Sometimes I wish I had been born in the 60s.
Not because I want to do my homework on a typewriter..(actually that’d be cool..) or wait three days for someone to call me back. I just want to know what it felt like to be young when everything seemed like it was so cool
I want to wear ridiculous clothes and have flowers in my hair. I want to sit on the hood of an old car with the radio playing while the sun goes down. I want to go to a record store and actually have to look through records instead of typing three words into a search bar. I want photographs that aren’t taken ten times because everyone is trying to get the perfect one.
the 60s that feels almost unreal from here.
The music, the colors, the posters, the cars, and the peace signs..
Of course, that’s the version that looks good from 2026.
The other version wasn’t as pretty.
There were major civil rights struggles, intense political conflict, war, protests, discrimination, and a lot of people who didn’t have the freedoms we casually expect now. Being a teenager in the 60s wouldn’t have meant living inside a vintage movie. Some of the things I love about the decade existed alongside some very ugly realities.
And then there’s the inconvenient fact that I would have to live without the internet. No Spotify. No Google. No texting. No more immediately finding out what happens at the end of a movie before you even finish it..that might take me out.
Still, I wish I could visit it. Not permanently. Just for a little while. I’d want to walk down a street in 1967(omg I said the thing) and see what everyone was wearing. I’d want to hear music coming through an open window. I’d want to sit somewhere crowded and watch people who had no idea that, decades later, someone my age would look back at their ordinary lives and think they looked magical.
I’m missing a version of the 60s that exists in my head. That version has really good music.
I love that someone is finally talking about the 60s. for everyone else, they always want to go back to the 80s, but the 60s was such a bipolar time in history that I think would have been both cool and confusing to live in.
Omg she said the thing.
Anyways, I fully agree. I love the fictional version of the 60s that we all have in our heads, and I would love to live in a time with the aesthetic of the 60s without all the conflict. (And even then, I’d love to have the chance to go to all of the protests.) I will say though, it is completely possible for you to live a toned-down version of this life. I personally am kind of transforming my life into a more “physical-media-hippie-flowerchild” kind, even if only bit by bit.
All time periods are romanticized in some way in present day. Like in medieval ages with the aesthetic of it, but no one knew proper hygiene. The roman empire as well had a putrid stench in its streets because of the faulty sewer systems it had in most cities. The 1920’s with their misogyny and racism. It’s cool to write stories based in these time periods tho 🥹