What Changed From the '80s?

Fear: How Our Culture Has Shifted So Far

So, I was on Twitter this week and saw the following video that was being retweeted. I had some thoughts I wanted to share here. (If you want to hear it with Waiting For a Star To Fall you can find it on YouTube).

I was born in 1980. The video shows so much of what I grew up watching and those actors/actresses matured through those years too. It was our somewhat shared culture. Surely those in Hollywood who had money had a different experience than those who were poor just watching reruns on free TV. But there was an attitude that was shared between most of us.

Content & Optimistic

There was an attitude or feeling of enjoyment of the present and optimism for the future. Somewhere along the way we lost that. I may be more optimistic than many people whom I watch/read online, but I know my enjoyment of the present mixed with optimism for the future has drastically changed for the worse since the 80s.

Light-Hearted Freedom

Another thing in that video (that is missing from today’s culture) is the feeling of freedom. It’s the feeling of being light-hearted, knowing you can joke around and not worry about offending people. It was like everyone was laughed at and everyone could take a joke. Or, at the very least, if you couldn’t take a joke you would walk away, not watch or listen to it. That’s taking personal responsibility for what you allow into your life.

And our culture demanded it. If you were going to get offended, people would ask, “Can’t you take a joke?” The onus was on you to not be offended, as it should be.

Again, somewhere between then and now, our culture flipped it so the onus was on you to not offend. But that’s impossible since offense is in the eye of the beholder. And, thanks to the way our brains work (we perceive what we believe) some people believe that offenses always exist and they find them everywhere. People will make up things to be offended by because they want to play “victim.”

Creativity

Another thing about that time period that is missing nowadays is some amazing creativity. In the montage, there are many movie ideas that were seen as fresh at the time. We look back on them today as old comfort movies but if you were coming from the ‘70s, they were different and exciting. Now they have lost that fresh luster. Furthermore, we have remakes that may be clouding the way we view the past franchises.

The reason for our loss of fresh, exciting ideas is clear to me. People have way more fear now. The remakes and reboots are trying to preach their ideological beliefs to an unbelieving world. It’s an attempt to convert the “savages” by adding a little of what they like, in the same way that Christianity changed their Hebraic Passover celebration to Easter and added Christmas to Yule.

No one wants to be preached to. And most of the 80s TV and movies were not so preachy. I do know that it got worse in the 90s and has been exponentially getting worse since. I’m sure you can find some examples of preachy behavior in the 80s and 90s but it was nowhere near the exponential rise of the 2000s and onward.

The preachiness is heavy. The older TV and movies and even songs were much more lighthearted than this heaviness we’re experiencing today in our culture. Everything seems more like life and death now. People are afraid to offend others because they may lose their jobs, which may mean no money for food and shelter.

Our culture has scared itself into submission and a dark place mentally, emotionally, and even physically. I just saw this article on color being drained from our society this morning too.

The Past Was Better, Part 1: Color

Free-Range Kids

Of course, another thing that has drastically changed from those years is that children used to go off and have adventures. That might be part of the allure of Stranger Things, even. It was a throwback to when kids would go out into the big world and have fantastical experiences.

Today busybodies will call child protective services if you allow your child out on the subway, train, or their bikes alone. The children haven’t changed. It’s the fear that grew out of proportion. It’s the wanting to be a “savior,” to protect those “victims” the children from the big bad world out there. Sure, crime is worse. But children also have cell phones, etc. Things are different. We don’t need to be as overprotective as we are.

My point is you won’t see movies and TV showing children having adventures like that unless you change the movie into some sci-fi or bizarro alternative universe flick. The freedom for children to roam no longer feels like reality.

Fear is Palpable Today

There is a heavy feeling of fear of offending others, fear of being killed, fear of being fired, or jailed for saying or believing the wrong thing. Of course, a lot of those fears are founded. I don’t believe we should try to stay in that fear, but rather personally work on facing our fears.

But most people today do not want to do the personal work and face their fear. They will continually look for someone to “save” them from what they fear. They will continue to fight those perceived “persecutors” and try to make converts of the heathens.

Re-Viewing

I personally watch older movies and TV shows and listen to older music. I love it. It helps to keep me optimistic rather than angry at what our “entertainment” has become.

I know that my roommate in college wouldn’t watch any show/movie in black and white. For some reason people today are averse to looking at the past. They see it as “evil” and view it with a sort of hatred. Matthew Perry recently died and I saw a post saying Friends was offensive. To others, who viewed Friends as it aired live, it was progressive to see a lesbian couple.

Now, if someone watched it, their “woke friends” might start to see them as a “persecutor” simply because they would watch something deemed as “backward” and transphobic. So they won’t even look….

People who don’t look at the history in context lose perspective. I wrote about this a little bit when someone wanted to censor Agatha Christie. I’ve made it public (no longer paid). There are a couple of interesting points I want to talk about in this context.

1. When you edit the past or don’t even look at the past, it’s much easier to believe things are “as bad as ever.”

2. When we say something was offensive in the past, and don’t go back to watch it or read it to verify that, people imagine the worst.

Offensive things were said in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but people used to laugh stuff off too. When our newer generations don’t look back on those times, they don’t see how easy-going people, in general, were. Others today actually take more offense than the people in that time did.

What To Do

• Face your fears. Our fear created this culture shift.

• Maybe (re) watch or listen to some old classics or older shows/movies you didn’t watch when they first came out.

• Don’t worry about offending others. You can’t offend anyone, they offend themselves.