There are things I like about the 80s too.

It had its own brand of batshit conspiracy theory types, though. Before COIVD 5G microchippers, before 9/11 Truthers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria

Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily during the 1980s and early 1990s, and featured charges against day-care providers accused of committing several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse.[1][2] The collective cases are often considered a part of the Satanic panic.

But on the whole, I seem to recall being less-exasperated over politics. Again, could be a function of age.

Kinda agree on the music, but from what I’ve read, people often like the genre of music that they listened to when growing up, so that might just be a function of growing up.

I recall inexpensive headphones and speakers being a lot more disappointing. Just about everything sounds great these days.

We had the crack cocaine outbreak back then.

Smoking (tobacco) was still common in the US. I was never really in an environment where it was super-obnoxious – like bars or something – but I remember restaurants having smoking sections that you could smell in the non-smoking areas, and regularly having people standing around smoking and smelling it. Kind of nice, as a non-smoker, to not need to smell it in 2024.

The Internet was not generally-available, and that’d be a pretty significant drawback for me. Cell phones were…well, being worked on. People had pagers sometimes. Though by the 1980s, having a personal computer – at least in the US – wasn’t terribly uncommon. googles Looks like it wasn’t until 2000 that more than 50% of households had a computer, though.

By the 1980s, video games were maybe still a bit geeky, but video game consoles aren’t weird to see in a home. You had early videogames out, still had a lot of videogames in arcades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_arcade_video_games

The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development, and cultural influence of arcade video games from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.

The golden age of arcade games began to wane in 1983 due to a plethora of clones of popular titles that saturated arcades, the rise of home video game consoles, both coupled with a moral panic on the influence of arcades and video games on children. This fall occurred during the same time as the video game crash of 1983 but for different reasons, though both marred revenues within the North American video game industry for several years. The arcade game sector revitalized later during the early 1990s particularly with the mainstream success of fighting games.

Doesn’t affect me, but for the folks who are into the whole trans scene, or even gay, you were gonna get a lot more hassle.

It wasn’t as fuel-efficient, but I liked the styling of automobiles in the 1980s over those today. Fuel efficiency and emissions mandates have kind of killed variety; it feels like there’s kind of an overwhelming sameness to everything.

A lot of the tracking issues associated with electronics and the Internet didn’t exist; I was happier with the privacy situation.

googles

Ah, here’s a list:

https://www.britannica.com/story/timeline-of-the-1980s

Oh, yeah, the AIDS pandemic started. That kinda sucked.

Smallpox was finally eradicated, though, that’s cool.

Chernobyl happened. That wasn’t good.