Well if you enjoyed the 80s soooo much then a) you where too young to grasp the problems facing your parents or b) you where too well off.
Just look at the cinema and listen to the music of my fine period.
Everything, every theme was: please dont kill us and can i have a room to call my own.
The politics where insane, mortgage rates of 10-15% where the norm, enormous economic shifts.
The 90s where fun but the eighties where, in my experience, very, very dark.
Ever listened to, I dunno, two tribes, war, dancing with tears in my eyes, Russians, etc.? Those first albums of u2? Really grasped what Terminator was about? Wall Street? Or the much lighter but still terribly fucked Trading Places?
It was all really dark stuff, my brother. Fun, but very dark.
I was a regular guy in my 20s/30s working as a computer programmer, living in a house with roommates and doing a lot of theatre. Amazingly there were more than your two possibilities, and I would hazard a guess that there are even more. LPT: simplistic binary thinking makes people boring.
Thats even now not so regular, that was very special and very high paying back then.
So amazingly, you being in your 70s (80s where 40 years ago after all) now and still unable to really fathom, comprehend, how very very good you probably still have it compared to others is telling enough. And that was one of the two binary options i gave for the 80s: too young too comprehend, too rich to care. You clearly fell and probably still fall in the latter category.
Not a lot 70+ year olds on Lemmy btw.
That all, combined with the use of the lpt acronym makes me doubt your age. That, or i’m talking to a llm.
Binary is boring that is true. It also has a 50% chance of being right the first time.
Obviously you know my life better at a glance than I do, having lived it. Meme-level thinking at its best! Take in minimal information, make a value judgement based almost entirely on preconceptions, and scroll on to the next item. This is why we have Trump (again) - because too many people dismissed all the issues as simple good/evil decisions so they could get back to entertaining themselves.
It’s also forgetting the Korean war, and several smaller wars in between (Panama, Honduras).
Vietnam was bad, but don’t forget so easily that we only just got out of the longest running war the US was ever been in, and it wasn’t Boomers or Gen X fighting in it. It spanned two generations. Now, because there US just can’t not be involved in a conflict, we’re casting about trying to find a good enemy; I think the next one will be with a developed country. We’ve realized that we don’t do so well with insurgencies, so maybe Russia or China. Or, maybe India and Pakistan will finish everything for us! They both have nukes, and China isn’t just going to sit there while they trade nukes across the border.
Anyway, it’s a little depressing that y’all have already written off the 800,000 veterans who fought in Afghanistan as being unworthy of notice.
The Korean War “ended” in 1953 the oldest boomer would have been 7 year olds, about half of them were the right age for Vietnam but even with that only about 2.7m served in some capacity for the Vietnam war with a lot in non combat roles there were 76m baby boom era so less than 4%
Fair comment about the Korean war; I incorrectly mentally lump it together with the Vietnam war as part of the general “war on communism,” and it wasn’t the boomers.
If you want to nitpick in that area, US soldiers in the Middle East over the past 30 years have all been enlistees, average age around 30. The average age of US soldiers in Vietnam was 19, most of whom were drafted. No American high school students since 1973 have had to watch lottery balls on TV decide whether they get sent to war.
Life has always been a struggle, but it truly feels hopeless being 20 something given the current state of the world. There’s some days where I spend 80% of the day consumed by suicidal thoughts.
Shhhh, the primary social media population wants to believe life was a breeze until they came along.
There was no oil crisis, no cold war, no economic crash in the 80s, no housing shortage in the 80s, no rampant crime!
The 70/80s where glorious!
/Sssss
We didn’t start the fire
I definitely enjoyed myself, more in the 80s than the 70s (which seemed largely like the record industry still trying to milk money out of the 60s).
Well if you enjoyed the 80s soooo much then a) you where too young to grasp the problems facing your parents or b) you where too well off.
Just look at the cinema and listen to the music of my fine period.
Everything, every theme was: please dont kill us and can i have a room to call my own.
The politics where insane, mortgage rates of 10-15% where the norm, enormous economic shifts.
The 90s where fun but the eighties where, in my experience, very, very dark.
Ever listened to, I dunno, two tribes, war, dancing with tears in my eyes, Russians, etc.? Those first albums of u2? Really grasped what Terminator was about? Wall Street? Or the much lighter but still terribly fucked Trading Places?
It was all really dark stuff, my brother. Fun, but very dark.
I was a regular guy in my 20s/30s working as a computer programmer, living in a house with roommates and doing a lot of theatre. Amazingly there were more than your two possibilities, and I would hazard a guess that there are even more. LPT: simplistic binary thinking makes people boring.
Yep, regular guy in the 80s doing programming.
Thats even now not so regular, that was very special and very high paying back then.
So amazingly, you being in your 70s (80s where 40 years ago after all) now and still unable to really fathom, comprehend, how very very good you probably still have it compared to others is telling enough. And that was one of the two binary options i gave for the 80s: too young too comprehend, too rich to care. You clearly fell and probably still fall in the latter category.
Not a lot 70+ year olds on Lemmy btw.
That all, combined with the use of the lpt acronym makes me doubt your age. That, or i’m talking to a llm.
Binary is boring that is true. It also has a 50% chance of being right the first time.
Obviously you know my life better at a glance than I do, having lived it. Meme-level thinking at its best! Take in minimal information, make a value judgement based almost entirely on preconceptions, and scroll on to the next item. This is why we have Trump (again) - because too many people dismissed all the issues as simple good/evil decisions so they could get back to entertaining themselves.
It’s also forgetting the Korean war, and several smaller wars in between (Panama, Honduras).
Vietnam was bad, but don’t forget so easily that we only just got out of the longest running war the US was ever been in, and it wasn’t Boomers or Gen X fighting in it. It spanned two generations. Now, because there US just can’t not be involved in a conflict, we’re casting about trying to find a good enemy; I think the next one will be with a developed country. We’ve realized that we don’t do so well with insurgencies, so maybe Russia or China. Or, maybe India and Pakistan will finish everything for us! They both have nukes, and China isn’t just going to sit there while they trade nukes across the border.
Anyway, it’s a little depressing that y’all have already written off the 800,000 veterans who fought in Afghanistan as being unworthy of notice.
The Korean War “ended” in 1953 the oldest boomer would have been 7 year olds, about half of them were the right age for Vietnam but even with that only about 2.7m served in some capacity for the Vietnam war with a lot in non combat roles there were 76m baby boom era so less than 4%
Fair comment about the Korean war; I incorrectly mentally lump it together with the Vietnam war as part of the general “war on communism,” and it wasn’t the boomers.
If you want to nitpick in that area, US soldiers in the Middle East over the past 30 years have all been enlistees, average age around 30. The average age of US soldiers in Vietnam was 19, most of whom were drafted. No American high school students since 1973 have had to watch lottery balls on TV decide whether they get sent to war.
Life has always been a struggle, but it truly feels hopeless being 20 something given the current state of the world. There’s some days where I spend 80% of the day consumed by suicidal thoughts.
And you can’t admit it to anyone, lest you end up involuntarily committed for a couple days and also handed the bill for the stay 🙃