Oh man. The 80s, the 90s, it was just better, man. So much goddamn better. I'm knocking on 50 soon, I got out of college and entered the workforce a bit before Y2K so I got to have a whole amazing college experience in the pre-connected days and let me tell you it was GREAT. Of course if one could glimpse 15 years into the future at that point, things would have seemed so magical and I would have felt awful that I'd need to wait for so long to get where we are at now. I suppose it's really true, the grass is always greener.
Anyway to chime in - being a kid was great, video games and video game magazines and arcades were just fucking so magical. Hanging out with friends and exploring the city was really the happiest thing. You could kill half a day in a used CD store looking for cheap scores or just buy something that was $6 and had a wacky name or cool cover art. Hang out at the comic book store, bum around the mall, just... VISIT your friend if you wanted to catch up and shoot the breeze. TV was cool but it wasn't overloaded with so many paralyzing choices!
Driving around was scary and special - I was in Boston and "conquering" that city felt more engaging than any video game, you had to figure out how to get from one place to another somehow and when you did it was like "new level unlocked" in your brain. Also discovering cool little bars or places to eat. You'd just hear about cool little places from your friends or some guy at work or something, no Yelp to just tell you "eat here and avoid this loser place.."
Yeah the present has its positives as well I suppose. I'd so much rather watch a movie at home w nice OLED TV on the couch then go to a theater. I can while away hours looking at bullshit on gaf or Reddit. I've figured out how to use FB and Twitter to indulge in my dorky special interests without all the angst and hatred and drama that 99% of the rest of the world uses it for (well, most of the time!) Want to learn something? I got into coding like 6 years ago, it's fucking MAGICAL that I can type "how do I use scriptable objects" or whatever into a YouTube search and immediately some 16yo genius will pop up and explain it to me with a clean, nicely produced video. VR and AR are incredible. I love that I can FaceTime with my folks and friends from childhood 3000 miles away.
So yeah, there are things to celebrate from both periods. I feel so lucky that I got to experience extremes of both, I suppose. But honestly overall I just remember feeling much happier with the Standard Operating Procedure of how things were 20 years ago. Of course I was much younger and life was profoundly simpler then, so there is that. At this point I'm not really too excited to see what more BS the future will bring. Anyway, whatever - the world is still incredible, it's a balance, choose how you want to live and all of that. We should probably all throw away our smartphones, but I suppose that is pretty much impossible.