The best decade in your opinion?

I'm biased, but the 90's, hands down:

We had the internet. It was slow, but wasn't bloated and full of idiots, SEO, AI spam, etc. Ads were practically non-existent.
Gas was like $1
Getting through the airport was a breeze
I could smoke in a restaurant while eating unlimited biscuits and gravy
We generally still had hope for the future

The Cold War had just ended, long-standing music barriers were breaking down, cell phones became affordable, falling crime rates, falling airfare, and on and on. 90's.
- 🤘
Big Mac combo was under $4. Canadian.
- In my early adulthood all of the fast food chains were engaged in what is known as The Burger Wars. Big Macs, Famous Stars, and Whoopers were all $0.99. It's a good thing they were too, because I was a broke-ass who would have starved without those $0.99 burgers.
Don't forget there was some great music.
- That has been true of every decide for at least a century.
Can I assume you were a teenager/early 20s in the 90s?
- Yep!
Unlimited biscuits and gravy...

Man, that's the dream!
- Best $4.99 you'll ever spend (I think they still have the deal, but probably costs a little more now).

I don't know. I live in Slovakia, so it doesn't seem like there's much to choose from (but then again, I don't know much about history). Perhaps either 1930s or 2010s.
Let's take it apart.
1870s - 1900s - Oppression by Hungarians
1910s - WW1
1920s - Strongly affected by WW1
1930s - Mostly recovered from WW1. Searching online, it seems 1930s could have been pretty good here. At least in cities. Though we do have the end of 1939, but for the most part, it seems fine.
1940s - WW2, start of Soviet era
1950s - 1980s - Soviet era
1990s - Huge increase in criminality after Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel gave amnesty to most prisoners. Thankfully I didn't have to be alive during those times, I've heard well enough about 90s.
2000s - Things start to calm down here. Also things like internet were getting quite popular, and haven't yet enshittified.
2010s - Not that bad, which is better than negative.
2020s - COVID-19, war between Ukraine and Russia splitting people and adding a ton of hate (usually towards Ukraine for some reason). But it's still just 2024, maybe something improves, though I don't feel like it.

I was a teen in the 80s. I was naive, but, having a blast in high school. I think we had amazing music and I remember MTV kicking off when it was full of awesome music videos. Obviously, I didn't pay attention to adult problems, but, I don't remember any major issues putting people into pissy moods.

I was 21 by end of the decade. I know there was Desert Storm which was really just a blip on the radar. Overall the U.S. appeared to be pretty solid. I know my group of friends really had a blast into the early 90s.

Luckily, I'm still tight with most of the original crew.

There are things I like about the 80s too.

It had its own brand of batshit conspiracy theory types, though. Before COIVD 5G microchippers, before 9/11 Truthers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria

Day-care sex-abuse hysteria was a moral panic that occurred primarily during the 1980s and early 1990s, and featured charges against day-care providers accused of committing several forms of child abuse, including Satanic ritual abuse.[1][2] The collective cases are often considered a part of the Satanic panic.

But on the whole, I seem to recall being less-exasperated over politics. Again, could be a function of age.

Kinda agree on the music, but from what I've read, people often like the genre of music that they listened to when growing up, so that might just be a function of growing up.

I recall inexpensive headphones and speakers being a lot more disappointing. Just about everything sounds great these days.

We had the crack cocaine outbreak back then.

Smoking (tobacco) was still common in the US. I was never really in an environment where it was super-obnoxious -- like bars or something -- but I remember restaurants having smoking sections that you could smell in the non-smoking areas, and regularly having people standing around smoking and smelling it. Kind of nice, as a non-smoker, to not need to smell it in 2024.

The Internet was not generally-available, and that'd be a pretty significant drawback for me. Cell phones were...well, being worked on. People had pagers sometimes. Though by the 1980s, having a personal computer -- at least in the US -- wasn't terribly uncommon. googles Looks like it wasn't until 2000 that more than 50% of households had a computer, though.

By the 1980s, video games were maybe still a bit geeky, but video game consoles aren't weird to see in a home. You had early videogames out, still had a lot of videogames in arcades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_arcade_video_games

The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development, and cultural influence of arcade video games from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.

The golden age of arcade games began to wane in 1983 due to a plethora of clones of popular titles that saturated arcades, the rise of home video game consoles, both coupled with a moral panic on the influence of arcades and video games on children. This fall occurred during the same time as the video game crash of 1983 but for different reasons, though both marred revenues within the North American video game industry for several years. The arcade game sector revitalized later during the early 1990s particularly with the mainstream success of fighting games.

Doesn't affect me, but for the folks who are into the whole trans scene, or even gay, you were gonna get a lot more hassle.

It wasn't as fuel-efficient, but I liked the styling of automobiles in the 1980s over those today. Fuel efficiency and emissions mandates have kind of killed variety; it feels like there's kind of an overwhelming sameness to everything.

A lot of the tracking issues associated with electronics and the Internet didn't exist; I was happier with the privacy situation.

googles

Ah, here's a list:

https://www.britannica.com/story/timeline-of-the-1980s

Oh, yeah, the AIDS pandemic started. That kinda sucked.

Smallpox was finally eradicated, though, that's cool.

Chernobyl happened. That wasn't good.
- I'd also add that what the decade means is also going to depend somewhat on the country. My guess is that, say, Canada and the US probably have fairly-similar experiences, but I remember one guy from Italy who regularly complained that he wished that everything were like it was back in the 1980s and 1990s (Italy had been running up large deficits then and didn't have some demographic and population outflow issues that it does now). In the post-Soviet states, the 1990s were chaotic.

I'm nostalgic for 60s america, a life I never lived. I was born this century and have lived in pakistan/ qatar for the entirety of my life. But have consumed so much american media which is nostalgic for the era and have heard and seen the romantacization of the decade so strongly that it feels like the time to be alive.

If you were alive in 1960s America, you would have seen no seat belts, significantly lower life expectancy, children still dying to smallpox and polio, and if you are ethnically from the Middle East; everyone in America would have hated you. Race riots were a massive thing in the 60s, police brutality was rampant against people of color. Even the FBI was trying to suppress race progress.

You have presidents for decades trying to create racist drug politics to entrap only non-white non-affluent people into cyclical prison systems.

You have so much hidden then, that happens today, but it was both hidden and far far greater.

The ideal doesn’t exist at all and more so for someone like yourself.
- For all matters of practicality the current decade is probably the right answer. With choosimg your favorite year or decade of the past I only think of the positives or the ideas and conversations of the era, especially the arts. Because it's not like op is gonna help me time travel. It's just about the preffered aesthetics
- Plenty of towns in America had Middle Eastern enclaves.

Whichever came before the invention of fire. It’s been going to hell ever since.

Go talk to Prometheus. That one is out of my hands
The invention of tools and their consequences have been a disaster for humanity smh 🤦‍♂️

What decade is your favorite largely depends on your demographic. Usually in your teens and 20s but sometimes single issues tip the scale to a different decade. eg. someone that is gay and got married to their spouse after that was legalized might have a different favorite decade than someone that didnt have an event like that tip the scales.

For me, the 2000s were the best decade so far followed by the 90s. The mid to late 2000s were my high school and college years. I had a solid social network, almost done with school, got engaged, no pandemic and 911 was almost a decade in the past and not as fresh, I finally felt like I had a whole family. For a while, it was great. Then the 2010s went to hell. 2020s arent looking so good either.

The 90s I mostly liked because the country seemed optimistic and I was a younger teen. This is when I got into video games, explored the internet when it became popular but still felt new and largely unexplored and it was before 9/11 when the country basically collectively had PTSD.

The present has pretty much always been better than the past. With a few exceptions, even shit like we have now is better than 10-20 years ago. More progressive, better quality of life, better medicine, lower mortality rate, etc.

Before 2016 I could pretend that the vast majority of my fellow Americans were good hearted, mostly rational folks.

Probably the 90's in the US. For context I'm an '80s kid.

The dust from deregulation had mostly settled, healthcare hadn't skyrocketed, education and homes were still mostly affordable. Union busting and offshoring had settled down a little. Bankruptcies crushing retirements, too. You thought that the traditional paths of career, maybe getting married, and buying a house were still on the table. Politics were pretty stable and it was probably the last time you could make the argument that "both sides" were kinda the same. We were kinda coasting after the close of the Cold War...sure there were some skirmishes, but nothing huge. The were the "good old days" where shit was just going OK for the most part (please don't pedantically point out what was wrong with society, no period is perfect, it's just that the '90s had a few less bumps in the road). The internet was becoming a more widespread thing, technology was advancing rapidly. You could still save the Earth with a little recycling, Climate Change wasn't obviously having effects as veiwed by the average person.

Followed by the '00s where we got hammered really fast with dot-com bust, 9/11, recession after recession, decades of war, politics shifting hard right, rapidly rising costs thanks to speculation and corporate mergers...it's been pretty unsettled for quite a while and for those entering the workforce now it's rough.

Yeah...the '90s. Things were still looking up until TSHTF in '00s and after.

This one.

Sure, I get nostalgic for the 90s, but we couldn't have imagined what the Internet would become.

There may have been less political drama back then (A consensual blowjob was as bad as it got around here) but I wouldn't trade being able to run my life from my phone and the availability of knowledge and media that we have now.

Sure, I get nostalgic for the 90s, but we couldn’t have imagined what the Internet would become.

I think that by the late 1990s, in the US, you probably had people with a vision of something that looked kind of like the current Internet and computing environment. The major devices were in place. We had commercial companies online (even if the presence was vastly lower), cell phone network in place, laptops, 3d hardware in computers, LCD displays, touchscreens, fiber-optic cables. People were carrying battery-powered gadgets. 802.11b, early WiFi was out. Techonlogy wasn't quite there yet, and a lot of services had to be developed, but I think that someone following the technology could probably have done a reasonable job of projecting forward.

IIRC, one big worry then was that some company might manage to monopolize it successfully. Sort of be more like the telephone network than the Internet of today.
- Oh, no doubt. We all had dreams of what it would turn into and what we'd be able to do with it. Still can't download cake, but we did accomplish a lot of other unexpected things. It was mostly hyperbole.

Twenty-teens. All the advantages of every decade that came before, all that art and culture, but pre-pandemic.

Post 911. Loses to 90s if you had any memory of it.
- I do. Videogames, music, and television were better after the turn of the millennium. So are civil rights, even with the damn Patriot Act.

The current decade probably. I've been just feeling financially secure and generally content with my life. Also can't wait to see where all these technological advancements are taking us.

As a general rule, the latest one. As much as it can be hard to see, life on average has been improving. Why would I want to go back in time where medicine was worse? Or we were covering everything with asbestos, or whatever was going on at that time. The only metric that I can think of that has been getting continually worse is the climate situation. Humans are pretty awesome though and I expect that we will be able to mitigate the worst parts for us. Note: That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be actively trying to stop it.

1960s. It was the closest to human species annihilation at peak cold war

So far I’d say my 40s