Yeah. 1980s. Try watching reruns of love boat for 1 hour with interruptions of dandruff shampoo commercials. Give it a shot as an adult, then imagine being 10. You will tear your eyes out. Sure, flip one of 10 channels to Golden Girls, you will try to hang yourself. Books? lol. Your school hands you the the book Jane Eyre. As a 12 year old boy, you might not relate to 19th century English countryside drama. Kids back then had fucking nothing. They went outside. Youtube is a god damn game changer - I wouldn't go out either.
As someone who actually group up in the 1980s, I am sad to report that 30 years ago was the 1990s.
> Books? lol. Your school hands you the the book Jane Eyre.
Both bookstores and free public libraries with books more interesting to most kids of the time than Jane Eyre were, in fact, things in the 1980s and 1990s. As were gaming consoles, home computers, handheld electronic games,
> Kids back then had fucking nothing.
Nah, kids often had lots of stuff in the home.
But they also had a culture which supported parents allowing children unsupervised in the neighborhood at much early ages then is considered acceptable today, which meant that more of them were allowed to go out beyond the home more often than is the case today.
We had tons of stuff. First off, bikes. We biked, biked, biked everywhere all the time.
Model rockets. Water balloons. Oh yeah, if someone replaced their kitchen cabinets, there'd be cabinet doors in the alley to use as... a bike jump.
Soccer or kickball in the alley. Walkie-talkies. Cops & robbers. A swingset to jump off of.
Computers. We all had computers; my clique had Ataris. Also records. Movie theaters. Blockbuster.
The public pool. The beach.
Slot cars. I had a slot-car set, up in our attic.
And none of that stuff was expensive, except the computers.
Growing up in the '80s was great. And today, we have mastery of technology but weren't shackled to it as kids. Growing up today seems like a stressful, distracted, and rather empty affair.
Absolutely. And the video games of the era were so hard and/or frustrating that you couldn't really play them all day.
We've really mastered the art of creating compelling and addictive time sucks, and our kids are paying the price for it. Ok we're all paying a price for it, but kids the worst.
