How are the 1960s and 1980s 20 years apart?

Yes. I've always held the belief that the 1980s were a "proto-2010s". Of course, you could find similarities between any pair of decades if you look hard enough, but there's just something about the '80s in particular which I see as not only being very much like the present day, but also highly relatable as well. It's as if they were the first "post-modern" decade. A lot of the issues people were dealing with back then we still face today. 

That's why it's so hard to imagine that the '80s were only two decades after the 1960s, a decade fueled by turbulence, progressivism and the overall desire to break down the archaic social values of the past. I mean, how can 1981 only be 15 years apart from 1966, they're worlds apart. 

I strongly agree, the 1960s seem so dramatically different from the 1980s. For example, I think the 1980s share so much more in common with the 2000s (even the 2010s) than they do with the 1960s and the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the 1960s (despite all the social changes) still share a lot more in common with 1940s than the 1980s.

I’m talking about the movies and television.

I'm more impressed with the 20 year gap between the 1950s and 1970s.

Audio quality was already pretty good in the 1950s. 1960s fashion shares nothing in common with 1980s fashion, the only decade 1960s fashion shares anything in common with is the 1970s (with the early 60s being identical to the 1940s and 1950s). You couldn't wear anything you wore in the 60s in the 1980s, it would be ridiculous.

Well, the 1960s had hippies, youth/young adult counter-culture, black and white to color TV transition, the Vietnam War, and psychedelic rock while the 1980s had hair metal, VCRs, the Cold War progression with the Berlin Wall and Gorbachev, synthpop, and MTV.

I used to be blown away by the gap between the '60s and '80s, but honestly there are some links between the two periods. For one, the '80s were a great time for '60s nostalgia acts, as artists such as Dionne Warwick, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, the members of Jefferson Airplane, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, the former Beatles, and many, many other '60s pop veterans were still at the forefront of the music industry in the '80s.

Additionally, the primary music-listening format in the '80s was still vinyl. Although it began to decline during the later '80s with the rise of CDs, it remained prevalent the entire decade.

Technologically, the '80s may have seen the rise of home computers, microwaves, home video, video games, the Walkman, etc., but most people still didn't actually own a computer and relied on the typewriter, while cell phones and the Internet were not popularized yet at all. Life in the '80s was pretty similar to the '60s, save for a few more gadgets, and wasn't the mass-connected world that the equidistant 2000s were.

Also, recording quality in the '80s wasn't completely crystal clear. This is especially prevalent during the early and mid-'80s. For example, listen to the vocal track on this song:



There's a vague muddle that definitely distinguishes it from present-day recordings.

Until the late '80s, most movies still had pretty primitive-sounding audio, not so different at all from films in the '60s. Just listen to the audio in The Breakfast Club:



Compare this to Clueless, which came out only 10 years later:



As for other matters, the '80s was still the era of the Cold War, the LGBT community had nowhere near the level of acceptance they'd attain in the 2000s (although this was at least the post-Stonewall era), CGI animation was represented by the "Money for Nothing" music video, and fashion was much more uniform and defined than the generally wear-what-you-want feel of the 2000s.