I was a kid then so to be fair, the good bits I remember are probably due in large part to having zero responsibilities and living a boring but privileged middle class life.

When I wasn't in school I was either outside playing with the neighbor kids or inside reading, drawing and working on D&D campaigns. I was the DM for our group and I drew whole maps on these giant sheets of hexagonal graph paper my Dad would bring home from his job at a printing company. 

We had a creek near our house and we were always out there running around in the woods and catching frogs or lightning bugs (there were so many insects and critters back then, their decline is eerily noticeable these days).

We listened to the radio a lot. Actual DJs picked the records and they mostly played whatever they wanted instead of repetitive playlists picked by corpos. Sure, there were ads, but radio was free. TV was also free. There was no cable or streaming. We had 4 channels. ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. That was it. You either watched what was on or not. If you missed something it was gone forever, or if you were lucky they'd show a rerun in the Summer. Everyone watched and talked about the same shows and movies. The culture felt less fragmented because we all saw and read and listened to mostly the same things.

News was whatever Tom Brokaw read to us for half an hour in the evenings. I was aware when big global events happened, but they werent in your face 24/7. I knew there was a gas crisis and sat in our car reading while we waited to fill up our tank on the days were were allowed to. They'd ration gas and had "even" or "odd" days when you could fill up based on the last number on your license plate. I knew about the Iran hostage crisis because we all put yellow ribbons on our tree trunks to show we were thinking of the hostages. 

My family was all military or military adjacent so they were patriotic. But their version of patriotic meant they were very pro-civil rights. They were "live and let live" people. They taught us to recognize discrimination and speak against it. They were very socially conscious. They really believed in "all men are created equal" and in the American Dream for everybody.

It's kind of surreal being GenX. So much has changed in my lifetime. Good and bad. Things were absolutely not perfect in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And like i said, i think most nostalgia for those times was just missing our youth. But I do feel like we all still had hope then. There just always seemed to be a sliver of optimism in how we viewed our possible future even when things weren't great. Back then we thought the future was what we saw on Star Trek. That we'd overcome war and greed and ignorance. 

I guess we really were naive.