The `dimensional shift` paradigm has become a staple part of the Mandela effect myth. So somehwere there is a sane world of Berens
tein bears, where Dolly wore braces and everything is right with the world. Like a lot of us here I endorse it very much as a
feeling - but not as a fact.
The 1980s were pretty horrible for many in the UK. It was an era of a polarised society of 'haves' and 'have nots' and a plethora of man-made disasters and atrocities on our soil/in our airspace (it was a turning point for much-maligned 'health and safety'). We were still living with the threat of a planned or accidental nuclear armageddon, and the rise of HIV-AIDS. I was a child and teenager during that decade.
Exactly. I came of age in that decade, and, whilst there was some fun to be had here and there, it was very much a polarised decade in the UK at least. - every bit as daggers drawn with itself as the UK is today.Those who claim nostalgia for it are betraying which side they took in that divide.
(It is interesting to note that this feeling of the `wrongness` of the present day transcends politics. Left, Right or Centre, liberal or conservative, globalist or nationalist- nobody feels as though they are on the winning side).
If I do have any nostalgia at all it would be for the Nineties - in the UK, at least. Some of the polarisation of the Eighties had levelled off (even if the underlying inequalities were never really addressed) and centrism ruled the day in politics (which looks a whole lot better in retropsect than it did at the time!) But if you weren't into that there were still a range of brave causes you could campaign for without getting embroiled in pointless intercenine squabbles with those who were supposed to agree with you. And the UFO scene was active and reasonably sane: it had not yet desescended into the morass of conspiracism that it is lost in now. TV comedy was going through a Golden Age and there was an active and interesting British music scene (and I don't just mean `Britpop`). The on-line world was there for those who wanted it - but was far less obligatory and all pervasive as today.
It was also an interesting time to be a man. suddenly `being a man` was something which was discussed and pondered on and that the male role can be accepted, rejected or remodeled was very much an issue of the time.
And I was still young enough to consider myself `young`.
Yeah: the age thing. It's a whole lot more challenging if, like me, you never did the marriage/house/kids thing. This means that in your head you're still in - maybe - your early thirties but that life every now and then gently - and sometimes not so gently -reminds you otherwise. It is not so much that you are losing your faculties - speaking for myself this hasn't happened yet -it is more the sure knowledge that at some point you wil start to do so. So there is limited time - but you have no idea how to make the best of it (what with having to make a living in the meantime and all).
And I endorse everyhting that Enola said earlier about the impact of the software information age. I musn't get political here but there are certain trends and tendencies - which were fringe crank causes in the Eighties and Nineties - that simply wouldn't have gained the traction that they have today were it not for vested interests promoting them with the interweb as theiir portal.
I am not so impressed by those who go on about how much information we have readily at our fingertips these days. It's not information - it's i
nfobesity. You always
could get that information - you just had to get off your backside and find a decent library.
About 15 years ago I was charged with teaching `study skills` to teens at a Further Education college. These were bright kids who were also very tech savvy. And yet they had to be taught how to find information and to how to process it. It seemed to be news to them that you needed to know the right search words in order to target your search to what you wanted to find and that not everything on the blessed interweb is sacrosanct - you do have to view things critically and have some kind of hierarchy of sources. I shudder to think how it must be for lecturerss in the universities of today.
However, this feeling of everything going crazy is nothing new. I really feel fo the immediate post- Seconf World War generation - I mean those who were getting on abit in the late sixties. (My granparents generation). They survived the cataclysm of the Second World War and then looked forward to a period o]f peace and stability. This indeed did seem to be theirs for a time - but then KERRANG!- student protests, freaks, women's lib, terrorism, drugs, pornography, race riots....imagine how they must have felt!