Totally open-ended question.

I was born in 1982, so I had the late 80s and all of the 90s as my childhood. It's pretty hard to complain. Pretty much nothing went wrong during that time. I definitely wouldn't want to have been born later, because pretty much everything after 9/11 has sucked. Being born earlier might be an improvement. The 80s have held up pretty well in hindsight, and I was too young to appreciate much of that decade at the time. If I'd been born in 1970 I would have been 7 when Star Wars came out, I'd have the 80s as my teen years, and I'd have a decade of great economic prosperity just as I become an adult.

What say you, OOT?

Every year, life on Earth gets better. Assuming nothing catastrophic happens like a nuclear war or a super disease wiping out humanity, I expect that trend to continue. So the current year is always the best year to have been born.

So, no global warming?

I don‘t see how we can have this debate without it devolving into a politics discussion.

It's simple, we go by science. So basically anytime after penicillin, vaccines and good amount of diseases are easily cured and/or neutralized.

Best subjectively or best objectively? I would assume objectively, but just curious. I always thought being a pirate in the 1700s would be cool.

And where? The US? Or does the question become when and where?

mostly this.. maybe a more interesting question is “what decade would be the earliest tolerable one for you to live?” which would be 70’s for me where air conditioning was mostly mainstream..

Like AIDS?

Not if you like cars. The 70's wrecked them because of new emission and crash standards. In the 60's you could buy big motor cars cheap and were lightweight compared to modern cars. They got 9 mpg but you didn't care because gas was 28 cents per gallon. The automotive industry didn't really catch up to the regulations technologically until the late 80's.

The 70's is also the decade of the 55 mph national speed limit. And gas lines. Nothing like getting up at 5:30 in the morning to get in line for 30 minutes at the gas station to buy your mandated $5 limit. If you waited till noon, the stations all ran out.

Wouldn't say nothing went wrong in the 80's, although the market crash in '87 did leave a number of buying opportunities. We also got MTV and, for a number of years, they actually showed music videos (and briefly, reruns of Monty Python). I still remember citing (during a Lincoln-Douglas debate) the rise in the Dow to four-digits as a measure of continued economic growth. Yes, there was a period into the early 1980's where the DJA had never cracked 1,000.

You were born as I was getting close to finishing high school...and as others aptly note, some of these sorts of discussions are going to necessarily devolve into politarding...so I'll just stop there.

But the only good thing to come out of a thread like this is pinpointing the age of posters LOL!

yeah.

im just glkad I had internet and online gaming for my middle school onward tenure.

was born in early 90s

Climate change will continue to happen. I am skeptical of the apocalyptic doomsday scenarios being thrown around. The impact on humanity as a whole will probably be easily managed.

Obviously depends on your own circumstances and opportunities, but my dad was born in 1950 and has had a pretty sick life. Got to do all the drugs and bang a ton of chicks in the 60s and 70s, faded getting drafted, had a kid in '80 then divorced right after and banged his way through the Eighties. Had decent $$ throughout, so he got to travel the world the whole time. In his 40's during the good economy and proliferation of the internet.
He was already pretty set finance and employment-wise so the **** show of the 2000's didn't effect him that much.

I was born in '80 and I feel like it was perfect in terms of balancing out gaming (NES in '86, then SNES, PC early 90s) and playing outside, having adventures with friends, biking around etc. Especially since (most) parents back then weren't too happy with kids spending too much time in front of a TV or PC monitor. I'm also not sure I would have read as much as a kid, which brought me a lot of benefits, if I were born 10 years later.

I really feel like I was born at the right time to enjoy both an "oldschool" and more modern era like childhood. Which is perfect imo.

As far as "online" gaming goes, does bringing your computer to your best friend's house for the week end as a teenager, spending an hour or two before being able to start playing due to the difficulty to connect two PCs together when nothing was "plug and play" count ? :P

just the accessibility of it all.

In elemtary school and some of middle school I would go to my neighbors and we would build forts play games and do stupid ****, i woudl also ride bikes into town play basketball and do outdoorsy things(not camping)

I woudl much much prefer to be born in 90s than 80s ainec for me. ainec

1970 was indeed a great year to be born! I honestly wouldn't trade it, other than feeling younger would be nice sometimes these days.

Being born later would be better so I wouldn't be so old, but being born in 1967 wasn't bad. This kind of world started happening right after I graduated college.



Really visiting friends still in school a year or two behind me things were changing. Security to go in the dorms. Big regular parties shut down. Coops purged of undesirables.

From an American perspective, here are some bad years to be born.

1923: Life starts out okay. But, your earliest (6 year old) memories include Dad losing his job and being very hungry when the Great Depression begins. Shortly after you turn 18, you're being drafted into the military to fight in the most destructive war in history.

1843: You're even more likely to die after turning 18 when the Civil War begins.

1947: Being drafted to fight in Vietnam (1965-) is offset by enjoying the birth and evolution of rock 'n' roll, television, and other post WW2 technology. However, you've got a constant realistic fear of World War 3 breaking out for the first four decades of your life.

1986: Congratulations on growing up and graduating college (~2008). We regret to inform you that, if you're lucky, your college degree can only get you a low paying service industry job.

This is a perfectly accurate description of my father.

Lol I was born in 1986. I skipped the college degree and went straight to the low paying service industry job! Still in it!



Your 1923 comments remind me of my mother's parents (only grandparents I ever knew) who were both born in 1917 Oklahoma. My grandmother literally lived in a tent for awhile as a kid. Oh yeah and her father was one of the many casualties of the flu epidemic of 18-19. I couldn't ****ing believe it as a kid when I learned great grandpappy Oscar died of the ****ing flu! Lol. So yeah both grandparents entered adolescence in Depressed OK. ****ing Dust Bowl ****. Made the trek to CA with many others in the 40s.

They were both 69 when I was born. So to me "grandparents" were old af, and it threw me for a loop when i saw kids with their ~50 year old grandparents.

The later you're born the higher the chance of us beating aging so from a life ev perspective later is always better even if we're also more likely to destroy the world and die young than we were a few decades ago. We got our first family computer with the internet at around exactly the same time as I learned how to jerk off so definitely wouldn't want to be born any earlier than 92

It's probably nostalgia but if I could choose I'd go with baby boomer
-Pokers easy to crush
-No security cameras
-People aren't staring at their phone all day

2019

It depends on your interests but the answer should almost definitely NOT be "One of these recent decades."

You guys are all a bunch of house cats

^^LOL what? The past is a terrifying hellscape of war and disease. Have fun with that...

edit: also don't forget all of the RAPE. <insert Norm McDonald .jpeg>

LOL ya actually, that and cancer are probably the 2 biggest recent diseases we have neutralized on a mass scale. If you're in the 1st world of course.....