1970s & 1980s Best Time to Grow Up?

Imagine what it takes for every decade to be the best time to grow up

One of my fave Substackers, Kirsten Powers, over at Changing the Channel, claims, Yes, the 1970s and 1980s Were the Best Time To Grow Up. Subtitle: No social media, no Internet, and grownups minding their own business is a recipe for success.

What do you think? Was it the best time? Is it a recipe for success?

My first reaction to Kirsten’s thesis was to add one decade and subtract another. My window of time would be the 1960s and 1970s. I was there in the 1950s but only briefly (4 years old in 1960). And though I acted like a child for the first couple of years of the 1980s, I was, as is said today, a grown-ass adult. According to neuroscience, in 1982, at 25 years old, my brain was finally fully developed.

Ironically, the first sentence of Kirsten’s post highlights the social media she asserts we can do without: “Nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s childhood is all over Instagram, and I'm here to tell you that it's just as great as advertised.”

I was so ready to fact-check this claim of ubiquitous nostalgia. Click. Oops. I forgot, I done quit the Instagram. Could someone send screenshots to my flip phone?

While Kirsten admits “intense nostalgia for my childhood and teen years,” she offers a caveat and a punchline: “This is not to say that it was perfect—of course, it wasn't. There's no such thing as perfect, but there are much better ways to live than the way we do today.”

If you’re a loyal reader of Kirsten’s, you know this quest defines her writing.

Indeed, there are much better ways to live than the way we do today. What are they?

Last year, I wrote a note to myself: Go back through your history and find those ways of being and doing that you believe were so much better than today. Revisit them—honestly assess. If they are truly good, bring them forward—tweak as needed.

What I found wasn’t surprising, but it was sobering.

Imagination & Creativity

My gig is imagining. For 50+ years, I've been getting paid to make stuff up. To bring the imagination out into the open—you know, creativity. What I imagine is just as real as what I create, but I don’t have to create all that I imagine. Still, any vocation that requires creating begins with the imagination.

This is where I connect with Kirsten’s thesis most. I cannot imagine the history of my creative life without the history of my locale, people, and time. And that specific seminal time of growing up is the 1960s and 1970s.

Why was this the best time for me? I've discovered too many answers for one post. I'll mention two that I connect to cultivating my imagination. More can be found in these books, here and here.

The first reason is: Multi-generational Ritual, Play, Education, and Work. This was a natural feature of my family and the NorCal farm town I grew up in—an epistemic framework. Some part of how I know what I know (including the development of my imagination) is due to close proximity to parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and aunts and uncles, often and in varied situations (from comedic to deadly).

I was in the mix while adults worked hard and played hard. Sunday dinners and celebrations for every holiday and birthday were the norm. My babysitters and caregivers were all family members. Farm and home labor, fishing and hunting, were shared experiences between children and adults. From an early age, I knew the power of dirt, seed, and soil—bullet and shovel.

Birth and death, fruit and spoil, were precisely as they are—natural. We often ate what we grew—the egg, the chicken, and every kind of vegetable, fruit, and nut. And as I wrote about in Roots & Rhythm, my mother was a wordsmith, and my father a musician (class was always in session).

The Academy of Adult Language & Conversation

While all of this is significant, the real payoff for my young self was assimilating the language woven into all the ritual, play, and work. Of course, I went to school. But the best education was tuning my ear to everything the adults around me said. I especially tuned into the women. They were more accomplished at general, substantive conversation. The men were good for amping up enthusiasm or scoring a well-placed joke. But they seldom risked the deeper waters of the women folk.

Though the ritual of after-supper visiting was always enlightening, working alongside an adult was the ultimate pedagogy. From an early age, I was required to work and help out. I wanted to quit almost everything I was asked to do. It was too difficult, boring, or painful (scrapes, cuts, and wood slivers were a pause in the action—not a reason to bail). My family never allowed me to quit. Joining them in their work, I learned to make things I was proud of, like a fence, a drainage ditch, or a garden.

I was taught persistence and resilience in "show, don't tell" fashion. I could overcome my propensity to quit and be better for it. I learned that finishing felt much better than quitting. Little did I know how much this lesson would positively affect my imaginative work to come.

And the thousands of adult conversations I listened in on? I learned how to express an opinion with wit and wink. Not by attacking the person. I also learned how to listen, say my bit, and pass the baton so everyone could contribute (then, I did this with jazz, too).

A circle of folks visiting without hurry was a marvel. Everywhere my adults went, they visited—the gas station, the market, and their favorite Mexican food. Always a conversation—a story—laughter. They were born making eye contact.

Every adult word taught me something about who I wanted and didn't want to be—about the world I wanted or didn’t want to help create.

Occasionally, I had a new book or toy, a distraction that interested me more than adult conversation.

Abundance and Division in One Hand

But unlike today, in my childhood, no one thing or distraction held unprecedented radical worldwide power to separate me from the people and place I was born into.

My distractions were coming (a girlfriend, music, sports), but they did not include holding in my hand the collective equivalent of a telephone, television, flashlight, calculator, alarm clock, typewriter, camera, video camera, art studio, recording studio, radio, walkie-talkie, record player, world library, world map with GPS, video calling and conferencing, weather station, bank, loan company, stock trader, game console, movie theater, medical monitor, and a worldwide store where anything could be purchased with a click.

The Positive Side of Scarcity

Scarcity allowed space for my imagination to do its thing. The work wasn't always conveniently done for me by a multi-skilled device. I had to ask What if?—figure it out alone. If I couldn't? My family were my YouTube tutorials.

This set a pattern for my life: Need or problem? > imagine what if > create what you imagine > assess and imagine more > create, start over > ask for help, get educated > begin again. You’re not a failure. This is the process. It takes what it takes. Imagine what it takes.

The second reason this was the best time to grow up (for me) is: Play and Place.

If I wasn’t with my family or in school, I would be outside playing with other children. Kirsten highlighted this feature too. I had no problem playing alone, but my mother insisted I go outside and interact with the natural world. This created an explorer mentality in me. In fact, it was common to say to another kid, "Hey, you wanna go explore?” Explore what? Everything. And we did.

Making Worlds Within the World

We had a vast playground of orchards, fields, railroad tracks, ditches, canals and rivers, farm animals, game birds, abandoned sheds, and a two-mile bike ride to town. There were no limitations on time except for dinner at 6PM. In the summer we had be in by dark. This abundance of places filled with earthy mystery fed our imaginations and helped us become problem-solvers. The scarcity of tools and resources taught us to think about analogs (if this works for that, maybe it will work for this, too). We did a lot of scavenging, building our own temporary dwellings, transportation, and expressing our developing thoughts and opinions. In short, imagining our present and future.

We were obsessed with taking things apart and putting them back together again. This taught us the difference between essential parts and mechanisms and those which added to the safety or aesthetic of the invention. Removing the governor on a Briggs & Stratton engine increased the available RPMs. This made the go-kart go faster, and faster was a value we pursued and loved.

Play was a series of What if? questions posed to oneself and your playmates. The investigation, the problem-solving, was on the child. At every turn, there was an imaginative decision to make. Failure and victory taught us in equal measure.

This was my time to test much of what I heard from all the adult conversations I took in. I found out what was meant by what they said by having the freedom to encounter something similar on my own without their supervision. This required risk and highlighted the link between freedom and risk.

Freedom and Risk

Freedom and risk in my era of childhood were not without cost. Bones were broken. Blood was shed. Fire burned and water drowned.

I argue that freedom and risk are centralized now within the human-held device and on social media. The risk today isn't a broken bone. It's a broken brain.

As statistics show, a growing contemporary problem is the inability of children to imagine a future.

This should not be. We can’t go back, only forward. But we can admit to imagining and creating something that is doing more harm than good.

You’re not a failure. This is the process. It takes what it takes. Imagine what it takes for this, and every decade, to be the best time to grow up.

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News and Podcasts

Friday March 21 I drop a 3-song EP of a writing/production challenge I gave myself last summer while enjoying a ride in my sister Terri and brother-in-law Doug’s beautiful boat. The soundtrack? Yacht Rock. Speaking of the 1980s—I was there! I know how to make that music. Let me know if you think I nailed it. Features son Sam Ashworth on lead and background vocals (+ Ruby Amanfu) with old friends Jerry McPherson (guitar), Mark Hill (bass) and Steve Brewster (drums), mixed by Richie Biggs. Streaming everywhere!

DFW Area folks: For the opening of this year's ORIGIN series, Art House Dallas will welcome author and scholar Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson for an evening conversation—Friday, March 21. Join in as Dr. Wilson explores mimetic contagion (the spread of desires through a society) and the unsettling ordinariness of evil, all through the devilish characters in the works of Flannery O’Connor and Dostoevsky.

Inside Musicast with Eddy Cabello & Rick Such—Very fun interview. Honored to be in the lineup with the great Bobby Colomby (Blood Sweat & Tears, A&R Columbia Records) and bassist Tony Levin of Peter Gabriel and a zillion more.

Being Human with Steve Cuss—Absolutely love anytime spent with Steve and this episode is no exception. Here, Steve digs into my life, work, and the new book Roots & Rhythm, teasing out the theme of the wildly relational nature of art.

Allender Center with Dan Allender—There was a decade of my life when I consistently drank from the deep well of Dan’s wisdom. Here’ the two of us riffing together, being each other’s fanboy, and swimming in the deep end.

The Habit with Jonathan Rogers—In this episode, Jonathan Rogers and I talk about success, identity, embracing failure and suffering, and navigating more than one economy at a time. Great host.