Reclaiming the Best of My 80s Childhood
One of my favorite photos, epitomizing my childhood, was taken during dinner at our small kitchen table in September of 1984. The occasion was a family celebration of my eighth birthday. It was a simple affair on a weeknight after school and work, with a store-bought cake on the table and a few balloons floating in the background. My mom has frosted hair and a sweater with shoulder pads, and I am wearing a hot-pink and teal colorblock baggy t-shirt—one that I had just received for my birthday. My younger brother is making a goofy face for the camera, and my "cool" oldest brother, a high school senior, is leaning back in his chair on the phone, its cord spiraling to the wall where it was attached. There was one phone in our kitchen and one in my parents’ bedroom, and those were the only two phones in our house. Something about this photo—my brother on the phone with all of us sitting around him—is so striking. Sometimes I really miss the simplicity of my 80’s childhood.
I have a book of letters my best friend compiled and bound for me after my year living in France in 1990. We were in ninth grade that year and devastated at being separated. Long-distance phone calls were out of the question because of the cost, so I loyally and diligently wrote to her every week. I couldn’t take photos of everything I was experiencing like I can now with my smartphone, so I drew her pictures and diagrams of important things, like my school. It blew my mind that it had been built in the mid-1500s and previously been a convent. I also sent her a map of the area where we lived, drawing with a red marker a line indicating the way I walked to school. I marked my favorite patisserie shop and where I bought my first lacy underwear so I could be like the other girls when I changed in gym class (this event had been laboriously explained in a long letter). I described in detail outings with my new French friends and their families, what they fed me, and the funny things they assumed about me because I was American (that I only drank Coke and ate hamburgers and followed the entire plot of the TV show Dallas).
If, over the course of the year, I had texted all this, I can promise you there would be no record of any of it thirty-five years later. The fact that we didn’t have smartphones leaves a written record that can be re-visited and treasured, even passed on to my kids. The current communications paradox is never lost on me: copious avenues for communication, most of it impermanent and forgettable. We are in a quantity over quality situation in the year 2025, and I miss the quality days.
Interestingly, when my oldest daughter was a toddler (almost twenty years ago), I was talking to a neighbor who had been hosting foreign exchange students for over two decades and shared a concerning fact with me: the exchange students were having a rougher time adjusting and weren’t having as much fun. She said she attributes it mainly to the fact that they hang out in their bedrooms on Skype (the video call technology of the day) and spend more time talking to their parents and friends back home than was ever possible before. I remember so clearly the look on her face, crest fallen, when she said, “The kids don’t fully engage here because they are too focused on what is going on at home. How can they expect to experience American culture if they spend their trip in their bedrooms on video calls?” When I think about this conversation now, a little shiver runs down my spine. Skype was the problem? Skype feels like it was available during dinosaur times. I can only imagine how much harder it is to offer exchange students a fully immersive experience now that they have FaceTime.
“We’ve confused simplicity with convenience. But convenience doesn’t seem to bring happiness.”
-Kate Humble, A Year of Living Simply
I constantly wonder if I am any happier than I would be if social media, apps, and smartphones hadn’t been invented. I know that along with these technological advances come medical breakthroughs and scientific discoveries that are solving many of humankind’s biggest challenges. But, if for just a moment, we imagine a world where TVs only have 13 channels, movie theaters are packed, long-distance calls cost ten cents a minute, teenagers have a lot of friends and lower suicide rates, and you have to put coins in a meter to park, is it really all so bad? What have we traded all the convenience for? Is life really that much better?
It dawns on me as I write that the question is not realistic: we can’t cherry-pick what technology we keep, or what we want to hold on to from certain eras. It is a package deal. Time brings change, and we can’t rewind the clock because if we did, we would have the whole package—all the ways it was before, including the parts we would never want to have again. Today, we have medical advances, feats of science, and a speed of things never before known to man. That is all here to stay. And the social media that causes us to compare ourselves to avatar lives of others, the apps that keep us buying and in debt and using more time staring at screens than many of us do in meaningful human-to-human interactions—it’s here to stay, too.
What we do have is choice.
Our autonomy hasn’t been taken from us. We get to choose how we interact with a lot of the technology that exists today. We can decide if we trade in simplicity for convenience—even though the promise from tech companies is just the opposite.
We can take steps to reclaim our time and presence:
Put alarm clocks back in our bedrooms and get the phones out.
Reduce consumption of TV by limiting the options (and save money in the process).
Get landlines so our kids can stay at home alone, postponing getting them smartphones, and teaching them how to call the neighbor to ask for a cup of sugar or make their own plan to hang out with a friend.
Go to the movies—getting out of our pajamas and into our communities.
Host dinner parties—spending time in each other’s homes, together, instead of spending more and more time in our homes, alone.
Take our phones off silent and answer them when people call, talking to our friends in real-time conversations instead of constant asynchronous texts.
Let our kids roam a bit more, letting them feel independent and free, not afraid of getting hurt or harmed, but living a bold life of discovery in their own neighborhoods and communities.
Let ourselves and our kids be bored. Stand in line without looking at a phone. Wait at a doctor’s office and read a magazine or stare out the window.
Reclaim up to 4 hours, on average, of our day by getting off social media, YouTube, Pinterest, or whatever your kryptonite is. Take the app off your phone; use your computer if you want to scroll. Research shows you will do it a lot less if you have to get on your computer. The lure of convenience, it turns out, is kryptonite for most of us.
Stop buying fast-fashion and shop locally. Less is more. Quality over quantity.
Keep our phones in our pockets and talk to strangers standing in line at a concert, on planes, and at coffee shops.
Join clubs and causes, contributing to your community and making friends along the way.
Take up new hobbies with all the time you have reclaimed and make something, build something, create something—anything other than giving your precious time to a screen that rarely gives back.
Reconnect with nature for free, 365 days a year—no subscription needed or auto-renewal to worry about. Your own backyard, a public bench, a riverside trail, or a lakeshore walk—it is always there and costs you nothing, yet gives you everything.
Live our lives in 3-D, in real-time in the place where our feet are planted, experiencing the color and texture of our actual lives instead of being voyeurs of others’ lives.
It isn't that the era of my childhood was perfect—it was a moment in time that was far from perfect and I could count the ways I’m glad we have moved on. But what I yearn for is an existence where we all live in real-time. Life in 3-D.
Do you remember writing checks at the grocery store? I do, and it wasn’t all that long ago. I am talking in the early 2000s I was still writing checks (I was terrified of credit card debt as a launching adult and always paid for things with cash or check) Now, on the rare occasion, I will get behind someone paying with a check at the grocery store, with incredulous grunts and audible huffs coming from others in line. I usually giggle to myself at the irony. The same people who are incensed that someone could have the audacity to spend an extra two minutes writing a check are the very same people who might then spend a barely conscious and completely unmemorable ten minutes doom-scrolling while sitting in the parking lot of the store.
We have theoretically gained so much time through modern advances. What are we doing with all this gained time? The research tells us we are more overweight, spend less time in nature, less time with friends, cook less, and are more in debt and more lonely than ever before. What we have gained for all the convenience hardly seems to be an even exchange.
Many scholars see social technology as contributing to instability in democracy, weakening social ties, and lessening care and connection with our one and only Earth. I see these things too and long for us all to live differently. I know deep down that going backward isn’t an option. I know that when I romanticize my 80s upbringing, it is partly because I feel anxious and, at times, utterly dismayed at the way many of us live with technology. The advent of Artificial Intelligence feels like it is bearing down on an already fragile human condition and is partly what evoked the writing of this piece. What is one to do with the sadness that comes while witnessing a world that is changing much faster than healthy human development can keep up with? When I start to feel distraught and overwhelmed by the sheer force of technological change, I begin looking to what I can control instead of focusing on what I can’t.
If you have ideas for choices we can make to live more closely aligned with the ways humans were meant to live and love, reach out.
I cherish hearing from you and welcome your conversation. I would even like to meet with you—on a walk, at a local coffee shop—to talk about all the ways we can adapt in this digitally based world without handing over so much of our precious time and attention to screens. In many ways, when we live too entangled with screens we are agreeing to an exchange of a one-dimensional life for ease and convenience. I want to hear your ideas about a more textured and nuanced existence. I want to live in each moment where my feet are, and less through a lens pointed voyeuristically into the lives of others. I do not want to be in a silent agreement with Netflix, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, or any of the countless technologies we hand over the most precious gift we have while alive: our time. I want to make conscious choices about how I interact with the advancements of modern technology, taking advantage of them to create more time to do the things that allow me to be engaged, present, and alive—where my feet are.
Enjoy the slow- Heather