I’m back! I’m back!!!! HELLO WORLD!!! HELLO INTERNET!!! HELLO LAPTOP!!! Oh man – it feels sooo good to be back online. Its been quite the week, attempting to live like its the Eighties. Before this experiment, I tended to look back on the Eighties with a great deal of fondness – it was the decade in which I grew up, spanning those formative teenage years. It was the decade of Wham, Duran Duran and Culture Club. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Bubble skirts and big shirts. So. Much. Neon. CRAZY hair. Looking back, it was an era of chaotic good-natured, even naïve, exuberance. The offbeat, edgy wacky humor of Kenny Everett (loved him) contrasted with the equally funny but gentle humor of The Two Ronnies. There was a lot to feel nostalgic about.
Ahh…. the rose-tinted premise of simpler times, right? Its like all those folk who wax lyrical about the 50’s and what a golden age that was to have lived in – well, as I was about to find out, there’s a big difference between imagining simpler times vs attempting to live in them. And when we say “simpler times” – what do we mean, really? I would say the main difference lies in how the internet and information technology has completely transformed the world – in every single aspect of our lives. For those of you who were not alive back then – basically think of all the cool tech that is so integrated into your daily life now its almost invisible- and then just strip it all out. Poof! It’s all gone. No internet. No smartphones. No apps. To get just a taste of what my week was like, simply turn off your wi-fi browser and wait for the cold turkey sweats to begin. I guarantee you they will kick in within a minute. You could even do it now – I’ll wait for you right here.
See? How long was it before your hand reached for your phone or your iPad or your Kindle before you caught yourself? If you lasted longer than a few minutes, hats off to you. So while this week was a part exercise in nostalgia, it was more of a test to see if or how I could survive without being permanently tethered to my phone and without the modern day convenience of the internet and all its trappings. Since retiring, I’ve become more conscious as to how I’m spending my time and so was becoming more aware that my relationship with my phone and all those daft “matching” type games that I play for hours was probably not as healthy as it should be. We only have a limited (and unknown!) time left on this planet – should I really be spending quite as much of it playing Township?
So here were the rules I set for myself as I prepared to go back in time to 1985:
- First and foremost – no internet – AT ALL- the wi-fi on my phone was turned OFF last thing on Sunday night and only turned back ON the following Saturday morning
- No use of smartphones or tablets – I did keep the cellular turned on for my phone so that I could receive calls – but I wasn’t able to use the internet to look up numbers, so my ability to make calls was super limited (how many phone numbers do you have memorized these days??)
- No use of any type of smartphone app, email or Google calendar
- No Amazon Prime!!
- No texting (this one HURT)
- No on-demand TV or movies – either basic live cable or watching movies via a VHS player
- No music streaming or audiobooks or Kindles – if i wanted to listen to music, it was CDs, cassette tapes, vinyl or the radio.
- No iPhone camera – I did make a slight concession here and used my Canon Digital Rebel camera to document my week – taking pics with a film camera would have been just too impractical
- No fancy skin care products – instead, my beauty regimen consisted of 80s compliant Pond’s Cold Cream and cocoa butter
- No electric toothbrushes – manual cleaning of the chompers only
- No fancy electric cars – back to gas-powered wheels for the week
- Dress as authentically as possible (hint – it involved a LOT of pink and plastic)
- No Keurig coffee machine
- No digital watches or alarm clocks – replaced with an analog, wind-up travel alarm clock
Of course, I wasn’t able to blog in real-time as I went along, so I scribbled notes in a makeshift diary for the week. In my next blog post, I’ll give you a day-by-day account taken from my notes but before we dive into how I got on, here’s a reminder of just what was going on in the world all those years ago…..
Major News Events in 1980s
- Live Aid pop concerts in Philadelphia and London raise over 50 million for famine relief in Ethiopia.
- Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
- Ronald Reagan is President of US; Mikhail Gorbachev leader of USSR; Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister of UK
- The United Kingdom and Spain agree to reopen the border between Gibraltar and Spain.
- The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior is sunk when French agents plant a bomb on the hull
- The Berlin Wall comes down
- Nintendo releases the NES in North American markets during October 1985.
- Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married
- Michael Jordan is named as the NBA’s “Rookie of the Year” in 1985
- Launch of CNN and MTV
https://www.rediscoverthe80s.com/2020/05/major-world-events-of-1980s.html
Top Grossing Films in 1985
| 1 | Back to the Future | Jul 3, 1985 | Universal | Adventure | $193,144,445 | 54,406,885 |
| 2 | Rambo: First Blood Part II | May 22, 1985 | Sony/TriStar | Action | $150,415,432 | 42,370,544 |
| 3 | Beverly Hills Cop | Dec 5, 1984 | Paramount Pictures | Comedy | $130,887,254 | 36,869,649 |
| 4 | Rocky IV | Nov 27, 1985 | MGM | Drama | $105,524,891 | 29,725,321 |
| 5 | Cocoon | Jun 21, 1985 | 20th Century Fox | Adventure | $76,257,348 | 21,480,943 |
| 6 | The Dream is Alive | Jun 30, 1985 | IMAX Films | Documentary | $70,000,000 | 19,718,309 |
| 7 | Witness | Feb 8, 1985 | Paramount Pictures | Drama | $65,532,576 | 18,459,880 |
| 8 | The Goonies | Jun 7, 1985 | Warner Bros. | Adventure | $61,389,680 | 17,292,867 |
| 9 | Police Academy 2: Their Fir… | Mar 29, 1985 | Warner Bros. | Comedy | $55,337,042 | 15,587,899 |
| 10 | Fantasia | Nov 13, 1940 | Walt Disney | Musical | $50,500,882 | 14,225,6 |
Best selling albums of the 80s
- Madonna: True Blue.
- U2: The Joshua Tree.
- Phil Collins: No Jacket Required.
- Fleetwood Mac: Tango in the Night.
- Whitney Houston: Whitney.
- Kylie Minogue: Kylie.
- Queen: Greatest Hits.
- Michael Jackson: Thriller.
Right then. All settled in? Let’s begin.
