I’M LIVING IN THE ‘70S... OR AM I?

Opinion: The View from a Man Out of Time 

I’ve often been described as a man out of time. Built for Australia in 1975, yet here I am writing this in 2025, a man born in 2002, raised in the digital age. I was born at the end of the paranoia and hysteria that followed 9/11. My first steps were taken beneath the television showing footage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be born in another era, to breathe in a slower world. My parents talk about the 1970s as the golden age: the music, the cars, the clothes, the freedom. They say it was the best time to be alive, though I often wonder if that’s true or just nostalgia talking – that trick of the mind that sands down the rough edges of the past until only the shine remains. 

The ‘70s in Australia were anything but simple. The Vietnam War was drawing to a close, and with it came the end of conscription and a growing distrust in political authority. Second-wave feminism was marching forward with new energy, demanding equality in the workplace and reproductive rights. When colour television burst into Australian lounge rooms, the nation saw itself in vivid detail for the first time and Countdown turned local music into a national obsession.

Politically, the decade was electric. The Whitlam government rose and fell in just three years, introducing free university education, universal healthcare and no-fault divorce, before being dismissed in 1975 in one of the most dramatic moments in Australian political history. The oil crisis sent shockwaves through a nation built on long roads and V8 power, forcing Australians to rethink how they lived and travelled. Environmental activism began to stir, with protests over the flooding of Lake Pedder and campaigns to save the Great Barrier Reef marking the early days of the green movement. 

Globally, revolution was in the air. The United States was reeling from Watergate and its failed objectives in Vietnam. Britain was suffering from strikes and economic despair, while at the same time punk was being born in smoky London basements and disco balls were spinning in New York nightclubs. The space race had cooled but its spirit of innovation lingered. It was a decade of both upheaval and imagination. 

For all its colour and creativity, the ‘70s were also shadowed by tension and uncertainty. Yet when my parents talk about it, they don’t mention politics or crises. They talk about backyard barbecues, rock & roll, cheap beer and nights that lasted until sunrise. They remember a world that hadn’t yet been digitised. 

Maybe that’s what nostalgia really is - not a longing for the decade itself but for a time when life still felt immediate. 

There’s a romanticism in imagining that world: men in bell-bottom jeans, women with sun-bleached hair, no phones and no constant connection. You could disappear for a day and no one would panic. Back then concert tickets cost about as much as lunch. Road trips meant unfolding a map across the bonnet, not typing an address into your phone. You lived by instinct, not algorithms. 

But I can’t pretend I’d trade it all. Being born in 2002 has its perks. The internet, for all its noise, can be a kind of magic. The world is at our fingertips: music, art, history, friendships, knowledge, all in the palm of your hand. Creativity no longer has gatekeepers. I can shoot photos, write songs, publish my thoughts and have them seen instantly by people on the other side of the world. That’s power the ‘70s could only dream of. 

Still, I sometimes feel we’ve lost something along the way. Our generation is the first that can never truly escape the outside world. You can’t just switch off. Even when you try, the world hums beneath your skin with messages, notifications and endless reminders of everything and everyone. Maybe the smart phone is our era’s Pandora’s box: once opened, it gave us everything, but it also took something we didn’t realise we’d miss – silence. 

So what is it that I’m really nostalgic for? The ‘70s themselves? Or the idea of simplicity, of being unreachable, unrecorded and unapologetically present? Maybe it’s not the decade I crave, but the pace. 

There’s an irony in knowing every generation looks back and says, we had it better. In fifty years, maybe we’ll say the same about our own time, when we could scroll endlessly, connect instantly and stream the entire history of music and film from a single device. Maybe someone born in 2075 will look back at us and think, man, they had it good. 

The truth is, no decade is perfect. The ‘70s weren’t. Neither is now. Each age carries its chaos and its charm. What matters is what we make of the one we’re in. Being a man out of time isn’t about living in the wrong decade. It’s about recognising that every era is fleeting. Nostalgia is just another way of saying I wish I’d paid more attention while I was there. 

So maybe I am living in the ‘70s, just not the one my parents knew. Mine is of the digital age, louder, faster, always online, but it’s still alive with music, movement and meaning. The rebellion isn’t in the streets or on vinyl anymore; it’s how we connect, create and stay human in a world that never stops. Maybe the revolution just looks different now.