I want to make a slightly ridiculous argument with complete sincerity: the 1970s might have been the best decade humanity has had. I was not there for most of it, which possibly makes me the perfect person to romanticize it, free of the inconvenient memory of how it actually felt. But hear me out, because I think the case is better than nostalgia, and it says something about the strange moment we are in now.
My argument is not that the 70s were comfortable or fair, because in many ways they were neither. It is that the decade sat at a rare and lucky intersection of forces that has not quite lined up the same way since.
Why that particular decade
The 70s had enough technology to make life genuinely better, and not yet enough to colonize every waking moment. People had television and cars and modern medicine, and they also had long uninterrupted hours that no glowing rectangle was competing for. The culture was extraordinary, music and film taking real creative risks, partly because the industry had not yet been fully optimized into focus-grouped sameness. And there was a sense of forward motion, of the future being something to build toward, that is harder to find now.
It was, in other words, a moment with the benefits of modernity and not yet all of its costs. That balance is rarer than it sounds, and we tend not to notice when we are living through one until it is gone.
What the nostalgia is really about
I think when people my age romanticize the 70s, we are not really longing for that specific decade. We are longing for the balance it represents. Enough tools to be capable, not so many that we are owned by them. Enough connection to feel part of things, not so much that we never get a quiet minute. We spend a lot of energy now trying to recreate, deliberately and with great effort, a kind of attention that an ordinary 70s afternoon apparently just handed people for free.
So no, I am not seriously suggesting we all go back. The 70s had plenty I am glad to live without. But I do think the decade got something right that we have since optimized away, and that the work of getting it back, carving out the uninterrupted hours, resisting the pull of the always-on, is worth doing on purpose. Sometimes the future is just remembering something good we did not realize we had.