How about “romanticize”

You have a sort of idealistic view of the 80’s that you are in love with.

It's like falling in love with somebody only from their social media post. The real person's nothing like that. It's only a curated view.

That feeling is called “anemoia”. It’s apparently a recent word.

"I'm listening to music in my walkman. It's been two hours!! Oh, the batteries died. Hang on, let me get my replacements... damn I left them at home. What should I do now? I guess nothing....... alone with my thoughts. I'll just fix my hair with this ozone-layer-destroying spray can. Cough, cough!!! The smog is harsh today! Not as harsh as last month, though."

Romanticizing might be a fitting term. As in you're romanticizing those times.

I was there in the 80s and 90s. You young people are definitely luckier. You are by far more beautiful, more gentle, you are more welcoming, you don't discriminate against gays and nerds. Socializing without mobiles was as boring as you can expect.

Do not spend too much time regretting a period that was meh at most

I don’t know the word, but your question makes me remember how nostalgic “Stranger Things” made me for the 80s. Although I lived through that as a child and it wasn’t all that cool, with the Cold War looming over everything.

the word is delusional

The word you're looking for is Hiraeth: longing / yearning for a time or place that does no longer exist, or never has existed.

Someone called it wistful when I looked it up and I like the word (read it here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50144/is-there-a-term-that-defines-nostalgia-for-something-youve-never-experienced#50147 ) it's nostalgia without needing to have lived it. So nostalgia is wistful but wistful also covers things you haven't lived.

It's called Sehnsucht in German and is also used as a psychological term in English.

I'm not really sure if the 80s were necessarily better or worse in reality. On one hand it all seemed relatively simple, but without the distractions of constant communication, flexible agreements, procastinating and whatever else we have in our modern stressful information overload, the 80s were quite brutally direct. If you could time travel there, you'd probably find people to be rude and focused on actions instead of thinking. For better or worse.

https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/105778238455/anemoia-n-nostalgia-for-a-time-youve-never

I have always wished I were around for the Cretaceous period... :(

Seriously though, it's understandable to want to experience something you can't. Like, the more we know we can't do a thing sometimes, the more we want to.

Personally, having lived through the 80s and 90s, there was absolutely something unique about both. I think if you set aside the trivial stuff, fashion, etc., it comes down to what I describe as a more human pace. Life just moved slower. You had to interact directly with people more, yeah. Also, people were kind of more on the same page. For example, TV shows were aired at a specific time, movies showed at a specific time. (I'm referring a bit more to the 80s here, pre VCR.) So, you kind of always felt like you were a part of something bigger. It was kind of a cozy feeling.

On the other hand, if you didn't fit into mainstream culture (straight, mostly white, probably Christian), things could be really rough for you. It was much harder to find groups outside of that mainstream. You could feel very lonely and isolated. Connecting with people was hard. Being a nerd was definitely not cool, it was just being a nerd. Bullying was really bad.

It was really hard to learn about things. Like, you had to go to the library or school. No internet searches. Maybe in some ways that was a good thing.

That's more the 80s. I would describe the 90s as sort of complacently boring for the most part. Also, in the same way that people romanticize the 80s and 90s now, many in the 90s were romanticizing and imitating the 60s and 70s. It didn't feel like there was as much of a distinctive culture to me. The 90s were when corporations really figured out how to commercialize everything too. Think... Pepsi sponsoring Woodstock 99.. Things felt less organic, more engineered from above.

But, those are generalizations. People always find a way to express humanity, to be creative, to be unique, to express something new. We'll look back on these times and see special things too. Personally I really miss when everyone was walking around with their fidget spinners dabbing...

I don't know, but I have the opposite. I grew up in the 80s, but given that I'm a queer af trans person, I'm nostalgic for a childhood that wasn't possible for me in that era

I think it's called Vicarious Nostalgia. Found a page on Wikipedia discussing the topic.

I know what you mean. The difference being that I lived through the eighties... I watch shows like Stranger Things and remember how awesome (parts of) the eighties were. Staying out late with my friends, basically running around unsupervised for hours at a time? Awesome. But most of that vision of eighties never really existed.

Oh, there was definitely a time when our cars were mechanical and we played our music at 78 RPM, but there was plenty wrong with the eighties.

Among other things, we were all pretty confident the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust with Russia. The rhetoric was incendiary and nobody thought peace was realistic. It was only when Russia's economy suddenly imploded and the whole thing collapsed that everyone took a collective breath of relief. It's impossible to communicate how incredible the collapse of the Soviet Union was. They were the second most powerful nation in the world - and their vision for the future was diametrically opposed to the American counterpart. There were clashes and proxy wars. Only the threat of total annihilation kept open war from being declared.

...and then one day, they just...vanished. They were more unstable than anyone knew. And when one too many little things went wrong... The whole thing crumbled.

The reason there's so many great comedies from the eighties? Everyone was desperate for some good escapism. In hard times, comedies sell well. (In good times, we want dramas.)

The eighties were stressful as hell.

But the TV/Movie version of the eighties looks fucking awesome. I wish I'd lived there too.