Dear Person Born in 1992:

An amazing thing happened a few years before you were born that you've likely read about but never fully understood. After nearly eighty years, the world was no longer divided in half, with both sides swearing total annihilation of the other side. After nearly fifty years, there was no longer a prevailing sentiment that the world would end in a thermonuclear fireball. After nearly thirty years, five billion people no longer considered - every day - the fact that armageddon was half an hour away, 24/7/365.

It's easy to say "oh, but people didn't think about it all the time" but it's also accurate to say that if people didn't think about it all the time, they were reminded of it regularly. One cannot frame the Cold War in the same terms as the Global War on Terror. The Soviet Union was not Russia, was not China, was not North Korea - it was a monolithic, totalitarian presence with four times as many nuclear weapons as we had that our president called "The Evil Empire."

'80s culture, more than any other, reflects a fatalistic optimism - "enjoy yourself while you can because you'll be dead soon." Whereas the 60s and 70s were an era of "free love" the 80s brought us AIDS, which still killed you back then. It was an era where the computers that you have lived with your entire life were just starting to penetrate into the collective conscious (but certainly not the collective living room). It was an era where the thousand channels you take for granted were busily blossoming from four. They 80s were an era that started out with marketing to children through television being illegal and ended with Transformers, GI Joe, He Man and Rainbow Bright. It was an era of banking dergulation that swept us from austerity and inflation to massive tax cuts and a rebirth of the new Oligarchy. It is the period that followed the Long Boom and ended Monetarism. Back in the '80s, the future founders of Google and the dot-com era were not visionary wunderkinds, they were future listless slackers distrusted by the Baby Boomers because they didn't do a good enough job babysitting their children.

There are certain periods of culture that, even through the long lens of history, remain unique and relevant. Which is not to say they are beyond reproach - there is much that was tragic about the 80s, not just historically speaking but also culturally. My recommendation to you is to look on the 80s not as a descendent of the era too comfortable in your own trappings to truly understand and empathize, but as a visitor from a distant culture absorbing and reflecting on the downfall of Communism and the twilight of Capitalism from a privileged vantage.

You might see a thing or two of beauty.

Have a video. it's four minutes of your life and, in my opinion, is a nice capsule of the cultural mores that nobody is talking about (but everyone has on the back of their minds) throughout all the horrible culture you mention. If you have the patience, here's two hours of horror.

Quite simply, we had other things on our minds and lots of us, when we look back on it, consider ourselves fortunate to still be here in this unimaginable era of 2013. It was a foregone conclusion where I grew up that if we were around in 1998, we'd be eating dog food and polishing The Great Humungous' boots.

Patrick Nagel says hello from an era when coke addicts died from heart attacks because they did "aerobithons" for charity.