How would you react if you woke up back in 1957?

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The year of my birth.

I'd be scared because of all the dinosaurs

I'm a woman so I'd probably wouldn't like living in an era when everyone still thought a woman's only place was in the home and be a virtual slave to her husband and kids while wearing high heels and pearls.

The country still not really rebuilt, soviet control (though not as brutal as back in stalin's days), poverty, alcoholism, trauma everywhere, shortages of everything and overwhelming fear of another war coming soon and destroying us again...
No, thanks.

This and women wore girdles and panty hose.Hell on earth.
And the hair spray, that smell makes me sick.

Yeah. Poland just 12 years after the war wouldnt be a fun place to be.

The US on the other hand...had Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe, expanding suburbia, and Eisenhauer building our new super highways. Awesome. At least for some folks.

It was the best time for rich white males.
Their reign of power.

For ordinary White men, blue and white collar it was great.

For the super rich not really more so than now. Probably less so.

Unions were stronger back then.

The super rich got taxed by the GOP POTUS Eisenhauer at seventy percent then. So the already well off were not excessively MORE well off then. Things didnt get good for the super rich until a generation later under Reagan.

I would make sure to avoid a Back To The Future scenario by staying far away from my parents, who were married that July.

I would campaign like hell against Richard Nixon in 1960.

I would watch the premiere of the Flintstones in black and white.

I would enjoy talking around the world on ham radio using AM during the best solar cycle peak in recorded history.

And I already got the polio vaccine, so I would be safe...

I think the sixties muscle cars look better.
Cars in the fifties were tanks.And handled about like a tank.
My ex had a 1958 Chevy truck and I hated that ugly thing.It was painted competition orange which made it even more hideous.

Considering I was not born until a decade and a half later (Give or take a few years), if I woke up then I would be surprized!

Was talking about time recently. It is odd because we live in time. Yet God lives outside of time. (Maybe a subject for the PPR section of the forum? (I can't see what section this is I am replying to as I write).

But yes, time is interesting. Can feel "Trapped" in time but also can feel that memories are scary because I can't go back to live there in them!

Yet I know that time is not forever... Interesting thought!

Introduce the concept of Free Love.

Horror.

Hmm, simpler times of prosperity vs. high stress times of austerity would be nice.. buuuuut, not sure how good life could be w/o modern engineering of things like kiteboarding gear, motorcycles, the internet & smartphone apps. (which have been very good to my sex life.)

If I woke up there and couldn't go back to Now, I suppose I'd simply make the most of it. Hell, maybe I'd be credited with ideas for kiteboarding gear, advanced motorcycles, the internet & smartphone apps. Nah.. more likely locked up in a looney bin if I said anything about that stuff.

At least the cars were nicer looking.

In the US, the 50s are constantly held up as a utopian time to which we should all want to return. TBH I think it was an awful time. In most ways I like today's world best, although if asked, I would say the 90s are probably the best decade of my memory.

There's always irony. If you're not American, you might not understand that the US basically cashed in on WWII. The typical white American family man of the 50s was a WWII vet who, due to his status, had absolutely unquestioned confidence in the correctness of his own views on life and had enough disposable income to do more or less whatever he wished. On the one hand, you could say that these guys had earned this in combat, but OTOH it led to an era of extreme intellectual and moral repression. Plus the US was a really ugly place then with bland food. Most of us would be miserable in that situation.

Whereas in Britain and Europe societies were just starting to recover from the devastation of the war. So if you lived in one of those countries, you point of view is going to be a lot different.

Most inspiration for the meme of the "ugly American" originated in the 50s (pre-21st Century definition of '"meme"). Very telling.