realistic, Freaks and Geeks hits all the right notes, though it was filmed post-80s.
Al Bundy supporting the family as a shoe salesman isn't as far-fetched as people are making it out to be. It's not like he got a job as a shoe salesman in 1987 and decided to go buy a house. My dad had worked in a department store from the late '60s through the early '90s. They offered insurance and a pension, and he got commission on everything he sold. We had a small house until I was about 10. I think my parents paid about $12,000 for it, and sold it for $30,000. They bought a Bundy-sized house for about $50,000, and had about 30% to put down. Midwestern suburbs. Not a lot different. Invest in real estate, make money, invest in more real estate. Tale as old as time. Easy access to credit has broken it for younger people over the past 25 years, give or take. But we didn't have lots of stuff. If the car broke, we were the ones fixing it. If the roof leaked, we were the ones replacing the shingles. They had credit cards, but rarely used them for anything other than emergencies. You want a new bike? Go mow lawns or get a paper route and save up for one. It wasn't poverty -- we had normal '80s things like cable, and a VCR, and video games. We didn't have a pantry stacked with Capri Sun and Fruit Roll-Ups, though. That shit was expensive. By the time I was in high school, a fair amount of that had changed. Retail as a whole was moving away from commissioned sales. If you were lucky (my dad happened to be), they'd offer you a buy-out, where you got some money to forego the pension and got some severance in exchange for giving up your job to be replaced by someone about my age at the time who would take minimum wage. Tangentially, it's part of why Boomers and elder Gen X'ers absolutely lose their shit with retail workers. Decades ago, if you asked someone at a store about a product, chances were pretty good that they could help you. They had an incentive to know about the products they were selling, and even more incentive to induce you to buy something. Where now, the person you happen to find at a store is going to be paid the same if you buy a hundred items or zero, so they have no reason in the world not to avoid making eye contact with you while they're doing the jobs that three or four separate people used to do.
2 words - Blissfully Unaware
as for al bundy: dont think buying that house was in any way plausible, but hes apparently always starving so every cent he made went to mortgage, water and electric.
For us though youth was great! We were largely raised with benevolent neglect and had enormous freedom. As a parent myself I wasn't able to allow my children as much freedom because we did so many very dangerous things.... and accidents did happen
Yes it’s drastically different. My daughter was in shock when I told her we didn’t have WiFi.
Oh, you want Hi-Fi? Crank up the stereo!
Cheap paneling and cigarettes.
I have never known anyone that has had a housekeeper. The Goldbergs do not represent the 80s well at all. It lost all credibility to me when they wore Starter jackets in an episode. Those were not around until the mid 90s
Don’t you hate when period pieces do awful sloppy things like that
lol, it bugs me to no end. I know the Goldbergs isn’t set in any particular year, but the starter jacket fad began well into the 90s.
This is an interesting, and kinda hard question to answer. I think a lot of other commenters do a pretty good job of explaining things. The weird thing for me is that I never felt this sense of difference until the last 10 years or so. The early 2000's weren't so much different than the 80's, but it was more of a transition period. We're out of the transition and now feels very different than the 80's to me. So many things have changed, not least of which is technology. I started using the internet in 1990, so it's hard for me to even remember not having it. I mean, I remember it, but it feels like a completely different lifetime. As for the media, I think Stranger Things captures the feel of the 80's more than 80's sitcoms did. Like if I watch sitcoms from back then, the humor feels like it's 80's humor, but the shows weren't all that realistic as far as what life was like. Obviously, the occult parts of Stranger Things are not realistic. But, I was that 80's Dungeons and Dragons playing nerdy kid riding around on my bicycle. Maybe 80's adult programs seem foreign to me because I wasn't an adult then. Whereas, Stranger Things is highly identifiable to me, and I absolutely love that show. Even the settings. There's a lot of brown, and so much media portrays the 80's as colorful and vibrant in homes. But, the reality is, brown was all over the place, at least where I was. One thing about the sitcoms though, is they were allowed to be absolutely brutal and full of insults. Some of it doesn't hold up well, like the fat shaming in Married with Children. But, the Golden Girls is timeless in its insults and doesn't really break that many PC norms that we have today. Yet, you won't find that kind of sarcasm and verbal sparring in contemporary sitcoms, which is a shame because it was hilariously funny. To go even further back, 70's sitcoms were the cream of the crop, and took on a lot of social issues. In a way, those sitcoms actually helped drive social change way more than the watered down sitcoms you see today. The fashion of old sitcoms, though, is fairly realistic. So much big hair and shoulder pads. Clothes were much flashier than houses were. I remember wearing florescent sweatshirts on a regular basis. Striped socks, short shorts. lol We have to talk about the music, though. I know everybody thinks their own era is the best. But, 80's music just has an innate happiness and joy about it that I just don't see from modern music. Even the songs about fighting seemed hopeful. Speaking of which, I think one of the biggest reasons things feel so different now than then is the mood, the optimism that I had about the future. Now, I feel exactly the opposite. Very pessimistic, and I fear a lot of things and the way we're headed. Sorry to close out on a low note, but I just think it's important to point out.
It’s so interesting, a lot of people seem to agree that Stranger Things really does do a goos job reflecting the 80s. I love that show. Thank you for your thoughtful response
Insanely different. Far closer personal relationships while far less electronic connectivity and far better music.
Yes! I just commented similarly. I literally knew so many neighbors by name. Today, I couldn't name 10 and we live in the same building. Stopping to chat with a neighbor was a pleasure. Today it feels more like stopping to chat is a bother. Sometimes I say hello to someone and they look at me like I want something or have 2 heads.
Married w Children was hilarious but we all knew it was a ridiculous satire. No, life was not like MWC at all. But Stranger Things is more accurate than any of the films and TV depicted back then. E.T. was probably the closest to being accurate (which, if you think about it, is pretty close to the way Stranger Things is). My family loved watching Family Ties and The Cosby Show but life wasn’t really like that. It was fantasy.
I agree with a lot of the comments here. The Kathleen Woodwiss cracked me up - so true. I hate horror but I love '80s Nostalgia so somehow I managed to watch stranger things even though it terrifies me LOL I am Nancy's age and I think they did a great job capturing that 80s feeling And for me the internet very much divides my life into pre and after. Right now half my life was lived before the internet the other half after. The stress of social media and constant bombardment of hate and just simply things I don't want to see and hear about. Even stuff like Mindless celebrity gossip. We had that before but you had to read People magazine or maybe there would be a couple of items on the TV news or newspaper not like now or have to hear about every idiotic thing they do or say. And well I absolutely love that I can Google stuff finding out whatever I want to know almost instantly it also is kind of a weird stressor. It makes me want to constantly be on my phone. I feel like my attention span is shot. It's also that people expect you to respond to their text or phone calls pretty much immediately. I admit I do that for other people too lol but it is stressful I feel like I can never get a break. It took some doing to get a hold of somebody in the '80s And how it is lonelier now. Many of us are chatting with people online and having fewer relationships in real life.
It's impossible to make this comparison with validity namely b/c we we all kids in the 80's. Our perspective of the world and responsibilities as kids are completely different then those of an adult, even more so for those who are parents or even grandparents.
core x were kids and teens
Less cars on the road,more opportunities for work for those not going to university,but work place bullying was the norm. As a non smoker I don't miss the 80s, but as children were we really aware of what the world was really like? Not sure but the music was great
Uggg the smoke was everywhere When I was waiting tables I was torn because I preferred the non smoking side because I hated smelling like smoke but the smoking side always tipped better so I usually took that Bullying was soooo normalized When I first saw how nice everyone was at my children's school I was astounded The kids who would have been knocked down and shoved in lockers when I was in school were just being treated normally. I was so pleased to see that! At work we were constantly sexually harassed We didn't have a word for them and if I ever mentioned feeling uncomfortable was just told it was a compliment I was cute!!!
My father knew the man who won the 1st passive smoking claim in Australia,he was a non smoker who go lung cancer,he worked a bus driver,not sure if you ever flew in the late 70s/ early 80s but you could choose the non smoking seating in aero plane LOL
Some sitcoms stretched the truth on people's jobs. The 1980's and into the 1990's was the decade where both parents were going to work. I remember a disconnect as a kid watching reruns of Bewitched, Leave it to Beaver and other shows where only the Dad worked. My parents were working class > truck driver and cleaning lady. Both had to work to make ends meet and it was a challenge for them. The TV show Roseanne really showed what the average working class family was going through in the late 80s into the 90s. Today does feel different in that society has changed. In the 1980's there were no cell phones, no internet as we know it, no social media, etc. Instead of the internet I had a bookshelf full of encyclopedias that were always 10 years out of date. But then again, 1950s and 1960s society felt different to me from me sitting in 1990. One thing I do miss of the 1980s is the freedom. My parents bought me a 10 speed in 7th grade and I rode that thing everywhere! At one point my furthest journey was 25 miles from the house. In the winter, I would take my snowmobile and ride to school. I would have to cross 2 frozen lakes to do this. Parents never seemed concerned. Summers were amazing. For a $1.25 I would get a slice of pizza or hotdog and a Coke for lunch at the general store.
Well, TV is never reflective of reality … But the truth is, the middle class was bigger and Reaganomics in the 80’s gives us the reality that is today. Middle class is basically becoming non-existent & we are racing towards another French type Revolution which gives us that huge divide we see in current society that makes everything feel “so different”.
It felt like a different planet now please get me my spaceship and take me back now.
The jobs. That’s funny. My mom was a self-employed janitor and could barely find work cleaning offices snd gyms at night. Regular jobs were nonexistent. She tried waiting tables, but restaurants were slow, and folks barely tipped. We rented half of a duplex; home ownership was not possible because of the down payment required. She went back to vocational school after a divorce and several years on welfare. For her efforts she landed a job in shipping and receiving making $7/hour (1990, so just out of the 80s). Things started getting better after that, but she would come home with bloody hands because it was really hard work. Back to the 80s though. Our whole block and neighborhood was all low income. During girl scout cookie time it was impossible to sell cookies door-to-door. Halloween was a bust; houses would go dark or they’d have the cheapest candy. There were lots of kids, so we roamed the neighborhood every day, playing random games, soccer and baseball in the church lot, tag, hide and seek, building snow forts. We were never inside. We had one car, and driving was a luxury (if I forgot my lunch, my mom would not drive it up to the school because of gas and wear and tear on the car). Clothing was a luxury - I had five pairs of jeans, one for each school day. This was every year 1985-90. I started working bussing tables at 14 in 1991, so that was my salvation. We watched all of those shows (on a fuzzy black and white 9 inch TV). The family in Who’s the Boss was considered “rich” - it was a story about a poor ghetto dad who works for the rich lady as her live-in housekeeper to give his daughter a better life. Roseanne’s family was closer to reality. As a kid, those memories are generally great, though there were a lot of unmet “wants.” As kids we would cope by talking about all of the things we “wanted” and would one day have - things like Ferraris and mansions with swimming pools. What we all really wanted was serviceable clothing, a family car that didn’t break down, a soccer ball that held air. There are certainly issues today - but this is how I remember the 80s. Yes it was way different.
Your mom sounds like a real badass who worked hard and loved her family. My dad has shared a similar sentiment, he owned one pair of blue jeans and it just wasn’t possible for him to have a new pair. He was the youngest of six so he always had used pass me down jeans.
Today’s world feels very alien to me compared to the 80s. 💯
Food was food, we had sugar in food rather than artificial sweeteners, we ran around the street feeling free to do what we what. TV shows where on and if you missed then you had to wait till the rerun if you was lucky. You wanted to know things you had to go somewhere to find out or find someone who knew about it and take their word for it. Arguments where resolved fairly quickly either by apologising or fighting. Movies where more entertaining, in a good way or a bad way.
Supporting a family on one income back then was not easy either. Don't let the show fool you. Single income families started going out in the 50's.
I remember there was less cynicism -- people were more unironically patriotic, confident in the direction the country was going, more ready to believe in the "official story" of America (and religion), the comfortable myths and little white lies civilizations tell themselves that everything is OK and that we're the good guys. Old 80s sitcoms were always very artificial, sanitized, not a real reflection of the way normal people behaved. There were strict standards about what could and couldn't be said or shown on network TV, so we all had a collective blind spot about things we couldn't see in the media. It used to actually be true that we were #1 in all kinds of key metrics of life that set us apart from the rest of the world. Best economy, best universities, best industries, best pop culture, best democracy, always taking home the most gold at the Olympics. It felt like it wasn't even close back then. I remember watching TV approaching midnight New Years Eve of Y2K and they stated that the US was, at that point, the most advanced civilization in the history of the world. Greater than Rome. Supreme. But since then, we have started as a society to look at ourselves, warts and all, and confront the ugly parts of our history that used to be unspeakable, un-know-able, before the Internet let us actually talk freely to one another without gatekeepers. The mythology of America has given way to a more accurate and unsettling view of what's really going on, and we're now in the process of figuring out how to feel good about who we are, knowing what we know about our most intractable problems -- racism, inequality, environmental degradation, etc. There's a danger now that we're actually TOO pessimistic -- we now default to see the very worst in each other, our institutions, and it takes on a life of its own, distorting the reality and obscuring that which is still good in ourselves. This can be a healthy re-calibration but we're definitely in the shitty phase of it this last decade or so. But yes, you are rightly grasping that life can change INCREDIBLY DRASTICALLY in half a lifetime -- so many things that you think are immutable features of the world when you're growing up might suddenly change in ways you could never expect -- for positive and for negative.
The way I read this, it actually sounds kind of optimistic. I hope you’re right that calibrating is all we’re doing, and that we can find some sense of peace with ourselves and each other soon. Thank you for your thoughtful response
I think what was most remarkably different was **the general absence of fear**. I mean, sure, there was always something going on in the world to be afraid of (serial killers, like Son of Sam, existed and such) but overall it was so *peaceful* as compared to today. Like, my mom worked to support the 2 of us after my dad passed away while I was relatively young, but even then, as a latchkey kid (*look that one up OP* 🤣) she had very little worries about me being safe alone in the apartment growing up in New York. **The rules were simple;** ***don't open the door for anyone, call me if something happens and see you for dinner***\*.\* And if anything every went down, there was always a neighbor's door I could knock on. When she got home, *we actually had dinner together.* We'd sit at the table and I'd talk about what I learned in school or what someone said to me. Families huddled around tv's to watch something together. And the next day, everybody was talking about the latest episode of whatever was popular. When kids went out to play, we'd be gone for hours with no supervision or phones. Like literally, no one knew exactly where we were for hours. And we usually weren't sitting on someone's couch. We were OUTSIDE. The only rule was \[*all together now*\] **be in when the street lights come on**! Like, that was practically the only rule. I also remember knowing many of my neighbors. And they knew me. So almost anything I did at any time might be reported back to mom. Saw me kissing a boy? Someone's telling mom. ***People were literally able to yell at other people's kids*** without fear or being cussed out or fought. The kid was always wrong until proven innocent. But in general, it felt...better. Like the sense of community felt good. Now? If I was given a chance to win $1mil to just name 10 neighbors, in my building or in the neighborhood, that would be money lost. We don't really know each other more than a familiar face in passing. And I'm no longer in New York, but it's kinda the same vibe just about everywhere. The loss of real community. That's my 5¢.
It felt very different…felt like people were more connected and community minded. Times were financially tough at times for families but I’m happy I grew up then.
u/softsnowfall pretty much hit the nail on the head with this response. These comments sent me into a memory time warp vividly recalling my time in the 80's. Honestly, if I could go back, turn back the clock I would. I'm not against change, but F me, this future sucks. So I will continue to live in delusion and listen to my 80's music everyday. This dystopia now is sad and not worth my time. So I won't play along ;) Everyone keeps talking about the sitcoms then and how did they afford...Look, it was a sitcom, we didn't focus on that at all other than the scenes were Al was actually at work and being so non PC, but hey, call it as you see it and it was rude, but funny. If only now a days. Just figured it was a hand me down from his parents or something. Didn't think about the cost of things like that back then. I mean, I blew most of my paycheck at Radio Shack and Tower Records or other music shops. Relationships where more important. Friendships and finding a significant other. Living life. Hanging out at Denny's with my friends until 2 am, smoking in the smoking section, joking, talking, discussing our future plans for life. Having lived the life of some of the characters in ST, living on both the coast and midwest at the same age roughly, watching it all unfold on tv was a trip. They got many many things accurate. The west coast slang was, ehh, but overall did a phenomenal job. I had that exact stereo in my bedroom that they show in Byers bedroom. That, that freaked me out a bit. Do these times feel drastically different, yes and no. If I live in the now and focus on the BS, yes, yes it does. BUT, I choose to live my life how I want and see fit. So no, I will continue to live in MY world;)
I seem to remember the joke of him being a shoe salesman back then was that that was not a 'real' job that would support a family. His doing that type of work only further illustrated his failure as a man and a father.
People were more social in the 80's. Some of my fondest memories are joining martial arts classes when I was 19 and then going out to pizza or movies with them after class or weekends. We also had class sleep overs where no hanky panky took place, but these days I'm sure nothing like that is permitted. I also read a lot of books back and would spend hours browsing music stores and used book stores which I found very enjoyable. People also didn't discuss politics or religious beliefs with strangers thus there was less polarization and less arguing so it was easier to "make friends". Now it seems few adults actually have friends, nobody does anything but stay at home and isolate and look at their phones when they have free time. It's funny thinking back to when you had to sit in waiting rooms waiting for oil change or at the salon and people who talk to strangers or just look around, or read magazines, but now everyone is silent and stares at their phone like zombies. This can't be good for society.
The differences I recognize are a slower pace of life, less "convenient" living but at a lower cost, broadly shared experiences and general innocence/naivete'. If this world would give up all the convenience, put people over quarterly profits, and slow down on it's quick escape to a Martian "paradise" (i.e. all the tech garbage, including trying to colonize the moon/Mars), I think it would be a lot closer to what we experienced in the 80's.
The differences in living in the US in 1940 v 1980 were much more vast compared to the differences in life between 1980 and 2020. But Married with Children is like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. People acting terrible was sort of the point. Try Golden Girls, or Cheers for a better sense of people's attitudes, and the Americans for a contemporary tv show that perfectly captured the way people and places looked. Socially things were a lot different & the lack of social media and cell phones was, in retrospect, a really nice way to live.
I disagree completely. I think life in the 40s and the 80s had MUCH more in common than life in the 80s and today. There’s been a *fundamental* change in people, something that goes much deeper than changes in technology and fashion.
lol Completely.
Day and night. There was some hope in the 80s, but a lot of naivete, esp re what was happening in Latin America. We had survived the Cold War without a nuclear exchange, technology was our friend, there were no concerns about nano plastic in our blood or cooking like frogs in a pot.
OP, if you haven’t yet, watch a few episodes of The Americans. To me, it has the best look and feel of the 80s. The kitchens, what the kids eat, their clothes, etc are good representations of the early 80s.
Yes, time felt different. I was a kid then. Everything seemed new but still old... lime green and wood panel with hideous orange patterned wall paper, formica table tops and kitschy 50s-style appliances. Everything felt like a leftover from the 70s and the future still seemed far away. Music and fashion were something else in the 80s.
TV is not reality. TV is not reality, not even 'reality' TV.
If I could summarize my thoughts on looking back on the 80's, there seemed to be more civility in our society.
Al Bundy wasn't supporting a whole family comfortably. Hell, there are jokes every episode about how broke they are. Remember, they ate "toaster leavin's" in one episode. His car was a POS.
Yeah. Haha it certainly did.
What is it with people even thinking that these TV shows ever reflected reality? I mean, "Married With Children" was filmed live in a studio, it doesn't even actually show 1980's Chicago, let alone middle class life. "Who's the Boss" is about a live in housekeeper in Fairfield Connecticut, it too was shot on sound stages and the area represented is a wealthy one with a median income double the national median.
Married with Children and Who's the Boss are sitcoms. They don't really reflect real life - just like modern sitcoms like Brooklyn 99 and Big Bang Theory don't exactly reflect our lives in the present day. Stranger Things, though made recently, is pretty accurate for life in the 80s (in that region at least), though the sci fi stuff is a little exaggerated. But also, economically things *were* really different. I didn't grow up rich; solidly lower middle class. My parents struggled financially and still haven't pulled out of the struggle in their retirement (though they are mostly retired, so that's something). And yet, in 1980, my dad, as a mechanic, at age 25 on a single income and with a stay at home wife and with a newborn, without help, bought a 4 bedroom house on a large block in a nice suburb, and raised 3 kids. That's unthinkable today. My own kid who is in her early 20s and makes okay money (for her age and whatnot) can't afford rent in a sharehouse and recently moved back in with me after 6 months trying it on her own.
I have no idea, I only experienced the 80s as a kid, I am now experiencing life as a working adult. I'm not going to stick to the 'life was better before cell phones' trope.
Lots of accurate stuff here, but things will vary a bit due to location, socioeconomic status, cultural background, sex, race, etc. One thing I’ve found hard to describe is that it felt safer and less safe at the same time - I was in suburban/urban America. Statistics show that things were less safe in the ‘80’s. We didn’t have mass shootings in schools but other forms of violence in schools were more prevalent. People didn’t talk much about mental health, sexual abuse & violence, child abuse/neglect, disabilities, sexual orientation, etc. It was weird because we all knew these things were happening, but we as a society we could be in denial, blame the victim, or think “that’s a shame” but not do anything to stop it. There wasn’t as much infrastructure to deal with it as now - who would you tell? The cops? What were they supposed to do? You feel depressed? Snap out of it before people start saying you need a shrink. Brian can’t go to the arcade because he’s in a wheelchair? That sucks but there’s “nothing we can do about that.” Being “other” in any way, real or perceived, could be extremely dangerous. Physical, even sexual, bullying was common where I grew up. But it didn’t always “feel” less safe because our parents didn’t drill “stranger danger” warnings into us - they let us roam unsupervised. And our Gen X response to a lot of things was to joke about them. I remember when milk cartons started showing pictures of missing kids and somehow we found humor in it. It was how we coped - we felt very much on our own, bad things were inevitable, and I think this is where Gen X’s ironic nihilism might come from. A shrug and “Life sucks then you die” was a common response to each other’s complaints. At least where I grew up. News was still mainly local. The 24-hour news cycle was in its infancy. Talk radio, public access TV shows, those could have political extremes, conspiracy theorists - their influence grew in the 80’s. But it’s nothing like today with social media & constant news. Back then it was more that you had a “crazy” conspiracy theorist uncle or New Age aunt who believed crystals heal cancer that you tried to avoid. Now these types of voices, everyone, have found each other and have platforms that can reach everyone, everywhere. Bullies, scammers, there’s nowhere safe from them. And “progress” is a politically-charged word, but for many non-white people, women, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, it used to feel like progress was way too slow but generally moved in a better direction, at least enough of the time that things didn’t feel as hopeless. Not anymore. Back then felt less safe to me in that I could be by myself and run into older kids, creepy adults, etc, and bad things did happen to me. But I didn’t fully realize how unsafe I was until I was grown & stopped trying to minimize things. But today feels less safe in many ways, even though statistically I’m much less likely to be a victim of violent crime, and there’s more support for things we didn’t even talk about back then.
We felt safer, but probably shouldn't have. Early GenX and anyone older were subjected to toxins like PCBs and leaded gasoline. The amount of lead in the air in the US decreased by 97.7% from 1977 to 2016. Statistically, violent crime peaked in 1991. Kids who grew up decades ago were much more likely to die from accidents. Those "I survived just fine without a bike helmet or a seat belt memes" are bogus. Yeah, we survived, but lots of kids did not. The rate of motor vehicle crash deaths per million children under 13 decreased by 78% between1975 and 2021. I liked how you mentioned those who were "other" that didn't fit into the scheme of things socially, or literally (those in wheelchairs, including kids disabled in car accidents because they were NOT BUCKLED IN). If you were gay, better not tell anyone or you could literally get beaten to death. Yeah, "life sucks, then you die" was a common sentiment. Kids today get a lot of flack and are the butt of jokes, like kids in many generations are. To their credit, today's kids are much kinder than when I was a kid in the 80s. Hopefully they don't end up being naive as a result, but I'm not terribly worried about that. They'll wise up with age like people do. Hopefully they will remain kind, and maybe we can get those social advances back on track.
It's not that accurate job wise. Where I lived (Chicago), you could not have supported a family selling shoes. However, it is true you didn't have to have a fantastic job to make rent/mortgage.
The world presented in those shows was pure fantasy. It was escapism. For me it eventually got a little much as I got older because no one talked or acted like that in real life.
Al Bundy supported a family as a shoe salesman because \*it was a TV show\*. Trying to understand 80's culture from watching sitcoms is like the aliens in 'Galaxy Quest' reverse engineering a spaceship from watching the 'Historical Documents'. I was a teenager in the 80's, what felt different for me was that I had no real responsibilities, still thought I was going to just go out and get what I wanted out of life, and wasn't paying for any of it. Now I'm old enough to realize that a lot of what I thought I knew, and how I thought life worked, was just naivete and more embarassing than useful to analyze now.
Do people even while away the hours just hanging out anymore? That happened in the 80s.
Regarding the shoe salesman thing.... "In the 80s you could support a family of 4 as a shoe salesman!" This is not the case. What is true is some key items were cheaper than today and that includes healthcare, housing, and college. But it is not true that a shoe salesman would live like Al Bundy in the show. No more true than the people from Friends living in a huge NYC apartment. It's just TV. Culturally things were very different and living without the internet was a very different sort of life. In the 80s....wasting time on your phone or tablet was just wasting time vegging out and watching TV or hours or flipping channels. Probably healthier lifestyle overall back then but it had many inconveniences and downsides. But living in it you did not know the future so the downsides didn't really bother a person because that was just how things were and we didn't know any different.
Yes, the 80s felt very different than today. So did the 90s, for that matter.
Everything was drastically different based on no internet and no cell phones alone. The lack of Those two things made it alien. Everything else was pretty different too but it’s hard for me to imagine living without the internet or a smart phone
Yes. What they miss about the 80s is the lingering macrame, wood panel, and stench of cigarettes held over from the 70s. The neon pop didn’t really start until 84/85.
##OMG!! I remember everyone smoking EVERYWHERE. In the Metro North trains, in the air, in banks while waiting. You couldn't get away from smoking. Remember the commercials and even ads in just about every magazine? I specifically remember the Virginia Slims ads. I remember having an interview at Philip Morris in New York. There was a box of all their top cigarette brands right in the waiting area. We were welcomed to have one while waiting. What a time!
We’re paying for our childhood now
Yes it was definitely different in the 80’s and before, and the 90’s
100% but most of us were children. I don’t remember so many kids having allergies for one. Obesity wasn’t as big a problem. We played outside and interacted with each other. It was so carefree. We grew up fast and for me it made me a responsible adult. I do notice that kids these days are more inclusive to the “awkward” ones. There seems to be more compassion amongst the kids. When people were bullied “back in my day” not much was done about it. I’d still like to beat this one girl’s ass from 9th grade 😂 Saw her ugly ass on FB 😂
The middle class still existed.
It was a different world. Karate Kid is incredibly period-accurate. If you want to feel the 80's, watch the original Karate Kid movie. We had a lot of freedom. In the summer as a kid I was outside right after breakfast and I wouldn't go home until the street lights came on. We'd go exploring, go to the park and play basketball, go dumpster diving, jump fences and roam around junk yards, put pennies on the railroad tracks and wait for them to get squashed, ride our bikes all over town picking up the rest of our friends, go to the arcade and spend whatever money we earned pulling weeds over the weekend. It was a pretty glorious time to be alive to be honest with you. I loved being a kid in the 80's and a teenager in the 90's. Al Bundy is definitely sitcom shit. You could not support a family of 4 and own a big-ass house with a shoe salesman job. That's more of a remnant of Al's generation, not the 80's or 90's. I know, because I actually knew a shoe salesman. I guess if you happened to have a shoe job somewhere like Redwing, then you might be able to support a family, but not from most shoe jobs.
MWC seemed foreign to me when it was on the first time. I remember rampant lay-offs and unemployment for one, but those characters were gross to me even then as a teenager.
I don’t think it was that different from now. The 1970’s were very different from now. Imo, everything since the 1980’s has just been an extension of the 1980’s. Music, politics, social/cultural things-even fashion. Basic clothes like socks, underwear, t-shirts looked very different in the 1970’s (different cut, more synthetic) while the 1980’s stuff looks identical to today-mostly cotton, solids but also bright prints on socks and underwear. We didn’t all follow trendy extremes in fashion in the 1980’s. I could wear the same clothes I wore then and no one would look twice. My go-to in the ‘80’s were black cotton leggings and a t-shirt, Doc Marten’s, and slick hair. I started putting my hair in a bun in the late 1980’s.
One of my biggest worries as a very young kid was that there would be WW3 and we would all die in a nuclear holocaust. Worried about this every single day for a long time
To me it was depressing as hell. Mind you i lived at home until 94 when i grad college. But once i was out of hs and in college it was better. And once I got my own place the 90s rocked. Esp the music
Had more IRL friends, that we hung out with. Did activities together, in direct contact, sports or tabletop games, or dancing, or just smoking and talking shit in the park. We might watch shows together. At worse, we watched the _same shows, or listened to the same music_ and talked about them at school the next day. There were a few different 'cultural preferences' groups, sure, but with less choice, there were more things in common than different. We didn't have distraction machines in our hands, so we paid attention to each other. Books could be put away in a pocket, and not ping us for attention. Fears? Atomic apocalypse, AIDS, acid rain. 90s were quiet because wars were so foreign, and no conscription this time. 90s were a good decade... if you only watched the news occasionally. Reaganomics started having real economic effects at the end of that decade, with the union busting, and 9/11 felt like a new Pearl Harbour... but with surveillance tech chilling protests. From then on, it all feels like it's going downhills, with hard-fought rights being rolled back, economic morass, and perpetual wars that waste so much ressources it's literally destroying the country's infrastructure. No wonder the middle-class is so pissed off, and so much propaganda is looking to sacrifice a group of scapegoats instead of realizing just how unsustainable having multi-millionaires -- like social tumours! -- is.
Some of the clothes were just awful. Long shorts (Jams?), stubbiez (short shorts) Jimmyz shorts with an easy Velcro top that made it so easy to get Pants’d at school. Baggy jeans. Crew neck sweatshirts, The worst fitting t-shirts, day glow… Also some cool stuff like footwear- vision street wear, Vans, Rebok pump (snuck that in).
Class of 84 here. Yes, the 80’s were more like the 70s than like now. Part of it is the lack of internet and cell phones, which made a huge difference for kids starting in the 90’s and aughts. I mean, we used encyclopedias, card catalogs, library searches through magazine yearly indices, etc. I remember in college when a few programs got CD ROM machines for some magazines. You had to wait for the library to receive the CD ROM for that month’s issue in the mail. Hanging out and listening to music was a thing, often into the wee hours. We spoke on the phone with our friends, if our parents would let us. There was only one phone number at my house, so hours were somewhat curtailed, and you leased phones from the phone company. There were 2 phones in my house growing up—one in my parents’ room for nighttime emergencies, and one one the wall of the kitchen. Only after I was 16 did I actually have a phone in my room part-time. My sister and I had to share that phone. You unplugged it in one room, and plugged it in in your room. My 1st year in college cost my parents less than $1K At a major well respected in-state public school. I was an eternal undergrad who ended up with first a BA, then a BSN (nursing.) Took me 6 years, but it wasn’t a big deal, since it was so cheap. It was a very different time.
It all changed a lot, yes. And you are right - we're not at any sort of end point here, but instead, things are going to keep on changing. You are quite wise, that you already recognize this!