Would you go back in time and stay? When?

I'm really glad I was born when I was (1976). I feel like that was the sweet spot of getting to grow up and mature before the internet took over everything, and still experience a lot of the cultural touchstones that have endured since the 80s.
In that sweet spot, though, I think there's another sweet spot of about 1996-2000 that was just about right. Before 9/11 jacked up everything, of course. When you had modern technology in a functional but still nascent stage, where you could make a cellphone call without the cellphone ruling your life. Before the political scene went completely haywire.
Maybe it's just nostalgia, or maybe it's because that's when I came of age. That just seems like the last time the world wasn't completely batshit crazy. If I had to go back in time, I think that's when I might pick. Would I, if it meant giving up everything I've gained since then, is a different philosophical question.

 

If I woke up and found myself in 1895, I’m sure my first thought would be, “Wow, this smells awful.” Sewage, pollution, horseshit, people without deodorant. The world just must have smelled so foul.

 

The past is like California today. A great place to visit and often, but I could never stay permanently.

Truth be told, I'd like to scrounge about $100 in old bills, go back to 1978 and buy Wal-Mart stock.

 

I think the conclusion is clear.

The less CO2 there was in the air, the worse of a time it was to live.

[/crossthread]

 

OK russkie

 

Tonight I watched the Twilight Zone episode, 100 Years Over the Rim, where Cliff Robertson plays a man from 1847 who is traveling with a wagon train from Ohio to California. He leaves his sick child, wife and the rest of his group to look for water. He crosses over a rim in the desert and finds himself in 1961. Spoiler alert: he goes back to 1847 but with penicillin and saves his kid. He was much calmer than I would be with both the leap forward and the fall back to 1847.

To answer the question posed in the thread, I wouldn't mind being born in the mid-1950s - a little more than 10 years before I was born. Yes, that would make me a Baby Boomer, but fuck you, I don't care.

 

I've always thought the time between the OKC bombing and the 2000 election drama was a pretty good period for the US. Yeah, the Lewinsky stuff happened, but everyone knew it wasn't going anywhere. No war, relative political peace etc. It was only five years, but again - compared to the stuff going on today?

 

Born in 1970. Generally it was a pretty good era to be born. Being a kid in the '70s was pretty cool and a teenager in the 80s was pretty cool -- we had cable TV by the time I was about 6, so I was never really limited to the three network stations, the local independent and PBS. There wasn't a whole hell of a lot of parental supervision back then so we had a lot of fun. I was definitely impacted by divorce as a kid, but a lot of other kids were going through it too by then so there wasn't usually a stigma. Too young to remember Vietnam at all or remember Watergate clearly and too young to really feel the late '70s malaise (I'm sure my parents were stressed but I was pretty insulated). Old enough to see the golden years of 1970s/80s baseball, which was just such a great era, and the Steelers and Cowboys teams of the '70s. And then being in my 20s during the '90s -- before the scourge of social media but, as Batman points out, with the technology to make life a lot more convenient without it being intrusive, and in a time of relative peace and prosperity -- was pretty damn cool. I will say high school in the '80s was a much nastier and more intolerant place in person, with a lot more pressure to conform, than it seems to be for kids today. But the social/emotional toll that social media takes on kids today is horrible.

If I was to pick another era, I think I would be born 10 years earlier. So I'd be too young for Vietnam but I'd be a teenager for most of the 70s and get to see Zeppelin live as well as the Who, Stones and Sabbath in their prime and get to experience the, um, permissiveness of the '70s at a time where I could benefit from it. And then retire before having to spend too much time in the toxic present-day workplace.

 

I'd relive the '80s and '90s if I got to skip the whole going to school thing.

 

I remember this yearning for something momentous to happen in 1996-1999 as the mundanity of The End of History set in.

Boy, did it ever.

 

I wouldn’t want to live in times without antibiotics. Assuming I couldn’t pass something to the locals by just being there, I wouldn’t trust that I’d avoid catching something.

Modern plumbing is also a plus, again avoiding typhus and dysentery. But I like the idea of going to a spot before Europeans ruined it and where the locals didn’t practice human sacrifice. This assumes that I could a) find ways to communicate with people who live there to avoid … unpleasantries… and b) could gain necessary survival skills sans modern equipment.

My usual response isn’t to live in different times but to witness events. Moon landing. Gettysburg Address. Famous baseball games. And others. Get in, see it, and get out.