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All good points. But the earlier decades had their charms too (at least for me, as a white American male).
The 40s allowed every healthy young person to sign up and be "a hero" in the greatest war the world has ever known, which for Americans mostly meant hanging around in England or the South Pacific islands, dating the local women. Then you have lifelong bragging rights as "the greatest generation."
The 50s: ridiculously strong economy. Just walk into your local factory, shake the boss's hand, and you've got a job that lets you buy a house and support a family. "Support a family" meant being head of the household, where the wife is fully devoted to taking care of you and the kids. Or go into the cities, rent an apartment ridiculously cheaply, and live as a beatnik, making a name for yourself in all the new forms of music. Or tour the world, which was all destroyed from WW2, so your American middle-class salary made you relatively rich. Buy yourself a new car every year, because each new model year is better than the one before and you can afford it. Or become a professor, since all the universities were hiring like mad.
The 60s: Much the same, but with better music and movies. You can also move out to California and be hippy, living in a commune for practically nothing or going surfing all day. If you were organized enough to buy a house there back then, it's probably worth millions now. Or get a regular office job, wear a suit and tie, have a secretary, and be on the golf course by 4 every day. Enjoy listening to the local news tell of amazing technological progress like "man lands on the moon" while your wife cooks you dinner and your 4 children play outside. Or if you're more adventurous, go to Vietnam, experience what it's like to kill a man, then go work off the stress by banging a dozen hookers (no worries about condoms or aids).
The 70s: Even better music and movies. Any guy with a guitar can instantly become a "rock star," possibly getting rich, but at least having a good time playing local shows. Or hang out in disco clubs, dancing with the beautiful women who flocked there. Take one of them with you to the drive-in theater, in the back of your massive Cadillac. Complain about the middle east and gas prices, but ultimately it's not your problem. Cities, beaches, and international travel are still very affordable. Host a party and impress everyone with your stereo, record collection, and maybe some blow.
The 80s: Get into finance and live like a king with some basic math. Or computer programming, or hardware electronics. Hang out at the local arcade, impressing people with your mad pac-man skills, or at home on the NES. Wear a crazy colored jacket. Watch "Cocktail" and then start a cocktail bar. Enjoy the feeling of your country's supreme military dominance and victory in the cold war. Watch all the classic sci-fi movies on first release, then over and over, and talk about them with your local crew. Rock out to the coolest hard rock shows of all time. Travel to Japan and see it at the height of its bubble, but while also being an exotic foreigner.
I think what all of these decades have in common was we were rich enough to have materialistic comforts and freedom, but still doing thingt in the real world instead of being all addicted to our screens. That, and relative status is also important for human happiness. I also like the aesthetics of pre-1940s architecture, clothes, and music, but there's probably too much poverty back then for me to enjoy.
I think for me the big issue is not having the constant worry that you have to over perform to stay in place. Up until the 1980s unless you went out of your way to screw up your life, you were generally going to live decently. Maybe not great, but decently. Parents generally didn’t have to overly worry about how good their kid was at school. He’d be fine.
To be fair I was cherry-picking some of the better lives. You could definitely screw up your life in the past by, say, working at a factory that closed down, or on a farm that was no longer profitable, or getting addicted to drugs that you didn't understand the dangers of.
It was always possible to mess up. But in the past, it was a lot harder to do so and the consequences were a lot less permanent. If you fucked up school, you aren’t doomed, you have lowered standards of living, but you could still expect a modest lifestyle where living on your own is feasible with a single job. The mythical permanent record is real, and because of credentialism it’s now not even good enough to keep your nose clean, but you need to get either blue collar job training or a college degree in the right subjects.
While modern jobs have lengthier training periods, I don’t think that failure is actually that much closer than it was- that’s just blue tribe neuroticism. If you fuck up in high school, well, transferring from community college to flyover tech is still a college degree and odds are you weren’t going to Harvard anyways. Living on your own at 70’s standards(eating at home every meal, often beanie weenies, tiny house, one car and not a nice one, no vacations except maybe camping in a state park) is still pretty in reach for most people who don’t get incarcerated or use drugs. We have social problems they didn’t, but it’s possible to bounce back from all the usual fuck ups.
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Starve to death in the Bengal famine.
Welcome to state socialism, enjoy your stay.
Post 2000s-
Whew, living in the Third World almost becomes bearable thanks to the internet.
It's easy for you Americans to forget that for most of the globe, things are the best they've ever been. Even your current struggles are a minor blip in the face of near unrelenting improvements of the things, which if they were gone, you'd miss the most.
Yeah, good thing you're not Chinese either in this scenario. Not much to look back at and feel good about, for at least a century.
https://www.statista.com/chart/4216/the-worlds-most-optimistic-countries/
It's a damn shame that no Indian warlord or petty king had 1% the sheer rizz or memorability of their Chinese counterparts.
On a more serious note, India was likely better to live in than China for at least the period stretching from the 1920s to the 70s. Certainly the average person/peasant didn't suffer nearly as much from the cupidity of their leaders. But the Chinese took the brakes off the capitalism train a decade or two before us, and that compounds, leaving aside HBD and better economic management.
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I would definitely not want to have lived in India in the past! At least, not as a regular person. Being a rich person might have been sweet, though.
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We're Americans, not Canadians. We want to know what's in it for us. If the benighted third-world masses are doing better that's great, but it doesn't offset the slightest drop in US QOL.
Speak for yourself, please.
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I think anywhere from a third to over half of your countrymen would disagree, not that I particularly care. The biggest contributions of the States to the rest of us has been through diffusion of technological innovation and global trade flourishing under Pax Americana, not from charity doled out from the kindness of your hearts.
The past is a foreign country after all, and sadly they don't hand out as many visas as they used to.
On the other hand, the future's free, and far less of a tourist trap.
Well, I don't expect them to reach the end of the road, Reactionary thought involves at least stopping the car and throwing away the keys, or setting it to reverse haha.
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I just wish we didn't have to live through this happening in real-time with non-rabid non-reactionaries. It's one of those things that's fun to think about, but hellish to experience.
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