I miss the 1980’s

[DSC]

Totally agree. Maybe it's just age but I feel like every year since around 2000 has zipped by. Then again, before that I wasn't spending all day in an office so that could be a factor.

This is a well known perception! This from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-time-seem-to-speed-up-with-age/ may explain.

“Where did the time go?” middle-aged and older adults often remark. Many of us feel that time passes more quickly as we age, a perception that can lead to regrets. According to psychologist and BBC columnist Claudia Hammond, “the sensation that time speeds up as you get older is one of the biggest mysteries of the experience of time.” Fortunately, our attempts to unravel this mystery have yielded some intriguing findings.

In 2005, for instance, psychologists Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lenhoff, both then at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, surveyed 499 participants, ranging in age from 14 to 94 years, about the pace at which they felt time moving—from “very slowly” to “very fast.” For shorter durations—a week, a month, even a year—the subjects' perception of time did not appear to increase with age. Most participants felt that the clock ticked by quickly. But for longer durations, such as a decade, a pattern emerged: older people tended to perceive time as moving faster. When asked to reflect on their lives, the participants older than 40 felt that time elapsed slowly in their childhood but then accelerated steadily through their teenage years into early adulthood."

Their conclusion is:

"The reason? Our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period. In other words, the more new memories we build on a weekend getaway, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight."

 

[tripwire]

Although most of my teens was spent in the 90's, I do have a soft spot for the 80's, and feel that I'm more of an 80's kid than a 90's one. Having said that, I look back fondly during those decades mostly because I was a kid/teenager, and my sphere of influence, understanding, and responsibilities was so limited compared to adulthood respectively. I had no inkling of the challenges with respect to economic hardships (recessions), worldwide politico maladies, etc. As a kid (and even in my teens), I pretty much lived in a very small bubble of my choosing.

I do have to say that I'm not fond of the 2010's though - or basically when social media became so ubiquitous.

 

[Jonny5]

I was born in 1981, so I can't really speak to most of the decade, but I thought to share some things from the 80's that I'm glad we got rid of:

• Smoking in bars and restaurants
• The Sunday shopping ban
• Bank branches open only 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and never open on weekends
• Home phones without call display (that first "Vista Phone" offered by Bell was a revelation in the 90's - but it was available in the US many years earlier)
• Outrageous long distance phone charges, and the way it was determined by territories drawn with arbitrary lines so there were quirks where you could call someone 50 miles away and it was local, but someone two blocks away was long distance.
• Bad pizza - even from the still existing chains like Pizza Pizza; they were much worse back then (though 5 year old me loved pizza night when my parents would call Pizza Pizza and get pepperoni with the 3 cheese blend, and they had a "30 minutes or free" delivery policy back then--my sister and me would sit at the window with an egg timer and count down the minutes. We got it free once!)
• No weather network on TV (launched in 1988)
• Harold Ballard!
• Municipal elections every three years instead of four (that was ridiculous!)
• Every peripheral computer device (keyboard, speakers, mouse, printer, monitor) had its own unique cable design, there was no standardisation at all and you had to install the drivers for all of them to get them to work, there was no plug and play.

 

[Northern Light]

This is a well known perception! This from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-time-seem-to-speed-up-with-age/ may explain.

Their conclusion is:

"The reason? Our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period. In other words, the more new memories we build on a weekend getaway, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight."

I think the above is a sound observation.

But I would add another.

Time, as a percentage of one's life to date.

Put another way, at the age of 5, one calendar year is equal to 20% of your entire lifetime up to that point. That would make a year seem relatively lengthy.

That same year, at 50 is only 2% of your life. To reframe it, at 50, it would take 10 years to equal the relative amount of one's life that one year did at the age of 5.

So 10 years would seem as 1.

 

[BobT]

I just discovered this thread, and the memories being awakened are profound. Some of my 1980s fun in this great city:
1. Serving with 7th Toronto Regt at Moss Park Armories;
2. Electronics studies at DeVry on Finch W. at Arrow Rd;
3. Rick Vaive, Borje Salming, John Anderson, Mike Palmateer, Dan Daoust et al when a corner grey in MLG cost 5 bucks;
4. Cooking at McDonald's at Wilson and Dufferin;
5. Those tiny theatres at the Eaton Centre Cineplex;
6. Yonge St at midnight Friday with the sidewalks shoulder to shoulder, and cars bumper to bumper, half of them from Buffalo;
7. The Mug, pleasant little lounge on Bloor W.

Really, I could go on and on. Those were awesome times.