The 80’s Were Shit, Actually

Stop it with the nostalgia, please

Photo by Fletcher Pride on Unsplash

I’m attempting to write a novel, one that’s been in my head since the mid-nineties (I think.) It takes place in the 1980’s.

I was a weird, sensitive teen who was raised a city mouse and then, at twelve, moved to the country. I didn’t have the clothes or feathered hair to be an 80’s country mouse — which, it turned out, was just the amuse bouche of the impending shit feast that was the entire decade.

It looks so beautiful from here

There’s stuff popping up in my feed that’s either some real people talking about how those years kicked their ass, or AI garbage about how great it was because polo shirts! And Cabbage Patch Dolls! And some mad genius gave us the Rubik’s Cube!

The crown jewel of young people’s novel amusements was the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons. That game was one of the few times I could relax about being alive and just get lost in the story and the complex system of twenty-sided dice dictating what we’d do next. I didn’t even play it that much, but when I did I felt good about stuff afterwards.

So sure, some of our pop culture was dope. But New Age music and a rapid proliferation of RPGs do not make for a content childhood and adolescence.

What’s interesting to me is how much I’m seeing that’s reselling the 80’s as the last era of “benign” neglect, with all it’s freedoms and autonomy, as a shining time for building independence.

If you stepped on a nail and got tetanus, you were possibly all alone in your house. You’d have to call an ambulance yourself. For example.

Hey listen, that shit builds resilience. Which has become a generational quality that’s akin to dating the quarterback: If you’re resilient, you will always have a certain coolness — even if you’ve broken up with the quarterback, the rest of the school assumes there’s some crazy desirable thing about you, because the quarterback wouldn’t have dated you if you were just some regular.

Having had a personally miserable time for the entire Reagan administration (like, oh, everyone else) certainly made me resilient, if by “resilient” you mean flakey and apt to recoil at any unexpected sound.

Culture’s current fetish

This one has made the rounds ten times by now, so you’ve probably already seen it — and that’s even if you’re not Gen X:

A sun-dusted sidewalk with a handful of unaccompanied (white) teenagers walking and laughing. The boys are more raucous, which is to be expected, because boys. Then it slips into another sun-dappled scene, this one of a backyard, and two (white) boys gleefully drink from the garden hose.

And another, this time on a different street, where the sun-flooded, car-free pavement features a passel of (white) teens looking back over their shoulders, and they say something directly to the camera.

It’s something like “don’t you want to be here again?” Then they smile, and their teeth positively shine in the sunny sunsetting background.

The things that are wrong with that video start with the fact that it’s clearly AI generated. The fuzziness, the settings and how they’re always lit by some kind of sunlight as if it’s the first and second rule of the 80’s club; the cleanliness of every scene like it’s been sprayed with Lysol and rubbed into an extra-shiny shell; the popped collars on the polo shirts were just where they oughta be.

It’s obviously — and nauseatingly — created by AI.

I kind of expect those teens to come out of a string of suburban houses, stand at the end of their driveways, pop their collars up in synch, and say “don’t you want to be here again?” in unison, like a Reagan administration’s reverse agitprop based on those creepy kids from A Wrinkle in Time.

The flip side

There’s another kind of video I keep seeing (I know, I know: algorithms are a bitch.)

It’s the kind that appears to be based in reality: some older, worn-out Gen Xers looking directly at the camera as if they can bore their eyes through the lens, talking about our coming-of-age differently.

They come by their fatigue honestly, at least. A guy will talk about how alone we were, how no one seemed to care, and how abuse was both common as dirt and unapproachable. He’ll talk about how he’s been repressed so hard he doesn’t know what he’s feeling at all; alternately, he’s warning us that the entire cohort of American 50-somethings are going to collectively lose their shit.

Possibly all on the same day.

Sometimes it’s a woman, and her fatigue is even deeper. Not only does she think of the 80’s and her eye starts twitching, she’s now in the terrible position of caring for aging parents and undisciplined teenagers at the same time.

She’s wearing big glasses with colorful frames in a last gasp of whimsey, but they don’t fool us: her gaze and the panic it belies jumps all over the place, until it shifts to the lens and we see she’s been living off pots of drip coffee from dawn until dusk since ’93 and can’t remember if she’s wearing clean underwear.

Or the last time she smiled without acid behind it.

We’re special, but not like that

There’s much to be said about the 80’s and the fun we used to have, maybe — swimming in the river with your friends, unsupervised, or hanging out for hours at the local Dairy Queen even though you finished your bucket of soft serve hours before. And did I mention Dungeons and Dragons?

Luckily, none of those things went anywhere.

So what gets me about all that ersatz nostalgia — other than it’s manufacture — is that none of that, none of it, is special.

Every generation has it’s tragedies, and it’s distractions. Case in point: there are no amount of Rubik’s Cubes that make up for all the people with AIDS that Reagan and his ilk refused to acknowledge because the gays are icky.

Just as there are no amount of hula hoops that made it A-OK that those kids had to drill hiding under their desks in case a pesky nuclear bomb was dropped.

Ditto the young people who came into the world when the Flu pandemic of 1917–18 may or may not have killed someone in their family. And that the remaining community members were savaged by WWI, whether they fought or not.

Maybe they didn’t have toys, unless they were extremely lucky and had a velveteen rabbit.

Generational trauma has claws that go very, very deep.

Our real advantage

One thing I’ve been able to recognize as a real Gen X learning curve that is unique is how the information age got into fourth gear just as we were entering middle school.

Sound recording was easily accessible when tape was invented. And rewatchable video, on VHS and other, lesser Beta formats. Way before the Smartphone, there was frequently one family in the area that you heard about that had an IBM, which is what home computers were called at first.

Sometimes you’d be allowed to go to your friend’s house to play pong with them on the entire family’s behemoth of a desktop. All were smaller than the armoire-sized industrial computers they used at NASA; In hindsight, those slabs of weird tech taking up the entire desk had an ennui, like they’d prefer being at NASA if they could.

Digital sound. Laptops, cell phones. LED lighting. The fucking internet, and the janky ways we endured to use it (like those goddamn CDs we’d get in the mail as promos for…something.)

We were there for all of it.

We can straddle those worlds: we help our boomer uncle with his Facebook login and also show our kids how and when to bleed the boiler. We understand Lyft but prefer the bus. We can both teach the young ‘uns how to grill a perfect kabob while we watch endless YouTube videos with those young ‘uns of people making cakes shaped like piles of laundry.

There are many shapes of resilience — that one is ours, I guess.

The ribbon that ties all of us

I look at my kiddo now, and my forehead is instantly dampened: their trauma is big. Very big. And they haven’t even seen the full shape of it yet. I won’t get specific, because I think we can all predict something extra about the near future that makes us grey out a little.

My point is this: no generation is special beyond the circumstances of their world when they grew up. Sorry, but nope. Everyone is shaped by the state of their society (or lack of one) as they become adults.

We all want to think we’re special; beneath the flipped collars or oppositional punk safety pins, Gen X is not any different. And, besides multi-sided dice, our time wasn’t any more golden than any other time.

Boomer’s parents fought not one but two world wars. Boomers were told everything was golden now, then watched Vietnam and Watergate undercut every fucking thing their parents told them.

Gen X was neglected and told to shut up about it because the adults — both of them at that point — were working. Millennials came up during the housing bubble collapse, just as they were getting their first student loan bills.

Gen Z, Gen Alpha? Well…look around.

The things that are the same, though: they’re still with us. We all love people. We all adore some kind of art form, we all create art. We all have to eat. We all want someone or something to make things simpler for us, and categories are great for that: it’s where this whole “Gen blah-blah” comes from, imho.

The fact that we’re not special is actually a tremendous gift.

Since we’ve all been here before, our muscle memory is intact — and the fact that it’s generational knowledge, passed down like hair color, makes it so much more valuable.

I don’t care what generation you say you’re from, you need care. Period. You need compassion, and hugs (or just fistbumps — some contact, at least,) and someone to tell your stories to.

Most importantly, you and I and everybody needs someone to tell us stories. Made up stuff, of course; but I mean plain reports of what it was like in , how you got when there wasn’t any in the store, how you entertained yourself before there was ____.

Those are needs, and every single one of us has them. As some disability advocate that I don’t remember (apologies) said, needs aren’t special.

I’m halfway through the first terrible draft of my novel. Some of what makes it terrible is that I’ve been reluctant to dive deeply into the 80’s sociopolitical landscape — it’s so chock full of grim reminders for me.

And yet.

At the end, my heroine prevails. It’s with weird acquired skills and unexpected support from locals (especially dorks who play D & D as if it was religion — which it kind of is.)

In writing this (subjectively) gigantic thing, I’m bumping into the resilience part, over and over. I’m schooling my own soul in the breakdown of how to bleed a boiler, how to stay calm when others are angry, how to make grilled cheese sandwiches with no bread and no cheese.

I’m thinking of how all of those skills are useful to our communal well-being. And how probably the best trick we, or any, batch of youths can learn is how to listen.

It’s a skill that’s the most precious, and at the same time is available to every generation.

We’ve saved each other — by saving someone from stepping in front of traffic to offering help to someone with obviously heavy bags, etcetera — over and over.

No reason we can’t do it again.

XO