What are concrete ways life has improved since the 1970s?
I lived through the 1970s. We had enough good quality food, home cooked meals, and far less obesity. I had friends to play with in the neighborhood, bicycles to ride, independence ("be home for dinner!"), ball fields and basketball courts, toys, a library I could walk to with lots of books, lived close to extended family, big back yards, could walk to school, church, grocery stores, family gatherings on holidays. TV and radio for news and entertainment, which we watched too much, but not nearly as addictive as today's devices. Atari for video games.
I was fortunate enough to be accepted to a good university, and was able to pay off my student loans in a few years.
I don't remember as many people going bankrupt from medical bills (although people were starting to complain about the increasing costs).
It's not clear to me in what ways life is objectively better today. I'm sure many people in the 1970s were worse off than me, but we were squarely lower middle class. A lot of people had more than us. I imagine life is better for racial and sexual minorities, and that shouldn't be taken for granted. But I don't think life is better for the median middle class person.
I’m about middle of Gen-X and I also enjoyed many of the things you describe.
I also did not enjoy the chance to learn about, discuss with experts (and interested novices), niche topics. Programming for me was few hundred line programs saved to audio tape or typed in from magazines. I had much less concept of the world in which we actually live than my kids do. Sure, I had the same Replogle globe that you probably did, but I didn’t know that people lived significantly differently lives outside my neighborhood. I just figured it was daytime earlier or later than it was for me. When I wanted to learn something, my parents had to drive me to the library. It might take me an hour to learn a single fact that I can access as fast as I can type the query now. If it’s something new, it might not even be in the library at all, despite being known to mankind already. When I wanted to take intro college classes after exhausting the high-school’s offering, I had to commute to college as a HS senior. When we wanted to go on vacation, we had to get a bunch of folding paper maps and plot out the route. Or laboriously copy down directions from a friend. If I wanted to be reachable, I had to stay near the phone (what we’d call a landline now). Air conditioning was a relatively rare treat. If you wanted to watch a movie at home, you had to drive to the rental place and hope that they had one of the 5-ish copies of the movie you wanted to see in stock.
Plenty is better, especially around comfort, convenience, communications, and educational breadth of opportunity. (And a lot is also worse, of course.)
I lived through the 1970s. We had enough good quality food, home cooked meals, and far less obesity. I had friends to play with in the neighborhood, bicycles to ride, independence ("be home for dinner!"), ball fields and basketball courts, toys, a library I could walk to with lots of books, lived close to extended family, big back yards, could walk to school, church, grocery stores, family gatherings on holidays. TV and radio for news and entertainment, which we watched too much, but not nearly as addictive as today's devices. Atari for video games.
I was fortunate enough to be accepted to a good university, and was able to pay off my student loans in a few years.
I don't remember as many people going bankrupt from medical bills (although people were starting to complain about the increasing costs).
It's not clear to me in what ways life is objectively better today. I'm sure many people in the 1970s were worse off than me, but we were squarely lower middle class. A lot of people had more than us. I imagine life is better for racial and sexual minorities, and that shouldn't be taken for granted. But I don't think life is better for the median middle class person.