Meh, I 'll take my chances with the present.
Given who I am as a person, I don't think I'd have fared well in even the recent past as women and people of colour actually had fewer rights under law in almost every country. I wouldn't mind going back a couple of decades and changing some stuff in my own life, but in terms of decades to live in? I'm pretty sure I'm good where I am. The future is an unknown country. I will probably get to experience a bit more of it, assuming nothing terrible happens to me or the planet and I take care of myself, but i will take it when it gets here. There's plenty of unknown potential bad in the future, but there's plenty of things that can happen both personally and in the world as a whole that I cannot now imagine. So, I'm gonna live the best life I can in reality as I have it now, and try to be situated to enjoy and survive whatever future comes. One day at a time. the present gets my vote. Yes, even with COVID and the mess that humans have been making of things and the force multipliers that make the potential for bad greater than in centuries and decades past b/c we humans have so much more technology that makes the world smaller and easier to manipulate and mess with and straight up just blow up completely. NOW.
I'm Spike... I like the world... though probably for slightly different comforts. I have a world that still has oceans I can swim in, trees that are still blooming and soil that is still producing fruit I can eat and flowers I can enjoy, plants and animals and sky... as well as things like computers and TV, electricity, AC, amazing photography equipment... great food from all over the world... And less trivial: I've the legal right to own property and vote and not have to ask permission of a man to 'be'. It is not legal for my husband to rape me or for his family to throw me out of the house while keeping my dowry if he were to die. I cannot be be owned by someone because of the colour of my skin. Or be gassed and burned in ovens because of my religion. And should my husband die (please god, no), I could marry a woman next time around should I choose to do so, because it is no longer against the law for me to love either gender.
Now.
If I could take a trip to a different time just for a 'vacation' (and change nothing) I probably would love to go to a time in the future... just to see what we've done with ye old planet. I have history books for visiting the past. That's good enough for me. Very little there is romantic to me. No rights. No cars. No trains. No planes. No hygiene. No medical care. Routine maternal death or infant death were the norm, not the exception.
Even if I'd been a white, European man of high birth, I think I'd have had fundamentally less freedom (not from legal restrictions, but from the limited nature of LIFE in the past. (most people didn't travel far from home and didn't see much.) I've been on several continents and seen the world go from typewriters and handwritten letters to email, texting, streaming video, online games and fantasy worlds... and a flown repeatedly in aircraft... and even had laproscopic microsurgery... I've driven a car at 100 MPH and used all kinds of tools, and vehicles... Even the fabrics I take for granted don't require me dyeing them with my own urine.... And I'm just a middle class black woman. Because of the internet, I've also written stories read by many people even though I'm not famous, and for cool stuff done in the past... I've ridden a horse and camped outside (and had much better camping gear (and hunting and fishing gear if I wanted it), and done a ton of other cool things even rich people could not have dreamt of a century or in some cases even 50 years ago). Oh and in the past I'd have had a much greater chance of dying of something nasty, even as a rich person with power. Nope.
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Maybe the 1960's, so I could see The Beatles at The Cavern and enjoy all the fantastic music, movies and fashion.
I was alive then. I was a young kid, but the best things about the 60s are available to us... music and culture and the advances that came to us because of that time. It WAS cool to watch stuff happen then and I'm glad I lived through it and was (just barely) old enough to remember things like the moon landing. It was very cool. But... my mom (who was not American) went into a whites only establishment and sat down and tried to order food. the only reason it didn't turn out badly for her was that she was obviously a foreigner and they probably thought she was some kind of diplomat. So... the world was a complicated place. I was told several times even in the late seventies that 'we don't hire women for that' and 'if you get married or have a child you will be fired or required to resign as we don't hire married women in this position' -- and this was still a completely legitimate reason for not giving someone a job. They routinely gave men raises when they fathered children or married. Women who married were routinely out of a job.
I'm glad I was a teenager in the 70s and got to live as an adult through the decades since. It wasn't all pretty, but it's all mine. And in a lot of very important ways, the world is actually a better place now than it was then. I'm grateful.
If you had a time machine and could travel to ANY period in the past, what would you choose? And why? Would you stay there or just visit briefly?
As for me, I'd LOVE to travel to the 1970's! The music, the clothes, the freedom...so intoxicating. There was no internet, plus people were expected to question things and think for themselves (unlike these days). But mostly, its the clothes, music and free-thinking that really, really appeal to me
How about you?
The music did rock. And to answer your question. If i did have to be an adult any other time but the time I was born, I'd probably go back ten or twenty years at most... so I'd be an adult fully in the 60s or 70s. further back than that? ONLY as a male white person from Western Europe.
