Many of us have a tendency to romanticize the past. We remember the best parts and forget the rest, and then we wish we could somehow return to this blissful, yet mostly imaginary, time. Perhaps no decade has been misremembered and overly-romanticized as the 1980s.
Were the puffy hair, cheesy arcades, and shoulder pads really all that great? One Gen Xer, at least, says No. Psychiatrist Jeff Knuppel runs the YouTube channel GenXistence, where he shares wisdom on getting older as a Gen X man in a rapidly changing world. He has the perspective of someone who’s helping clients with the struggle while living through it himself.
In a recent viral video, Knuppel says we don’t actually miss the ’80s at all:
“I was a teenager in the 1980s. And I really did enjoy that era. But the fantasy I actually want…it’s the one where I wish we could rewind certain parts of daily life to that era and just sort of leave them that way. Not the whole decade, not all of the parts of it, just the parts that made life better.”
Here are the six things from the ’80s—and to a lesser degree the ’60s, ’70s, and even ’90s—that many of us still crave:
1. The freedom to be unreachable
Perhaps one of the most obvious differences between life in the ’80s and the modern world is how, back then, we were mostly unreachable a lot of the time.
If you weren’t at home or at work, no one could get a hold of you. Knuppel says that’s a “boundary no one had to think about.” He elaborates that, of course, we all have the freedom to become unreachable now if we want, but it takes a lot of work to create the same freedom:
“You have to silence your phone or turn off notifications, explain to people why you didn’t respond. If you go a few hours without answering a text, people wonder if something’s wrong. Being unreachable has gone from the default state of a normal day to being something you have to actively create and defend.”
2. When the world stayed out of your head
One thing people misremember about the ’80s is it being some kind of international utopia without racism, war, divisive politics, and constant culture clashes.
It only seems that way because we weren’t bombarded with those things all day every day.
“Think about what happens before most people have even finished their first cup of coffee today,” Knuppel says. “Notifications from last night, texts, emails, a news app with 15 headlines, and every one of them is engineered to trigger an emotional reaction. You open social media, and within 60 seconds you’ve been exposed to a political argument, someone’s outrage about something, a clip designed to make you angry, maybe some war footage, three opinions about something you hadn’t even thought about yet. And that’s all before 7 or 8 in the morning.”
There was news in the ’80s. In fact, much of it was bad. But Knuppel argues that the bad news, delivered via newspaper or a short nightly news program, didn’t infect every aspect of our lives like it does now. He adds that the information coming at us is more than our brains were designed to handle.
3. Before everything became “content”
Life was more boring in the ’80s. And while Knuppel says he doesn’t want to romanticize being bored, there was something peaceful about just being. That’s a feeling that’s really hard to capture now.
“You could spend a Saturday working on a car in the driveway or going fishing or listening to a record or cassette from front to back. None of that needed to be anything. It didn’t need to be a practice or a ritual. It wasn’t content. It wasn’t a side hustle. It was just a Saturday.”
Even those of us who don’t participate much in social media can understand the pull of productivity culture, where every activity needs to justify itself by earning money or social clout. Anyone who grew up in the ’80s or ’90s undoubtedly misses a time when social comparison wasn’t so rampant. Opting out is harder than it seems.
4. A world your hands could fix
The technology available to us in 2026 is truly incredible and has made many aspects of modern life better.
But Knuppel says the men he speaks with in his practice yearn for the days when almost everything in their life could be diagnosed and fixed with a toolbox and an instruction booklet. And it’s not just a manly men need to fix things kind of deal—the inaccessibility of modern technology leads to a frustrating helplessness in a lot of people, especially ones who are used to being handy and self-reliant.
“It used to be a $14 part in 20 minutes with a screwdriver. Now it’s a circuit board and the manufacturer doesn’t sell the board separately. So, you’re replacing the whole unit,” Knuppel says, adding that most modern technology isn’t designed to be fixed at all, but rather replaced when it stops working. “What’s been lost here goes deeper than convenience. A guy used to have a real direct relationship with the physical stuff in his life. He could understand it, maintain it, and fix it. That gave him a kind of authority over his own world.”
5. When you didn’t have to question everything
There’s no way to get around this conversation without addressing the AI of it all—and before that, Photoshop, Internet scams, and biased reporting.
“Think about what it takes to get through a normal day with your guard at the right level,” he challenges. “Is this email legitimate or is it a phishing attempt? Is this product review real or did the company pay for it? Is this news story reporting facts or is it just designed to provoke a reaction? Is this company going to sell my information? Is this music AI-generated? Is that photo real? It’s exhausting, and it’s constant. Most of us have gotten so used to it that we don’t even recognize it as a burden anymore. It’s just the way things are. But it is a burden. It’s attacks on your mental energy every single day.”
6. When scarcity made things matter
We live in a modern world without any real limits. There’s essentially no end to the number of photos you can take, the number of new songs you could listen to and discover right now, the number of movies and shows to stream from your living room this very instant.
Knuppel argues that Gen X doesn’t miss crappy music and camera technology; they miss when things felt special. The one big movie of the summer that everyone saw; the new album that everyone was waiting on collectively; the handful of good pictures that came out of a major gathering.
“After a certain point, having more choices doesn’t make life better,” he says. “And when everything is instantly accessible, constantly available, and endlessly abundant, it gets harder to feel the full weight of any single experience.”
There’s a hopefulness in Knuppel’s video, despite how it sounds.
The hair bands and the synth music and the parachute pants are probably never coming back (arguably for the best). But some of these things could return some day. We know what we miss, so now we know what we can try to rebuild.
More and more young people are pushing back—rebelling against AI, buying vinyl records and Polaroid cameras, choosing dumb phones, and joining more real-life clubs and meetups than their predecessors. A small but growing segment of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are rejecting technology that makes us feel disconnected from the physical world, and each other.
“I’m 63,” one commenter concluded perfectly. “I miss the community from the 80s. We were always together with people. We were always laughing and talking and living in the moment – so even if there was sadness in your life you got through it. We knew all our neighbors by name. Kids could run free, together, in groups on bikes. Human beings need community more than information. I think we’re starved for it.”
