The Way Things Used To Look

When I was a young kid in the early 80s everything looked so cool. Things looked more grimy and real as opposed to now, where everything looks sterile and lifeless. I find the perfect example of what I am trying to say would be exemplified by Times Square in the 70s/80s vs. Times Square 2015. I love looking at pictures from the past -- the way people dressed, the colors, etc. I have lately become enamored with the video below, which shows a glimpse into New York CIty in the year I was born. Does it not seem like we have lost our humanity since these times in some ways? Notice how few people back then were obese, and nobody is seen walking around with their face mindlessly buried in their phone. People generally looked happy, healthy and alive. Not that I would consider the 80s to be the pinnacle of individuality or human existence, but compared to today the contrast is rather stark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDSGWy1CU78

 

The layout of a lot of stores in malls now is odd to me, like the stores where there are only 2 walls of product. But I don't shop out very often, so its not something I think about often or care much about. There is kind of a uniformed, surreal style of layout in cities which I'm not to into, those shopping centers where you can probably guess the majority of the shops just by seeing one store or design but I think the color schemes now are way better than the 80's.

 

60's and 70's were way cooler...the 80's to me....the music, the styles....were an embarrassment.

 

Every decade looks better in hindsight. I'm partial to the 20s and 1880s.

 

It all depend on which aspects of which decade you are focussing on. Especially if we are comparing the 80's with now not everything looks better (or worse) to me.

 

I can't help thinking that if you'd been a kid in another era you'd have thought everything looked cooler then, and that adults who lived in the 80's probably thought that everything looked cooler when they were young kids.

 

did you ever consider that is simply the difference between 35 mm film and the high resolution pictures of today?



As for the rest of what you say...HAHAHA...LOL

you are so naive, the 80's sucked balls, the clothes, the music, all of it sucked balls!
the only decent thing to come out of the '80's was the home computer, everything else sucked.
hell you should know how bad it sucked, it's Dude111's favorite decade, that alone should clue you in.

 

And everyone had bad teeth in the 80s

 

hipster babble

 

I heard the year 2080 we are retrofitting everything to 1980..because it was such a good look

 

I know what you mean. Everything has been gentrified and whitewashed to death.

 

between the end of the war, when the railroads replaced steam with diesel, and when everyone HAD to have a car, two or three of them, and the world was only may 1/4 as crowded as it is now, infrastructure looked a lot better. well i grew up in the mountains, donner summit in northern california. never thought much of cities, then or now, even though i've lived the latter half of my life in them. too many buildings in cities aren't that interesting. they're mostly all just boxes. i'm not talking about the efficiency of lacking decoration that looked like crap anyway, but the lack of interesting shapes and forms. in the 70s and 60s was all about creative shapes, odd and interesting. there was even some of that in the 40s and 50s. well i have my own way of looking. grime itself doesn't do it for me, though natural earth and rock with trees and other things growing in it is good. pavement is the problem. i wouldn't call it stirile. but i would call it repressive of the spirit of the earth. and i blame addiction to the automobile and the corporate economic culture wanting to keep everyone that way.

addiction to 'epicness' and exitement and ostentation, everything having to be a big exciting deal, that's what keeps everything fucked up. the whole thing, that made the rise to dominance possible, was an atmosphere permissive of innovation. innovation permitted to fail, to be creative, to be whatever anyone wanted to imagine it. now i'm not saying corporatocracy should get away with murder by unsafe conditions, but rather that individuals should not be limited by the conditions of a corporate for profit framework.

really everything that is dissapointing about the appearance of todays world is from accomodating the automobile and private ownership of the earth itself. nothing wrong with owning what you build and a modest privacy buffer around it, but it shouldn't get in the way of letting people and other living things move about unhampered beyond it. the whole everything looking the same everyplace, that is what is so unnatural and unhealthy for the mind.

when i was little, the vast majority of retailing was nether franchised nor corporatized. and infrastructure WAS unionized. and universities and their libraries were open to the public. and education was free until you got into college. and even then, resident discounts meant minimal fees, and then the whole community 2 year college system was created to be a free alternative, to universities, that were only expensive if you were from out of state and didn't establish residence for 6 months or a year first.

i don't know where anyone is finding "stirile" environments anywhere. but urban and suburban areas are certainly unnatural ones.

 

I definitely had more fun in the 80s. Did some crazy stuff that and survived it. I'm much more calmer and healthier now.

 

Becaause of my age, I can't remember much about the 80s. But from speaking to others, and what I remember, this is what I think.

Better today:-
Technology and access to knowledge. Nice new developments and regeneration in towns.
Cheaper air travel.

Worse today:-
mass over immigration. certain types of crime. loss of social fabric - Americanisation.
Poor outlook for young, indigenous people. Ridiculous system of everyone having a university degree, no matter how rubbish.
vacuousness of things like facebook and twitter. vile political correctness being rammed down people's throats.
"Me me me" culture and too much bling - in music AND real life.

Towns generally seem cleaned up, but yes, a little sterile. Sports like football have become very sterile and ruined by corporate "brand" culture.

People seem to look physically fitter today - because of better understanding of exercise and nutrition (esp protein supplements becoming popular).

Massive loss of culture - for instance, young indigeneous kids speaking in mock West Indian type accents in London etc.
eg "Iz u dissin me blad".

 

well I think this generation is way better than the 80s

Something about the 80s seems like people were trying to hard to make it feel like the future.

And people aren't mindlessly in their phones like they think, most of the time their doing nothing, mindfully avoiding unwanted human engagement

AND NY is no longer cool, just a corporate consumerist world that symbolizes are past failures

 

cities stopped being cool when the airplane was invented. or whenever there started being more people living in them then outside of them. when earth became grime and native plants became weeds.

kindof about which things and when. railroads created civilization. automobiles destroyed it.

there are a whole lot more ways of looking at this question then it seems like very many people have considered.

 

Pictures and videos definitely transport you to a different time and place, and they are often fun to remember. But we view the past with rose colored glasses, New York city, in the 1980's was riddled with crime and the crack epidemic. It doesn't sound like a good place to be.

But that isn't really the point you are trying to make. Things certainly look more shiny and sterile now. I'm trying to think back to the last time I spent time in NYC, a few years ago. I wiped my face off later that night and it was so dirty! Maybe it only seems clean on film or in photos.

 

I don't really see the bad thing? What's worse: cities appearing gritty and not sterile (in the 80's vein, not like some preindustrial era people might dig a lot) or shiny and sterile. Both can be tremendously ugly but both can have some kind of beauty to it too (all in the eye of the beholder, right?). I see influences in cities from all past decades and am glad I'm not in the 80s. The best thing about the 80s is that the 90's came after it

 

when i was a kid, iesenhour was president and only rich people could afford to fly. and middle class people still rode buses and trains if they were going on a long trip, or trolleys if they lived in cities. so yes, when i was little lots of things looked a lot different. the most of the mail went by rail, we had u.s. highways, most of them two lane, instead of 4 lane interstates, and zip codes didn't yet exist. most retailing including eating places, was mom and pop. fast food wasn't even a phrase in the dictionary and franchises were few and far between. banks didn't have drive up windows, or atm machines either. yah, a LOT of things looked different. towns had actual down town shopping districts, even if they were only a couple of blocks long. (you could still get jeeps and camping gear that was world war two surplus)
(in the 80s, i was in my 30s)