If you had the chance.....

[Calaber]

Some of the replies here give pretty good reasons for not going back and I sure won't argue with them. Perhaps it's because I was fortunate enough to grow up in a highly desirable area of Sydney, had a good family life and enjoyed whatever comforts were available at the time that I yearn to re-visit those times. Yet nobody else feels exactly the same way. Those who would go backwards would take the opportunity to improve their futures financially, but most of you would be reluctant because it could change the way your lives evolved since those times.

My purpose was simply to think about revisiting and observing how life was back then (whenever "then" was). To be an observer, see how people lived, perhaps how YOU lived back then (and possibly wonder how the hell you ever survived!) It's a bit odd that most of you interpreted it as going back and making changes, which you didn't want to do.

If I'd been born into a rural area with no decent roads and the various other things Figjam mentions, or into a divided, racist society like commodore, I'd rather leave it behind me too. Obviously, something I feel strongly in favour of is something others would resist just as strongly. That's the beauty of this forum. We don't have to all agree on the same things and often, we don't.

 

[Dayvo]

I'd love to go back to the 1950s. Especially the big family Christmas get togethers . Born and living in Scotland at that time we used to have a white Christmas every year and sometimes we were snowed in so we had about 20 relatives staying over for a few days or sometimes up to a week as the snow was about a metre deep . As for forfeiting a year of my life ,well i cheated death 2 years ago literally by 5 minutes so everything from then on is a bonus

 

[Calaber]

Good onya Dayvo. Finally someone who gets the idea. Must be our generation.

 

[Dayvo]

Good onya Dayvo. Finally someone who gets the idea. Must be our generation.

No worries mate . It would also be great to listen to the stories first hand both my grandfathers used to tell about fighting in "The Great War " which at the time i was too young to appreciate. And to meet my older sister who died when i was very young .

 

[Brettly-2008]

I'd go back to the year 2000 when all my mates and I were about 20 and life was one big drunken party and the ecstasy was good but not dangerous and the whole scene would die out within a few years anyway so any harm was bound to be minimal. I took life way too seriously back then and wish I 'indulged' in life/women/whatever a bit more rather than worry about what people would think and what I was going to do for work/career. A slight regret but a regret nonetheless.

 

[c2105026]

It could be interesting, I suppose, to revisit the 90s and observe the complete lack of technology and how it would have made life, in a way, much more inconvenient to say the least.

Doing up a car for example - nowadays you just google, eBay, whatever and if the part you need exists you can find it. Back then....you see an ad in a car mag for a parts warehouse (eg. rare spares). You call the number, and a week later you get a catalogue. You order from the catalogue and you post the form back and lo and behold you have a box of parts. Or....you are left with swap meets, just parts, your owners club or the local wreckers and leads on other wreckers that might have your car in stock. For your daily driver, fancy getting a set of sparkplugs from Big W?

Going out with people. You had to actually go out and communicate with eachother. If you decide at the drop of a hat to see a movie, you had to find a copy of the local paper for movie times. Oh that's another thing, back then regional cities had local papers worth reading!

Doing school assignments - my family was fortunate enough that we had sets of encyclopedias. If that wasn't detailed enough we had to go to the local library.

Watching actual proper sitcoms on TV, not the reality **** they have now

Making a mixtape of your favourite songs from your small but growing CD collection - nowadays a 200 song playlist from a 5000 song library is an hour of scrolling away

Embarking on a diet you had to look up Alan Borushek's calorie counter and work it out for yourself. Pen and paper. Now its MyFitnessPal

Back then if you went for a run, you'd have to measure your route in the car or by scale off a map. Nowadays there's GPS watches.

and so on.....

 

[Towcar]

I would go back to my teens and stop myself from smoking, teach saving and hammer in that I need to buy a home as early as possible.

For the most part that will give me back a few years from not smoking and a better future where financially I'd be better off.

 

[Towcar]

I would go back to my teens and stop myself from smoking, teach saving and hammer in that I need to buy a home as early as possible.

For the most part that will give me back a few years from not smoking and a better future where financially I'd be better off.

 

[Risky]

If I go go back there would be a lot I would change.

Starting with my parents. I would have gotten mum out of the railways & told her to keep healthy to help either stop or slow her dementia as she's experiencing now. I would have gotten my dad to have taken better care of himself so he wouldn't have had arthritis throughout his body & not contracted MRSA which eventually killed him. I would have wanted their lifestyles to change for the better to grow old together in retirement.

I would have gotten my first girlfriend & myself not go out on our Vespas to go to the shops back on the 23rd May 1987 where she got killed by a truck driver going through a stop sign. I intended to marry her & she knew it.

To have triple checked that the secondary store room was properly cleared of asbestos that we used at work instead of suffering the early stages of asbestosis that I have now. The company that removed it should have done the job properly.

 

[Sheldon Cooper]

well that was depressing