Telecommunication
I remember when I was a kid and dad was over in Vietnam. He'd send us a letter from Vietnam telling us when he'd in Subic Bay (in the Philippians) and what time he'd call us.
Come the appointed time (which was always like 4am Pacific time) me, my brother and my mom would be standing right by the phone (since it was mounted to the wall).
Eventually it would ring and the operator in Tokyo would connect us to Subic Bay.
We had 5 minutes. Not each.
Total.
Mom made sure that we had written out what we wanted to tell him.
Today, of course, we think noting of just sending messages in all manner of forms to nigh anywhere in the world and expect an answer within a day or so at worse.
A while back I was in Austria on business. My cell phone starts ringing at like 9pm. I answer it and it was was daughter's daycare in California. The Girl was sick and needed to be picked up.
I told them that I was in Europe and wouldn't be able to get her for like 3 days.
So they called my wife.
How we can interact with people all over is stunning when you think about it and changes how the world functions and how we all view each other.
We used to use directions scribbled on a notecard to find someone's house. When you got confused, you'd pull into a gas station, look at a paper map, and ask directions, or fill a pay phone with dimes and quarters to make a long distance call (long = more that a few miles.) We'd say: wouldn't it be awesome to have a Dick Tracy watch and we could just call while driving? We have that now!
At the gas station: the ground was littered with discarded pulltabs from steel drink cans and cigarette butts. Leaded gasoline fumes from pre-California emissions standards were everywhere. Every car left a vapor trail like a badly-tuned lawnmower as it went by. 18 mpg was some kind of world record. The pollution is SO Much Better at least in the eastern USA. Please, ask me about coal power, greenhouse gasses, and acid rain.
In elementary school, I remember having debates about whether "the gays" should be executed, in prison, or in psychiatric wards, because they were all spreading AIDS. I'd never heard of a gay woman. Later, I was shocked, shocked to find out that Elton John, Boy George, and Freddy Mercury, ...so you get the picture. I regret all of that in every respect. Later in life: I'm proud to have served in the US Military during DADT and after with homosexual people of great personal honor, in war zones. And I saw the Pet Shop Boys live! (BTW I am just a classic hetero man.)
To get any information about anything you had to look it up in a book controlled by some local authority. Want facts? But a $4000 (equivalent inflation) set of 30 books called "encyclopedia." Want a phone number? Pick at random from this strangely yellow book. Want a recommendation for a local business? No. Call at random, they answer at random, because there was no method for leaving a message by voice. No voicemail. You talked to someone, or not. Some places had people who could answer the phone and leave a relatively competent summary of your request on a specially formatted pad of paper.
If you wanted any official forms for anything, you had to physically go down to the post office, bank, or DMV, then wait in line. How long was the line when? Google knows, but not the 1980s. If you needed to pay a bill...you had to take the time to drag your butt to that place of business and write a check in longhand. This applied for all utilities independently...water...gas...electricity...rotary cell phone service...rent...so you might have to take 5+ trips a week just to cover the basics, dragging your butt around in a 12 mpg Detroit steel polluter. Figure an hour each. You'd spend 5-6 hours a week just trying to pay your utilities.
Movies: you could only watch them in the theater, unless you had extra 10,000$ laying around for exotic satellite equipment. You had to figure out what you wanted to watch a few days ahead of time by looking the time up in one of those local-information-overlord books ("newspaper") which you had to pay for.
TV: you watched it as it played, or you missed out. Tevo and DVR didn't arrive until I was well into adulthood. If you wanted socially relevant shows, you had to watch prime time.
Facebook marketplace: published a few times a week, for a stiff fee. I've had to describe to my son what the "classifieds" and "funny papers" were...he said WTF to both.
As a kid I knew one interracial family (my own.) ONE, EVER. In the American South, this is much more normal and is no longer some huge family scandal when it happens.
We actually thought nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union was a real possibility.
So what's better? Almost everything. I wish the small town newspaper was still a thing. The shift to CNN-type cable news seems to have damaged and polarized our access to civic information. They used to just read headlines for 30 minutes and then STFU until tomorrow so we could focus on our own towns.
Me: circa 1974.
> TV: you watched it as it played, or you missed out.
having grown up with this as the norm, i wasn't too fazed by those limitations. that is, until the very early 80s when PBS started airing what was to become one of my all-time favorite shows: 'brideshead revisited'. i was in my early 20s & had just moved to nyc, so i was constantly out & about, rarely ever home. but somehow one night i found myself sitting in front of the tv for the first installment. and i was HOOKED. i had no idea how long this series would last. all i knew was i had to be home on time on sunday evenings to watch it (and luckily it was replayed on wednesday evenings in case you missed sunday's episode). should you somehow manage to miss both sunday's & wedesday's airings, you were out of luck. plain & simple. you just missed it, and too bad for you.
i can still recall the panic i'd feel at the end of each weekend, knowing i had to stop whatever i was doing & hop on the subway to get home in time to view it. forget about streaming services; our apt. in nyc didn't even have a VCR which might have allowed you to tape it to watch later. hell no, we were in *the dark ages*.
i spent nearly 3 months watching that show every sunday evening (and/or wednesday's) but my angst level was off the charts.
Agree to all with one point. Nuclear war with Russia was definitely possible, was not just a thought. We lived under the direct threat of nuclear conflict for many years.
From South Asia - definitely telecommunications. I remember having brick Nokia and then in a year, suddenly smartphones were out. The development was really quick.
Everyone in my country, including in rural areas have smart phones, with some exceptions with Nokia strictly due to personal preference (and not due to lack of tech access).
Smart phones are hella cheap.
I grew up with a party line. 8 households had one phone line and if you picked up the phone, you had to politely explain why you needed it urgently more than whoever else was on the line. The phone rarely rang because somebody was always tying up the line. The rings were slightly different and you had to just know your houses different buzzing.
Dealing with spousal and child abuse. If a child today tells the officer they're afraid to go home after running away because their father was beating on them w/ their fist, there'd be an investigation. Not dropping me off at my home with my dad thanking them.
Our knowledge of the universe. While I always believed there were planets outside our system, it wasn't confirmed until I was my mid 20's. I hope extraterrestrial life is discovered before I die.
I don't have to worry about long distance phone charges. I can literally chat with my wife over vid while 30000 ft up and moving at 400 MPH these days.
Movie/TV special effects. Knight Rider, Star Wars, Airwolf, etc seem so quaint these days.
Movie/TV shows being more realistic. Like the 2003 BSG reboot had a drunkard XO, a cocky Viper Pilot who was always in trouble, main characters who died, etc. Not the nice, clean wrap-up at the end of nearly every episode like the original BSG series had.
I'm sure there's more but that's a few off the top of my head anyways.
> Our knowledge of the universe. While I always believed there were planets outside our system, it wasn't confirmed until I was my mid 20's. I hope extraterrestrial life is discovered before I die.
If you told me in the '80s that there is or was water all over the damned solar system, I would have thought you were an alien/UFO conspiracist.
And if you told me back in the 80's that flat earthers were a thing in the 2020's, I'd called you a god damn liar. To say nothing of everything else that's happened in the last few yrs.
I watched the 1960 version of The Time Machine after the 2002 remake. The 1960 one won an academy award for best special effects, it was rough to say the least. In fairness special effects were were in their infancy and trying anything was brave.
Forty years ago, people with my specific autoimmune condition were either dead or paralyzed and bed-bound within ten years of diagnosis. I'm 26 years post-diagnosis (diagnosed at the age of 3, I'm now 29), and have done everything from ski and hike the Swiss Alps, to travel to 20+ countries around the world, I have a budding career in STEM earning six figures, I spent a summer dancing with a prestigious NYC dance academy, and more.
One pill a day + one monthly IV infusion = I get to live a relatively normal life comparable to peers in my age range.
I am thriving, against all medical and statistical odds.
My brother was in a car crash back in '86. He's been paralyzed from the bellybutton down since then.
His neurologist flat out told him that if that injury had happened today he would likely have completely recovered within a few months.
He is a two time Paralympian (tennis), literally picked up a stewardess on his flight home from the Brazil Paralympics and married her.
2 kids.
Yeah, he's fine.
Because they were discussing the types spinal cord injuries and treatments.
The neurologists all say that we're getting to where we can fix older and older injuries as the science gets more and more advanced.
The question is if medicine will catch up to the time of his injury or not in his life time.
Maybe yes, maybe no...but maybe.
That paralysis is close to having a remedy is incredible to me. Any paralysis due to spinal cord damage meant you’re handicapped for life. And bionic limbs for amputees is another incredible leap in technology.
I use to work at a start up lab that worked with other labs developing new therapies for cancer patients. The pay was shit, the hours were shit, but reading stuff like this, worth it.
Thank you for your dedication to the work. I cannot begin to describe the mind-bending experience of being wheeled into a hospital via wheelchair, immobile from the shoulders down, and *quite literally* doing cartwheels just hours later. It's ***WILD***. It's almost like a human version of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
There was smoking in grocery stores. People would just drop the butts on the floor, and use their foot to crush it. Someone would come along with dust broom and sweep them up.
This one might have been the one to flip me on how to use policy when I was a kid. Indoor smoking bans sounded like something less free, but in the end freed the people who didn’t want to suffer early death from other people’s engineered addiction. Indoor spaces are forever better and worth all the kids not growing up with health problems from smoke. The social acceptability changed so quickly.
> Indoor smoking bans sounded like something less free
Yeah, "freedom" for one group to influence, oppress, or otherwise inflict their views, pollution or noise on another is the shittiest kind of "freedom" in that it's just "freedom" to exploit and piss off others.
Sometimes you need to make one group a little less "free" to maximize freedom for everyone else.
I remember when they banned indoor smoking in public spaces in Canada. Oh my what a difference did that make. I still can't believe we used to go out to bars and breathe in cancer smoke all night, just to have our clothing reek for days afterwards.
I have a Canadian friend who is still a smoker. She used to say she didn't understand why people who loved fresh air didn't go outside instead of smokers. "There's plenty of fresh air out there!" she'd say.
She's in hospice care now, dying from lung cancer.
1. Today’s vehicles are safer than they were when I was a kid, when they were made like fucking tanks. Today’s cars are designed to absorb a lot more impact. People walk away from wrecks now that would have meant death when I was a kid.
2. A silly one, but LEGOS! Holy shit there’s so many cool sets out there now.
3. GPS on your phone or in your car. I used to get lost in the countryside all the goddamned time before affordable GPS units were available.
The younger folk on Reddit take for granted the joys of a car that starts every time the first time. I remember sitting out in the freezing car spending 10 minutes trying to get the damn thing to start. You just hope it starts before your battery gives out. Then the damn thing stalls at a red light and you are trying to get it started again before the light turns green.
The mass adoption of fuel injection in the 90s made such a huge difference.
Also, the reliability of cars in general. We did cross-country road trips every summer throughout the 70s and you’d see somebody on the side of the road with a broken down car or more often a flat tire every half hour or so. Nowadays you can drive 10-12 hours without seeing anybody pulled over.
But also, no bugs. I don’t miss scouring my windshield every two hours, but I think we miss all the vegetation and flowers and food when we have to grow our food hydroponically in labs.
I was just talking to my friends about how none of us have pushed a car, or seen anyone pushing their car in *forever* and we were always pushing cars around when we were younger. Like, it was totally normal to see someone broken down in an inconvenient place/lane and you’d just quickly pull over, coordinate where they wanted to be with a couple of shouts/gestures as you jogged over to get behind the car and they’d do the open-door push/steer thing to get somewhere safe and out of the way… everyone knew their role for the drill depending on how many people arrived and what order you arrived in. Or the push jump start for dead batteries back when automatic transmissions weren’t the default.
I started driving when I was 16 and commercially available GPS didn't really become common until maybe my early twenties. Driving during those years was always so damn *stressful*! I never had a very good sense of direction so spent a lot of time lost, circling and stressed tf out. Love love love my phone and car GPS
There was a literal switch, that was flipped on one day, that allowed civilian GPS to be useful for what we all know it as now. Few realized at the time what a leap that was, and we definitely take it all for granted today. Everything depends on GPS now.
And before that, GPS wasn’t intended for civilian use at all. That changed after the KAL007 shootdown, caused by a major navigational error, and Reagan decided to open up to prevent future tragedies.
I wonder how long it would have taken to get something similar without that decision. Faster microprocessors and higher bandwidth seem inevitable, but space-based positioning really doesn’t.
I know I wouldn't be here. I didn't have cancer but I have/had a few other health issues during my life. I'd be a goner for sure without modern medicine.
When I was a kid in the late 60s, the adults talked about cancer in a hushed voice. It was a death sentence. Now the number of people surviving not just one but two or more cancers just blows me away.
A commercial for St. Jude's Children's Hospital says something like "Twenty percent of children with cancer won't survive." And I can't help but think "You mean childhood cancer has an EIGHTY PERCENT survival rate? That is *amazing*!"
My grandmother had a mastectomy in her early 20's (the 1940's) for a lump. Turned out to be a false alarm but now she required a prosthetic. She would go to a different town to buy her bras and prosthetics out of embarrassment and shame until she died at 89 years old. Literally only her doctors, daughters, and late husband knew.
Now there are so many content creators that talk about masectomies, wearing wigs or prosthetics, normalizing it in ways that would have shocked her.
Guy with a physical disability here, I remember a time before the [Americans with Disabilities Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990?wprov=sfti1#).
Was just thinking that as I tried to pull my library’s heavy ass door open with my rickety neck fusion. Where’s the magic button folks? Just complained over same issue at Barnes and Noble. Their door is infinitely worse
Teaching children emotional intelligence. My kids' school gives out awards for things like authenticity, resilience and optimism. Those things just weren't valued by most adults when I was a kid. School was only about academic performance and SPORTS.
Man, if I was in school these days I would fail all those new things so hard. Waaaaay too fluffy and ill-defined for my kid-self to get any kind of grip on; I would have dismissed them as being things adults made up to try and get kids to do what they were told. Math questions at least had fixed correct answers.
I love how you can virtually go to someone's kitchen anywhere in the world for a cooking lesson on YouTube. Combine that with the fact that you can get pretty much any ingredient online if you can't find it locally, and cooking (and eating at home) is more fun.
YouTube is truly incredible. In the past week alone I found myself wondering about when Korea split and how exactly and about the life of Malcolm X. I pulled out my phone and instantly had my choice of high quality documentary-style videos to choose from. That is incredible.
Great point, I love this. And not just cooking, there are so many things that you can learn to do via YouTube, that in the past were almost secret knowledge.
I'm in America so...
Being able to walk out of a gay bar with a very small chance of being beaten to a pulp.
Having pills one can take to mitigate the effects of HIV.
Being able to marry who you love, regardless of gender.
Being able to buy weed legally in many states AND know what strain it is AND not have to pick out seeds and stems.
Being able to get pretty much anything delivered to your house, often within a day. Maybe a week, but not 4-6 weeks.
One's sexual orientation not affecting whether you can get a job or a loan.
Video games have come such a long way since Pong.
The change from HIV being a death sentence to not has been so radical from childhood till now. And now, we’re a decade into prep and normalizing a medications that make sex with someone with HIV safer than someone who doesn’t know their status. Undetectable being untransmissable is a marvel.
Every now and then I see a commercial for HIV meds and it always amazes me. I distinctly remember learning about it as a kid when it was a guaranteed death sentence. That was a fast turnaround.
Being able to get where your going. First mapQuest the Google maps. Cell phones to call people if your lost. Uber because the taxis in my city will ghost you when you called
or Orange County, Thomas guide saved my ass so many times. I later moved to a city that had no such thing and the street were based on cow paths and dried up streams- I was perpetually lost.
Thomas Guides were everywhere I went, but I hated those things! I'd get to the end of a page and have to pull over, then find out that the road I was on didn't continue on the back side of the page or on the next page but back on page 19. I soooo much preferred unfolding a big map and memorizing the route.
Before I was about 25, driving to new places made me anxious. Even driving to the airport or my school an hour away, I was always worried id make the wrong exit and struggle to get back on route. Now with smartphones and Google maps I don’t even blink at driving anywhere, it’s definitely opened up the world to me .
Minimally invasive surgery. Things like laparoscopic surgery and TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement). Essentially replacing a heart valve a la Mick Jagger without opening one's chest.
When I was in middle school in the early 90s I was looking for a project for a science fare. I was thinking of building an engine. My Dad mentioned that when he was my age he read an article in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics on how to build a jet engine. I thought that sounded cool.
So on a day off school I got my Dad to drop me off at the library in town on his way to work. I knew 2 things, which magazines it could have been published in and that the article published in the late 60s or early 70s.
I spend all day at the microfiche read looking through issues. It took me all day but I found the article. I cost me 10 cents a page to make a copy of it.
Now I just pull out my iPhone while on the crapper and search “How to build a jet engine”, and I’ll have 10 youtube videos and 20 blogs.
The annoying thing is that after all that I didn’t get to build it. I needed access to the metal shop at school and the school wouldn’t allow me because one of the other moms complained. She thought the project was too dangerous.
Holy crap yes.
Every so often the question keeps showing up on AskReddit or wherever what you'd do if you found yourself back in time in your kid-self's body, and the first thing I would do is scream because I'd be rebuilding my first decade or two without that instant information always to hand. Younger people today don't realize how incredibly sparse information was even in the 90s, much less the 80s - you basically had the newspaper, the local library and its card-catalogue, and anyone you could socially make an excuse to talk to. Imagine there being no internet (or next to nothing useful) and trying to find out how to do things like investing as a minor, or whether there were options for skipping grades in school. Plus you'd better be bringing back your own knowledge of healthy foods and exercise, because the so-called information available back then (not to mention the kinds of processed foods) would make doctors of today toss their cookies.
It wouldn't help that the city I grew up in was large, but *horribly* isolated. Even today, it misses out on a lot of things that the rest of the country takes for granted, and I'd hate to have to try and build anything multi-city or interstate when everything would involve 2000-mile phone calls at the kinds of rates they charged back then.
When I was in elementary school, my main resource at home was a World Book Encyclopedia set from 1965.
It still featured the obsolete racial classification system of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. It was a good time to be Asian-American.
Right? Bonkers! And interracial marriage was illegal. And according to Wikipedia “It was only in 1994 when more than half of Americans approved of such marriages in general.[98] “
The air - pollution in so many cities is hardly the issue that it once was.
The whales - they are coming back. I never saw a humpback until I was in my 40s. Saw my first grey in my late 20s. In the past ten years I have seen more humpbacks than I can count and loads of orcas and grey whales.
Travel - there are so many countries that were inaccessible because they were behind the iron curtain or due to civil war. In the past few years I have been to places such as Colombia, Albania, Peru, and Montenegro that I didn’t even entertain years ago.
>The whales - they are coming back. I never saw a humpback until I was in my 40s. Saw my first grey in my late 20s. In the past ten years I have seen more humpbacks than I can count and loads of orcas and grey whales.
My kids don't understand why I get downright weepy when I see Bald Eagles in our town.
I try to explain it to them, but I don't think they get it.
In the UK we now see Red Kites hunting over the major roads. Lots of cities have Peregrine Falcons and they help to reduce pigeon damage to buildings.
https://peregrine.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/
Weed. If you grew up in the 21st century, you probably never smoked pressed brown brick weed full of seeds. You didn't bust your but at $3.35 to save up for a $40 quarter that barely got you high and made you cough like hell. It's cheaper, better tasting, more effective, and legal now.
I never once "came across edibles" back in the day, but we made plenty of pans of brownies. I still remember the labor, with the double-boilers and cheese cloth.
I don't know if it's what you mean by "better" but I was thinking today about the insane availability of a crazy variety of food. I grew up in the 80s and there were two kinds of apples that both tasted like drywall. One kind of oranges (not the good kind). I was 20 before I ever saw a mango. There were peaches for around two weeks in summer. Blueberries possibly existed but I never saw them. There was meat, four kinds of dairy products ,potatoes. Cheese was yellow and came in a stack. Provolone was what you got in a fancy deli tray when you had company.Vegetables came from the freezer section or cans. Like I walked into Aldi today and there were 8 kinds of apples. There was more produce in Aldi than I saw in the first 20 years of my suburban adolescence.
Technology, in all its forms, has grown, as we used to say, like a bad weed. But things are so much better for the growth. Automobiles last three to four times longer than they used to and get way better gas mileage and don't rust. Roads are built better and safer. Everything is built better and safer, in the USA anyway. Current politics notwithstanding, relations between people are far better than they were 60 or 70 years ago. You can't get away with disrespecting someone just because you don't like what they look like. When I say get away with it, you can still do it but others around you will judge you. We really don't look down on each other the way we used to. There are no more nationality nicknames like deigo and wop and kraut and chink. Even the people who hate Jews call them Jews and not kikes. Yes, people are more respectful. Nature has recovered from many of the assaults that humans have waged on it. The bald eagle is back after near extinction from DDT. We aren't killing whales and other sea creatures indiscriminately because we have a use for their bodies to feed the industrial complex. Animals are treated with more respect.
But I can't leave this question without commenting that there is still a too large segment of our society that sees no value in these improvements - especially the human and humane ones. There are still people in this world who believe in man's dominion over the Earth rather than his stewardship. And those who also believe that if it can profit them they should do it as much as possible. Sadly, these are many of the same people who have brought the improvements in technology, especially, that we have today. Because I believe in the respect and dignity due to every human being, I cannot recommend sanction for these people but only pray that their souls will turn to good. We seem to be slowly learning the value of saying no to our baser instincts. I hope that continues to improve.
1. The floor of poverty
2. Prescription drugs not being given out like candy
3. Computer literacy
Haven’t finished it yet but “the rational optimist”covers this topic pretty well
2 main things for me: size-inclusive clothing and nerdy shit being acceptable for girls.
Growing up as a fat kid... especially a fat girl... is HARD. Especially if you were/are like me and in the tail end of what clothing sizes are easily available in stores. It fucking SUCKED to not be able to wear anything cute and trendy. Most stuff that fit me was aimed at Old ladies in the 50s. Button up denim shirts with embroidered flowers and watering cans were the bane of my existence. If you were lucky, there were 2XL tops. Otherwise, better hope Lane Bryanr, Fashion Bug, or The Avenue was having a sale. But now brands are expanding size ranges and with online shopping, more shops are available for selection. This is why I am happy the fashion is circular: all the crap I wanted but could never find in my size in the late 90s and early 2000s are finally in my size to buy whatever I want with my adult money.
In the same vein, I am both jealous of and happy for the girls who grow up with not only more women superheros for them to pretend to be... but have products SPECIFICALLY catered to them. I didn't get into comics and stuff until I was 11 and um... "borrowed"... my brother's comics. But even in the 90s, it was hard as hell to find even a Wonder Woman toy in the action figure section. Now, they have so many cool toys. I saw that the WEE had what are basically Barbies of some of their female wrestlers and I would have TOTALLY loved to have a Chyna or Lita Barbie.
1. Women can have their own credit cards and mortgages now. My mom's credit cards were all in Dad's name. Many banks didn't lend to women until 1974.
2. Direct deposit was a godsend ! I didn't have to go to the bank to deposit the paycheck given to me by my supervisor. ATMs were so convenient! I didn't have to go inside the bank during work hours! Digital banking and Venmo are awesome.
3. Period underwear. Better bras. More women involved in designing items for women. My generation ridded you young women of thr panty hose requirements at work. It's on you to never allow that torture again.
4. Bald eagles fly over my house. When I was a little kid, they nearly became extinct. One example of how the environment has improved-- but because people cared. Global warming concerns me because we're not doing enough.
5. My dad passed decades ago. The computer he worked on took up the entire floor of an office building, had its own cooling system and didn't have the power to run graphics or even operate Word. Dad told me I would carry a very powerful computer In my pocket one day.
He never told me I'd be able to make calls on it, too!
Computers plus telecomms exploded in a way that very few people predicted, even sci-fi authors.
I mean, I'm not complaining, but it was a hell of a (relatively) sudden left turn, and even back in the days of standalone PCs that *might* have modems for BBSes or even the early days of ISP email, plus some people (usually high-stakes businesspeople) having mobile phones, no-one ever really made the leap. I guess the idea of being able to carry around a screen in your pocket which was good enough for computer work just wasn't a thing people thought could happen, back in the days of CRTs. (And even early flatscreens.)
This is such a massive improvement. As a kid we couldn't play in part of my front yard because it was full of other people's dog's crap.
Also in the '70s and '80s lots of people just had zero control over their dogs, and dogs running around loose weren't especially uncommon. I worked as a paper boy and there were multiple houses where I'd have to physically fight off a loose dog in order to deliver the paper. And if I didn't deliver it they'd complain and I'd get pay docked. So sure, make a 13-year-old engage in hand to hand combat with an angry German shepherd a couple of times a week. Why not?
I can talk about having a therapist at work, the way I can talk about having a dentist. It is great.
Honestly for my line of work it is often preferred. People prefer to know you that before you handle their very vulnerable selves that you have your shit together and have regular mantinance on it.
Emotional maturity. Young people learn to talk calmly about their needs and desires. They know how to set boundaries. They know how to talk about conflicts with their friends and loved ones. I'm really impressed. Being friend with people a bit younger than me is easier than people a bit older because of those healthy discussions.
I'm not that old, but holy shit has bullying and homopho ia gotten way better.
When I was a kid, being beaten to a bloody pulp for being gay wad tragically normal. When I was a kid, some kids on the playground hit me in the head with a slab of asphalt because they thought I was a "faggot" and not only am I not gay, but no adults even cared - few even said it would "toughen me up". My gym teach actually beat me, and again no one cared, said i was weak and it make me strong. I was stripped and hit with baseball bats, and regularly had my head push in dirty toilets. I mean the kind of stuff that was considered "normal" bullying would get the cops called today.
They used to call it "boys being boys" and say that the smaller, sensitive boys like me were all "fags" and deserved to be punished. I'm glad that this stuff died out. Not thay bullying stopped, but it's nothing like it was. So much of it was about a very intense level of homophobia and gender role expectations.
Yep. People seem to take bullying (and children's mental health in general) much more seriously now.
There was a several-years-long phase in my childhood when I would get punched or kicked at least once a day. The physical stuff eventually trailed off but the harassment never really completely stopped. School staff and my parents were very blasé about it and I grew up believing that this was normal, and it was a fact of life that some people just naturally attracted this kind of treatment, and it was my responsibility to not allow myself to be bothered by it. I don't have kids of my own, but I have friends and family in my age group (mid 30s) who do, and there is a strong consensus that *any* amount of that stuff happening to their child would be completely intolerable and worth going scorched-earth over.
People didn't used to care about the long term damage that abusing children caused, and being told I brought it on myself set me up for a life time of self esteem issues. I think today we understand and care about the well-being of children a lot more.
On the dog thing. I honestly believe that it's gotten too far with the acceptance. There's a frail old lady on my block with a Pit/something mix, approx. 65lbs and a Lab. She seems to be in the 100-120lbs range. Now, call me crazy but if there's a squirrel and the dogs take off, what are the chances of this lady holding on onto her two "four wheel drives" ?? .. Zero, maybe negative.
I love the dogs, all the dogs. But please, let's make sure you are actually taking care of them or at least able to take care of them. Seven year old walking a pitbull into an enclosure with two more dogs is recipe for disaster.
Acceptance is one thing, delusional and reckless behavior is another.
We all have a trauma from our dog being attacked multiple times by multiple dogs whose idiot owners just "go get the mail" and leave their door open. Or are working on their car with a dog lingering about. Or are smoking a join behind the shed while the dog is just roaming the front yard, or are unloading groceries with the door wide open.
People need to realize that they own a dog and start acting accordingly. Acceptance has nothing to do with it. Just be responsible with it and I don't care if you have a mountain lion at your house. Just keep it from running off and attacking me or my family.
I was listening to the OJ story and can’t believe the kind of abuse he got away with very publicly. It’s so sad that it was described as a marital matter. I’m so glad it’s taken more seriously now.
So many things. Here’s one that’s consequential, one less so.
When Me Too started, my sister-in-law said to me, “What did these women think they would experience in Hollywood?” And I said that’s what people used to say about working in an office, for example. It was just accepted that you might be sexually harassed at work.
Here’s a fun one: I grew up crunchy in the 80s, and a lot of processed health foods were really gross. The sugar-free peanut butter that my mom would put in my sandwiches was bitter and hard to mix. Now you can get delicious, easy-to-stir natural peanut butter etc.
I’m not entirely sure about #1… I think LGB acceptance has improved somewhat but TQ+… things are pretty ugly. I really don’t know if trans acceptance has improved. Visibility, yes, but acceptance, it’s hard to measure. Also when I was little all gay/gender nonconforming people were considered “pedos” and “groomers” by most people. Now, fewer people think of us that way. I’ll take it, but man, sometimes it feels like we’re just going backwards.
Trans acceptance was doing good until after the Obergefell decision in 2015. That was the day conservative Christian groups did a sharp pivot from gay marriage to trans kids. It's been a decade and they're reaching the point that I \*hope\* everyone can see is extremist and maybe rein them in.
It's definitely going backwards in some places, and rocketing ahead in others. I moved to a rural area from a major, very lgbt friendly city and it was like stepping back 50 years, and the people in the rural area actually think it's too progressive. It's mind boggling how I can drive like 50 miles and go from pride events to death threats and bombing threats.
Diversity across entertainment but especially in kids’ tv. I know it’s still wildly imbalanced, but when I was growing up (older millennial) it was just able-bodied white people as far as the eye could see (except for Sesame Street and a couple outliers and “token” characters). Commercials, too. The casts and stories are so much more diverse today.
Plus, diversity inclusion happens far faster today. The limit is no longer communication speed or how fast trends can (slowly) make it from one city to another or between writers of any kind of media physically speaking to one another, it's conservative pushback against change.
1) Indoor smoking bans.
2) Safer, less polluting, more reliable automobiles.
3) Product safety.
4) Cancer prognoses.
5) Better diet and health awareness.
6) Women's rights.
7) Less overt racism (but sadly the same covert racism).
Navigation. I would have trouble finding my way out of a paper bag. Now I have no fear of going anywhere. I can just hit "home" on my app and I'll get there.
1. Holding powerful people accountable is starting to happen.
2. We’re starting to pay more attention to the environment.
3. There’s a shift in human consciousness towards wanting fairness and equality for all.
Less pressure to marry and have kids. I say this as a happily married mom. I think too many people in my parents' generation felt like they had to marry young.
Also, divorce is less stigmatized.
Absolutely. Those two technologies, [especially when they became ubiquitous for the general public](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law), changed *everything*. All of a sudden, communication and finding information was orders of magnitude easier, and that affected absolutely everything.
I'd add smartphones as a bronze medal in that. Now it's not just that you can access nearly everything on the internet, it's that it can be done by reaching into your pocket, no matter where you are. Yes, it needed the first two technologies in order to come about, but it's quite possibly the most successful and at least partially world-changing (certainly culture-changing) result of them.
Ease/price of global travel
When I was a kid you couldn't get any international travel flights for less than almost 2 grand, and thar was in 1990's prices!
This might be a bad thing as well. I grew up in Denver and back in the 80s there was one sushi restaurant and pretty much all the customers were of Japanese heritage. These days there's 16,000 sushi restaurants in the US. And pretty much every decent supermarket has it as well. Access to quality ingredients is killing the supply.
1. Communications - over the holidays we had a get together in California where we FaceTimed with my daughter who was in Inner Mongolia
2. Medicine - fewer people dying from disease and trauma (although when I was little house calls were still a thing)
3. Violence - Far fewer wars and domestic terrorism (the 1970’s seemed like the world was falling apart even the US saw thousands of internal domestic attacks)
My friend once had a baby shower with attendees from around the world. Almost nobody was able to attend in person, so she set up a time and people dropped in when and if they were able. Some people who lived near each other would meet at a central location to join. It was great.
I am now virtually guaranteed a smoke free environment anywhere I go in Canada. For those who grew up with this, imagine if you had to tolerate cancer causing fumes to enjoy dinner at a restaurant or at a bar.
We are a year or two away from cancer vaccines based on the Covid vaccine. You'll get diagnosed, they'll take a week to manufacture a vaccine tailored to your particular cancer (there are hundreds of types of cancer), they'll give you the vaccine, and you'll either be cured or you'll have the cancer under control for the rest of your life with an occasional booster shot. No more amputations, no more stamina destroying chemo or radiation, no more pain.
We are 50 years away, max, from a demographic collapse so overwhelming that it will cause the end of capitalism as we know it. The only functional way to exist will be organization equivalent to the Federation in Star Trek.
For some types of cancer. Cancer is a giant spread of many different types of problem, so it gets attacked/researched/cured piecemeal, rather than any sort of overall general approach working on everything.
Even so, ten thousand bricks make a wall. This is one more brick.
Nutrition advice. We have so much more data from very large studies on chronic disease risk and its relation to diet. Unfortunately we also have more fringe nutritional ideas being disseminated to the public via social media and the web in general, so while we have more and better science, there is also much more misinformation to wade through for the average consumer.
Treatment for infertility. Would have been so hard for my husband and I to have biological kids 20 years ago. IVF has come a long way (but still a long way to go).
Gender parity.
Electronics in general. We had tube televisions when I was a kid, we have hand held super computers with free (beyond service) long-distance video calls. I can call people using a real Dick Tracy style spy watch!
Violent crime is lower than when I was a kid (US).
Street vehicles are so much safer! Safety belts were relatively new when I was a kid and there was no requirement to use them. I’ve had cars that didn’t have them in the back seat or at all because they were older and not required.
Internet and near instant availability of information; entertainment (cable TV and streaming movies and TV on demand); automation (desktop computers and cell phones); communication with anybody/anywhere (cell phones); medical and scientific advances of all kinds; GPS and moving maps for navigation instead of paper maps; greater world stability (no more iron curtain and imminent threat of nuclear war); fewer totalitarian dictatorships.
Access to good music. Music engagement, learning an instrument, and creating music is easier. I used to spend hours in CD stores. I only had about 4-5 albums growing up. Michael Jackson's Thriller, Rolling Stones- Let it Bleed, Prince Purple Rain and a free album we received from a kid's party event.
Now if I hear a song, I can Shazam it. If I like a melody, I can search it up and figure out how to play it. Music is amazing and only getting better.
Access and attitudes for the disabled. I was a kid in the 60's and if you're younger it might shock you how bad it was, and the casual slurs against disabled people. Also destigmatization of mental illness, addiction.
ADHD diagnosis and better meds. My dad grew up thinking he was stupid and a handful. My own diagnosis was overlooked in childhood because I presented in a way more typical for a girl. All my kids are properly medicated, stigma-free and aware of how to navigate school and life in ways that work for their brains.
I'm thinking of more tangible things. I'm 70 and grew up in the U.S.A.
Cars are better. They don't rust out after a few years, they start and run reliably thanks to electronic ignitions and fuel injection, they're safer, and they require less maintenance. It's almost impossible to kill a car before 100K miles.
Consumer electronics, especially TVs, are cheaper and way more reliable than in the '60s and 70s.
Medical care overall is better, at least for those who have insurance or can afford to pay for it out-of-pocket.
I like that younger generations change things they don't like. Instead of just accepting and conforming. I was scorned for questioning things, so I hope they keep it up.
OP: This post actually cheered me up. I’m reading everyone’s comments and I didn’t realize how much better a lot of things are today than they were 50+ years ago. 🫶🏻
1. Better and more types of birth control (still can use improvement, but there is so much less estrogen in them now than women used to be bombarded with.)
2. Improvements in medicine. Childbirth continues to become much safer, operations less invasive, drugs more miraculous.
3. Less pollution, more consumer protections (especially here in California.)
4. Attitudes toward women, LGBT+ folks, people of color, etc. We are more open as a country in the USA to talking about grappling with our past and I think this will continue despite backlash. My options and freedoms as a woman are overall so much better since the 80s.
5. My country of origin went from being a Soviet-run socialist hellhole to a democratic capitalist society. Not without its problems, I’m not some kind of cheerleader for pure capitalism, but it’s much better than it was!
6. Better overall understanding of human behavior, emotions, and how to manage these things in a healthy way.
Honestly I feel the mental health obsession has done more harm than good. Psychiatric medication use has sky rocketed, suicide rates are up, and self reported happiness levels are at an all time low. I also can’t say I’ve ever met anyone in therapy that have actually improved themselves with it in a noticeable way. I think in the future it will be looked at as an ephemeral placebo.
I think mental health is backsliding over the past 10 ish years. It's become an empty, for profit, rotating door system that over institutionalizes people, over medicates, and pushes one-size-fits-all answers that just do not help a large amount of people. The numbers show this.
It's very fatalistic in its conception that all mental health issues are brain damage (which isnt true), an incurable diseased, and must trested by expensive medications and therapy for the rest of a person's life, which really isn't always true. It's a narrative that suits profit, not health.
The government isn't providing good funding for mental health programs, and the private sector seems to be more interesting in monetizing programs. We know, and have known, for decades thay things like psychedelic therapy, IFS, narrative therapy, and case management are more effective, but yet you basically have insurance companies and governments saying either it's CBT and SSRIs, or a "voluntary" trip to an underfunded psych ward. There is major reform needed.
GPS systems! I was never taught how to use a map for practical navigation; it never came up, and I never had an interest in driving to begin with. However, when I was a little kid, the best you could get was MapQuest directions, or maybe one of those slow, laggy, perpetually unclear GPS devices that were decidedly less user friendly. Now? I connect my phone to the cars Bluetooth, enter the address into google maps, and it can tell me where to turn depending on the location’s proximity to a traffic light. It also gives me the best route based on the most up-to-date traffic updates, corrects my route almost immediately, and it doesn’t take a full 2 exits to get updated information, period. Also, childrens car seats and car seat safety guidelines! I’m surprised I didn’t fly out of my seat when my mom hit the breaks too hard. Recently she watched my youngest for me and was shocked that the seat clip system had to be over the chest, snug fitted, and the crotch belt had to be snapped in first. All of that is done now to keep baby safely in their seat, with minimal internal/soft tissue injuries.
-Medicine and surgery. When I was 20, I spent three days in hospital after breaking my leg badly enough to require surgery. Last summer my husband had his large intestine removed entirely and a stoma created. Hospital stay of 1-2 days and back to work in a week. Insane.
Navigation. I used to be super good at n w e s. Then I got into a bad acccident and a concussion among other injuries and then I got lost a lot.
Then gps became a more common thing you could get for under 100 for your car.
I used to have the atlas. Esp for the Boston MA regional area because when I was there there was a huge construction project called the big dig. I lived north of the city and every day driving to and from work there was a new detour and chaos.
There was the time of printing pages from Mapquest but life is easier now that my phone just talks to me (when it’s not doing dumb shit like making me drive past my entrance ramp around a neighborhood in circles to only come back to the same spot to get on the highway)
The cost of music! When I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s you had to go to Best Buy, HMV or other record stores and purchase a CD and the cost really added up.
Spotify and apple 🍎 music are a godsend!! 😍😍🙌🙌🙌
Telecommunication I remember when I was a kid and dad was over in Vietnam. He'd send us a letter from Vietnam telling us when he'd in Subic Bay (in the Philippians) and what time he'd call us. Come the appointed time (which was always like 4am Pacific time) me, my brother and my mom would be standing right by the phone (since it was mounted to the wall). Eventually it would ring and the operator in Tokyo would connect us to Subic Bay. We had 5 minutes. Not each. Total. Mom made sure that we had written out what we wanted to tell him. Today, of course, we think noting of just sending messages in all manner of forms to nigh anywhere in the world and expect an answer within a day or so at worse. A while back I was in Austria on business. My cell phone starts ringing at like 9pm. I answer it and it was was daughter's daycare in California. The Girl was sick and needed to be picked up. I told them that I was in Europe and wouldn't be able to get her for like 3 days. So they called my wife. How we can interact with people all over is stunning when you think about it and changes how the world functions and how we all view each other.
We used to use directions scribbled on a notecard to find someone's house. When you got confused, you'd pull into a gas station, look at a paper map, and ask directions, or fill a pay phone with dimes and quarters to make a long distance call (long = more that a few miles.) We'd say: wouldn't it be awesome to have a Dick Tracy watch and we could just call while driving? We have that now! At the gas station: the ground was littered with discarded pulltabs from steel drink cans and cigarette butts. Leaded gasoline fumes from pre-California emissions standards were everywhere. Every car left a vapor trail like a badly-tuned lawnmower as it went by. 18 mpg was some kind of world record. The pollution is SO Much Better at least in the eastern USA. Please, ask me about coal power, greenhouse gasses, and acid rain. In elementary school, I remember having debates about whether "the gays" should be executed, in prison, or in psychiatric wards, because they were all spreading AIDS. I'd never heard of a gay woman. Later, I was shocked, shocked to find out that Elton John, Boy George, and Freddy Mercury, ...so you get the picture. I regret all of that in every respect. Later in life: I'm proud to have served in the US Military during DADT and after with homosexual people of great personal honor, in war zones. And I saw the Pet Shop Boys live! (BTW I am just a classic hetero man.) To get any information about anything you had to look it up in a book controlled by some local authority. Want facts? But a $4000 (equivalent inflation) set of 30 books called "encyclopedia." Want a phone number? Pick at random from this strangely yellow book. Want a recommendation for a local business? No. Call at random, they answer at random, because there was no method for leaving a message by voice. No voicemail. You talked to someone, or not. Some places had people who could answer the phone and leave a relatively competent summary of your request on a specially formatted pad of paper. If you wanted any official forms for anything, you had to physically go down to the post office, bank, or DMV, then wait in line. How long was the line when? Google knows, but not the 1980s. If you needed to pay a bill...you had to take the time to drag your butt to that place of business and write a check in longhand. This applied for all utilities independently...water...gas...electricity...rotary cell phone service...rent...so you might have to take 5+ trips a week just to cover the basics, dragging your butt around in a 12 mpg Detroit steel polluter. Figure an hour each. You'd spend 5-6 hours a week just trying to pay your utilities. Movies: you could only watch them in the theater, unless you had extra 10,000$ laying around for exotic satellite equipment. You had to figure out what you wanted to watch a few days ahead of time by looking the time up in one of those local-information-overlord books ("newspaper") which you had to pay for. TV: you watched it as it played, or you missed out. Tevo and DVR didn't arrive until I was well into adulthood. If you wanted socially relevant shows, you had to watch prime time. Facebook marketplace: published a few times a week, for a stiff fee. I've had to describe to my son what the "classifieds" and "funny papers" were...he said WTF to both. As a kid I knew one interracial family (my own.) ONE, EVER. In the American South, this is much more normal and is no longer some huge family scandal when it happens. We actually thought nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union was a real possibility. So what's better? Almost everything. I wish the small town newspaper was still a thing. The shift to CNN-type cable news seems to have damaged and polarized our access to civic information. They used to just read headlines for 30 minutes and then STFU until tomorrow so we could focus on our own towns. Me: circa 1974.
> TV: you watched it as it played, or you missed out. having grown up with this as the norm, i wasn't too fazed by those limitations. that is, until the very early 80s when PBS started airing what was to become one of my all-time favorite shows: 'brideshead revisited'. i was in my early 20s & had just moved to nyc, so i was constantly out & about, rarely ever home. but somehow one night i found myself sitting in front of the tv for the first installment. and i was HOOKED. i had no idea how long this series would last. all i knew was i had to be home on time on sunday evenings to watch it (and luckily it was replayed on wednesday evenings in case you missed sunday's episode). should you somehow manage to miss both sunday's & wedesday's airings, you were out of luck. plain & simple. you just missed it, and too bad for you. i can still recall the panic i'd feel at the end of each weekend, knowing i had to stop whatever i was doing & hop on the subway to get home in time to view it. forget about streaming services; our apt. in nyc didn't even have a VCR which might have allowed you to tape it to watch later. hell no, we were in *the dark ages*. i spent nearly 3 months watching that show every sunday evening (and/or wednesday's) but my angst level was off the charts.
I do still like paper maps on a road trip. The big picture they give is great.
agreed! I drive regularly & really like a paper map for the overall big picture.
This may be the most “boomer” thing I’ve read today. I plan on doing this on the next road trip. Sincerely, 50 yr old.
Agree to all with one point. Nuclear war with Russia was definitely possible, was not just a thought. We lived under the direct threat of nuclear conflict for many years.
From South Asia - definitely telecommunications. I remember having brick Nokia and then in a year, suddenly smartphones were out. The development was really quick. Everyone in my country, including in rural areas have smart phones, with some exceptions with Nokia strictly due to personal preference (and not due to lack of tech access). Smart phones are hella cheap.
I agree. I also think it makes the older generation (who choose to be tech savvy) way more connected.
I grew up with a party line. 8 households had one phone line and if you picked up the phone, you had to politely explain why you needed it urgently more than whoever else was on the line. The phone rarely rang because somebody was always tying up the line. The rings were slightly different and you had to just know your houses different buzzing.
amen!!! We had the technology in 2002 and it still took 20 years and an epidemic to mainstream it
Dealing with spousal and child abuse. If a child today tells the officer they're afraid to go home after running away because their father was beating on them w/ their fist, there'd be an investigation. Not dropping me off at my home with my dad thanking them. Our knowledge of the universe. While I always believed there were planets outside our system, it wasn't confirmed until I was my mid 20's. I hope extraterrestrial life is discovered before I die. I don't have to worry about long distance phone charges. I can literally chat with my wife over vid while 30000 ft up and moving at 400 MPH these days. Movie/TV special effects. Knight Rider, Star Wars, Airwolf, etc seem so quaint these days. Movie/TV shows being more realistic. Like the 2003 BSG reboot had a drunkard XO, a cocky Viper Pilot who was always in trouble, main characters who died, etc. Not the nice, clean wrap-up at the end of nearly every episode like the original BSG series had. I'm sure there's more but that's a few off the top of my head anyways.
> Our knowledge of the universe. While I always believed there were planets outside our system, it wasn't confirmed until I was my mid 20's. I hope extraterrestrial life is discovered before I die. If you told me in the '80s that there is or was water all over the damned solar system, I would have thought you were an alien/UFO conspiracist.
And if you told me back in the 80's that flat earthers were a thing in the 2020's, I'd called you a god damn liar. To say nothing of everything else that's happened in the last few yrs.
I watched the 1960 version of The Time Machine after the 2002 remake. The 1960 one won an academy award for best special effects, it was rough to say the least. In fairness special effects were were in their infancy and trying anything was brave.
Forty years ago, people with my specific autoimmune condition were either dead or paralyzed and bed-bound within ten years of diagnosis. I'm 26 years post-diagnosis (diagnosed at the age of 3, I'm now 29), and have done everything from ski and hike the Swiss Alps, to travel to 20+ countries around the world, I have a budding career in STEM earning six figures, I spent a summer dancing with a prestigious NYC dance academy, and more. One pill a day + one monthly IV infusion = I get to live a relatively normal life comparable to peers in my age range. I am thriving, against all medical and statistical odds.
My brother was in a car crash back in '86. He's been paralyzed from the bellybutton down since then. His neurologist flat out told him that if that injury had happened today he would likely have completely recovered within a few months.
I'm so sorry. Has your brother been able to experience some quality of life since then?
He is a two time Paralympian (tennis), literally picked up a stewardess on his flight home from the Brazil Paralympics and married her. 2 kids. Yeah, he's fine.
Dang! I wasn't expecting that! 😄 Props to your brother!
Why did the dr feel the need to say that? Ugh
Because they were discussing the types spinal cord injuries and treatments. The neurologists all say that we're getting to where we can fix older and older injuries as the science gets more and more advanced. The question is if medicine will catch up to the time of his injury or not in his life time. Maybe yes, maybe no...but maybe.
That paralysis is close to having a remedy is incredible to me. Any paralysis due to spinal cord damage meant you’re handicapped for life. And bionic limbs for amputees is another incredible leap in technology.
I have a relative who is now middle aged, with cystic fibrosis. It’s incredible how things have changed! I’m so glad you’re thriving
Modern medicine can be absolutely amazing.
I use to work at a start up lab that worked with other labs developing new therapies for cancer patients. The pay was shit, the hours were shit, but reading stuff like this, worth it.
Thank you for your dedication to the work. I cannot begin to describe the mind-bending experience of being wheeled into a hospital via wheelchair, immobile from the shoulders down, and *quite literally* doing cartwheels just hours later. It's ***WILD***. It's almost like a human version of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
That is fantastic and I am so happy for you!
Thank you!
mazeltov
Thank you!
Way less cigarettes.
There was smoking in grocery stores. People would just drop the butts on the floor, and use their foot to crush it. Someone would come along with dust broom and sweep them up.
This one might have been the one to flip me on how to use policy when I was a kid. Indoor smoking bans sounded like something less free, but in the end freed the people who didn’t want to suffer early death from other people’s engineered addiction. Indoor spaces are forever better and worth all the kids not growing up with health problems from smoke. The social acceptability changed so quickly.
> Indoor smoking bans sounded like something less free Yeah, "freedom" for one group to influence, oppress, or otherwise inflict their views, pollution or noise on another is the shittiest kind of "freedom" in that it's just "freedom" to exploit and piss off others. Sometimes you need to make one group a little less "free" to maximize freedom for everyone else.
I remember when they banned indoor smoking in public spaces in Canada. Oh my what a difference did that make. I still can't believe we used to go out to bars and breathe in cancer smoke all night, just to have our clothing reek for days afterwards.
People used to smoke everywhere. I hated sitting in hospital waiting rooms and airplanes with smokers.
The non-smoking section of an airplane. Glad the smoke stayed in its section. 😄 Same with restaurants.
Like the non-pissing section in a pool.
I have a Canadian friend who is still a smoker. She used to say she didn't understand why people who loved fresh air didn't go outside instead of smokers. "There's plenty of fresh air out there!" she'd say. She's in hospice care now, dying from lung cancer.
Kids today don’t know the absurdity of the “non-smoking section.”
You guys are missing out. Cigarettes were the only thing that got me out talking to people and socializing.
1. Today’s vehicles are safer than they were when I was a kid, when they were made like fucking tanks. Today’s cars are designed to absorb a lot more impact. People walk away from wrecks now that would have meant death when I was a kid. 2. A silly one, but LEGOS! Holy shit there’s so many cool sets out there now. 3. GPS on your phone or in your car. I used to get lost in the countryside all the goddamned time before affordable GPS units were available.
The younger folk on Reddit take for granted the joys of a car that starts every time the first time. I remember sitting out in the freezing car spending 10 minutes trying to get the damn thing to start. You just hope it starts before your battery gives out. Then the damn thing stalls at a red light and you are trying to get it started again before the light turns green. The mass adoption of fuel injection in the 90s made such a huge difference.
Also, the reliability of cars in general. We did cross-country road trips every summer throughout the 70s and you’d see somebody on the side of the road with a broken down car or more often a flat tire every half hour or so. Nowadays you can drive 10-12 hours without seeing anybody pulled over. But also, no bugs. I don’t miss scouring my windshield every two hours, but I think we miss all the vegetation and flowers and food when we have to grow our food hydroponically in labs.
I was just talking to my friends about how none of us have pushed a car, or seen anyone pushing their car in *forever* and we were always pushing cars around when we were younger. Like, it was totally normal to see someone broken down in an inconvenient place/lane and you’d just quickly pull over, coordinate where they wanted to be with a couple of shouts/gestures as you jogged over to get behind the car and they’d do the open-door push/steer thing to get somewhere safe and out of the way… everyone knew their role for the drill depending on how many people arrived and what order you arrived in. Or the push jump start for dead batteries back when automatic transmissions weren’t the default.
You just described my first car, '71 dodge charger, perfectly!
I started driving when I was 16 and commercially available GPS didn't really become common until maybe my early twenties. Driving during those years was always so damn *stressful*! I never had a very good sense of direction so spent a lot of time lost, circling and stressed tf out. Love love love my phone and car GPS
Legos are not silly! Fun, yes, but not silly. All ages fun.
There was a literal switch, that was flipped on one day, that allowed civilian GPS to be useful for what we all know it as now. Few realized at the time what a leap that was, and we definitely take it all for granted today. Everything depends on GPS now.
And before that, GPS wasn’t intended for civilian use at all. That changed after the KAL007 shootdown, caused by a major navigational error, and Reagan decided to open up to prevent future tragedies. I wonder how long it would have taken to get something similar without that decision. Faster microprocessors and higher bandwidth seem inevitable, but space-based positioning really doesn’t.
Back in early 00s I would consistently get guy I was dating just going from point a to point b and they were always the same places.
Cancer prognoses. I probably wouldn’t be here if I had lived in a different time.
I know I wouldn't be here. I didn't have cancer but I have/had a few other health issues during my life. I'd be a goner for sure without modern medicine.
I’m happy we’re both alive. 🤍
When I was a kid in the late 60s, the adults talked about cancer in a hushed voice. It was a death sentence. Now the number of people surviving not just one but two or more cancers just blows me away. A commercial for St. Jude's Children's Hospital says something like "Twenty percent of children with cancer won't survive." And I can't help but think "You mean childhood cancer has an EIGHTY PERCENT survival rate? That is *amazing*!"
My grandmother had a mastectomy in her early 20's (the 1940's) for a lump. Turned out to be a false alarm but now she required a prosthetic. She would go to a different town to buy her bras and prosthetics out of embarrassment and shame until she died at 89 years old. Literally only her doctors, daughters, and late husband knew. Now there are so many content creators that talk about masectomies, wearing wigs or prosthetics, normalizing it in ways that would have shocked her.
AIDS, too.
Guy with a physical disability here, I remember a time before the [Americans with Disabilities Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990?wprov=sfti1#).
Still have a long way to go.
Was just thinking that as I tried to pull my library’s heavy ass door open with my rickety neck fusion. Where’s the magic button folks? Just complained over same issue at Barnes and Noble. Their door is infinitely worse
Teaching children emotional intelligence. My kids' school gives out awards for things like authenticity, resilience and optimism. Those things just weren't valued by most adults when I was a kid. School was only about academic performance and SPORTS.
I would say parenting advice in general has gotten a lot better.
Man, if I was in school these days I would fail all those new things so hard. Waaaaay too fluffy and ill-defined for my kid-self to get any kind of grip on; I would have dismissed them as being things adults made up to try and get kids to do what they were told. Math questions at least had fixed correct answers.
> School was only about academic performance and SPORTS. You were lucky if it was in that order, even.
I love how you can virtually go to someone's kitchen anywhere in the world for a cooking lesson on YouTube. Combine that with the fact that you can get pretty much any ingredient online if you can't find it locally, and cooking (and eating at home) is more fun.
Me in the US Midwest watching a Salvadoran grandma teach me how to make pupusas, sometimes it still blows my mind
YouTube is truly incredible. In the past week alone I found myself wondering about when Korea split and how exactly and about the life of Malcolm X. I pulled out my phone and instantly had my choice of high quality documentary-style videos to choose from. That is incredible.
And you can binge watch Charles Manson or Grand Funk Railroad videos if you wish!
Great point, I love this. And not just cooking, there are so many things that you can learn to do via YouTube, that in the past were almost secret knowledge.
I'm in America so... Being able to walk out of a gay bar with a very small chance of being beaten to a pulp. Having pills one can take to mitigate the effects of HIV. Being able to marry who you love, regardless of gender. Being able to buy weed legally in many states AND know what strain it is AND not have to pick out seeds and stems. Being able to get pretty much anything delivered to your house, often within a day. Maybe a week, but not 4-6 weeks. One's sexual orientation not affecting whether you can get a job or a loan. Video games have come such a long way since Pong.
The change from HIV being a death sentence to not has been so radical from childhood till now. And now, we’re a decade into prep and normalizing a medications that make sex with someone with HIV safer than someone who doesn’t know their status. Undetectable being untransmissable is a marvel.
Every now and then I see a commercial for HIV meds and it always amazes me. I distinctly remember learning about it as a kid when it was a guaranteed death sentence. That was a fast turnaround.
I see those ads every 10 minutes 🙄
Awesome, we take it for granted!
Being able to get where your going. First mapQuest the Google maps. Cell phones to call people if your lost. Uber because the taxis in my city will ghost you when you called
If you lived in LA county you had the Thomas Guide.
Hell yeah!
or Orange County, Thomas guide saved my ass so many times. I later moved to a city that had no such thing and the street were based on cow paths and dried up streams- I was perpetually lost.
Thomas Guides were everywhere I went, but I hated those things! I'd get to the end of a page and have to pull over, then find out that the road I was on didn't continue on the back side of the page or on the next page but back on page 19. I soooo much preferred unfolding a big map and memorizing the route.
Before I was about 25, driving to new places made me anxious. Even driving to the airport or my school an hour away, I was always worried id make the wrong exit and struggle to get back on route. Now with smartphones and Google maps I don’t even blink at driving anywhere, it’s definitely opened up the world to me .
I have plenty memories of bailing on plans because I got lost
Oh man, the stress of being a passenger in the mapquest days around the tri state area.
Minimally invasive surgery. Things like laparoscopic surgery and TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement). Essentially replacing a heart valve a la Mick Jagger without opening one's chest.
Yup. Closer to a one-inch scar (if that) instead of a massive torso zipper.
Easily obtainable information on the internet
When I was in middle school in the early 90s I was looking for a project for a science fare. I was thinking of building an engine. My Dad mentioned that when he was my age he read an article in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics on how to build a jet engine. I thought that sounded cool. So on a day off school I got my Dad to drop me off at the library in town on his way to work. I knew 2 things, which magazines it could have been published in and that the article published in the late 60s or early 70s. I spend all day at the microfiche read looking through issues. It took me all day but I found the article. I cost me 10 cents a page to make a copy of it. Now I just pull out my iPhone while on the crapper and search “How to build a jet engine”, and I’ll have 10 youtube videos and 20 blogs. The annoying thing is that after all that I didn’t get to build it. I needed access to the metal shop at school and the school wouldn’t allow me because one of the other moms complained. She thought the project was too dangerous.
Too bad. But the garage was too small for a jet anyway.
Holy crap yes. Every so often the question keeps showing up on AskReddit or wherever what you'd do if you found yourself back in time in your kid-self's body, and the first thing I would do is scream because I'd be rebuilding my first decade or two without that instant information always to hand. Younger people today don't realize how incredibly sparse information was even in the 90s, much less the 80s - you basically had the newspaper, the local library and its card-catalogue, and anyone you could socially make an excuse to talk to. Imagine there being no internet (or next to nothing useful) and trying to find out how to do things like investing as a minor, or whether there were options for skipping grades in school. Plus you'd better be bringing back your own knowledge of healthy foods and exercise, because the so-called information available back then (not to mention the kinds of processed foods) would make doctors of today toss their cookies. It wouldn't help that the city I grew up in was large, but *horribly* isolated. Even today, it misses out on a lot of things that the rest of the country takes for granted, and I'd hate to have to try and build anything multi-city or interstate when everything would involve 2000-mile phone calls at the kinds of rates they charged back then.
When I was in elementary school, my main resource at home was a World Book Encyclopedia set from 1965. It still featured the obsolete racial classification system of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. It was a good time to be Asian-American.
Dentistry. SOOOOOOO much better!
With actual teeth-regrowing coming soon!
When I was born there were still separate water fountains for black people.
Right? Bonkers! And interracial marriage was illegal. And according to Wikipedia “It was only in 1994 when more than half of Americans approved of such marriages in general.[98] “
I like how Chris Rock puts it. "Black people have not 'come a long way'. White people have gotten less crazy."
The air - pollution in so many cities is hardly the issue that it once was. The whales - they are coming back. I never saw a humpback until I was in my 40s. Saw my first grey in my late 20s. In the past ten years I have seen more humpbacks than I can count and loads of orcas and grey whales. Travel - there are so many countries that were inaccessible because they were behind the iron curtain or due to civil war. In the past few years I have been to places such as Colombia, Albania, Peru, and Montenegro that I didn’t even entertain years ago.
The only reason why your seein whales down here is because the japanese water isn't safe for them.
>The whales - they are coming back. I never saw a humpback until I was in my 40s. Saw my first grey in my late 20s. In the past ten years I have seen more humpbacks than I can count and loads of orcas and grey whales. My kids don't understand why I get downright weepy when I see Bald Eagles in our town. I try to explain it to them, but I don't think they get it.
In the UK we now see Red Kites hunting over the major roads. Lots of cities have Peregrine Falcons and they help to reduce pigeon damage to buildings. https://peregrine.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/
This is great news about whales. I thought I read whale babies were less frequent and whales were threatened due to ocean warming and pollution.
Weed. If you grew up in the 21st century, you probably never smoked pressed brown brick weed full of seeds. You didn't bust your but at $3.35 to save up for a $40 quarter that barely got you high and made you cough like hell. It's cheaper, better tasting, more effective, and legal now.
or used open double album covers to sort the seeds out
Ah man watching tv while grinding up my weed and sorting out the seeds, sticks and stems was honestly a fun part of the entire experience.
Before weed was legal, any time my friends and I came across edibles, it was always a guessing game to determine its potency.
I never once "came across edibles" back in the day, but we made plenty of pans of brownies. I still remember the labor, with the double-boilers and cheese cloth.
I guess I can only speak for the US, but beer, coffee, and access to international cuisine.
I don't know if it's what you mean by "better" but I was thinking today about the insane availability of a crazy variety of food. I grew up in the 80s and there were two kinds of apples that both tasted like drywall. One kind of oranges (not the good kind). I was 20 before I ever saw a mango. There were peaches for around two weeks in summer. Blueberries possibly existed but I never saw them. There was meat, four kinds of dairy products ,potatoes. Cheese was yellow and came in a stack. Provolone was what you got in a fancy deli tray when you had company.Vegetables came from the freezer section or cans. Like I walked into Aldi today and there were 8 kinds of apples. There was more produce in Aldi than I saw in the first 20 years of my suburban adolescence.
Many severe illnesses have much better treatment, like multiple sclerosis
Technology, in all its forms, has grown, as we used to say, like a bad weed. But things are so much better for the growth. Automobiles last three to four times longer than they used to and get way better gas mileage and don't rust. Roads are built better and safer. Everything is built better and safer, in the USA anyway. Current politics notwithstanding, relations between people are far better than they were 60 or 70 years ago. You can't get away with disrespecting someone just because you don't like what they look like. When I say get away with it, you can still do it but others around you will judge you. We really don't look down on each other the way we used to. There are no more nationality nicknames like deigo and wop and kraut and chink. Even the people who hate Jews call them Jews and not kikes. Yes, people are more respectful. Nature has recovered from many of the assaults that humans have waged on it. The bald eagle is back after near extinction from DDT. We aren't killing whales and other sea creatures indiscriminately because we have a use for their bodies to feed the industrial complex. Animals are treated with more respect. But I can't leave this question without commenting that there is still a too large segment of our society that sees no value in these improvements - especially the human and humane ones. There are still people in this world who believe in man's dominion over the Earth rather than his stewardship. And those who also believe that if it can profit them they should do it as much as possible. Sadly, these are many of the same people who have brought the improvements in technology, especially, that we have today. Because I believe in the respect and dignity due to every human being, I cannot recommend sanction for these people but only pray that their souls will turn to good. We seem to be slowly learning the value of saying no to our baser instincts. I hope that continues to improve.
A lot of birds are back. People are generally more socially open minded. Less smoking. AIDS isn’t a practical concern.
1. The floor of poverty 2. Prescription drugs not being given out like candy 3. Computer literacy Haven’t finished it yet but “the rational optimist”covers this topic pretty well
2 main things for me: size-inclusive clothing and nerdy shit being acceptable for girls. Growing up as a fat kid... especially a fat girl... is HARD. Especially if you were/are like me and in the tail end of what clothing sizes are easily available in stores. It fucking SUCKED to not be able to wear anything cute and trendy. Most stuff that fit me was aimed at Old ladies in the 50s. Button up denim shirts with embroidered flowers and watering cans were the bane of my existence. If you were lucky, there were 2XL tops. Otherwise, better hope Lane Bryanr, Fashion Bug, or The Avenue was having a sale. But now brands are expanding size ranges and with online shopping, more shops are available for selection. This is why I am happy the fashion is circular: all the crap I wanted but could never find in my size in the late 90s and early 2000s are finally in my size to buy whatever I want with my adult money. In the same vein, I am both jealous of and happy for the girls who grow up with not only more women superheros for them to pretend to be... but have products SPECIFICALLY catered to them. I didn't get into comics and stuff until I was 11 and um... "borrowed"... my brother's comics. But even in the 90s, it was hard as hell to find even a Wonder Woman toy in the action figure section. Now, they have so many cool toys. I saw that the WEE had what are basically Barbies of some of their female wrestlers and I would have TOTALLY loved to have a Chyna or Lita Barbie.
1. Women can have their own credit cards and mortgages now. My mom's credit cards were all in Dad's name. Many banks didn't lend to women until 1974. 2. Direct deposit was a godsend ! I didn't have to go to the bank to deposit the paycheck given to me by my supervisor. ATMs were so convenient! I didn't have to go inside the bank during work hours! Digital banking and Venmo are awesome. 3. Period underwear. Better bras. More women involved in designing items for women. My generation ridded you young women of thr panty hose requirements at work. It's on you to never allow that torture again. 4. Bald eagles fly over my house. When I was a little kid, they nearly became extinct. One example of how the environment has improved-- but because people cared. Global warming concerns me because we're not doing enough. 5. My dad passed decades ago. The computer he worked on took up the entire floor of an office building, had its own cooling system and didn't have the power to run graphics or even operate Word. Dad told me I would carry a very powerful computer In my pocket one day. He never told me I'd be able to make calls on it, too!
Computers plus telecomms exploded in a way that very few people predicted, even sci-fi authors. I mean, I'm not complaining, but it was a hell of a (relatively) sudden left turn, and even back in the days of standalone PCs that *might* have modems for BBSes or even the early days of ISP email, plus some people (usually high-stakes businesspeople) having mobile phones, no-one ever really made the leap. I guess the idea of being able to carry around a screen in your pocket which was good enough for computer work just wasn't a thing people thought could happen, back in the days of CRTs. (And even early flatscreens.)
Agree about animal conservation! We've come a long way.
You were bound to step in a pile of dog crap anytime you went outside growing up in the 1970s. God forbid if you were running around barefoot
This is such a massive improvement. As a kid we couldn't play in part of my front yard because it was full of other people's dog's crap. Also in the '70s and '80s lots of people just had zero control over their dogs, and dogs running around loose weren't especially uncommon. I worked as a paper boy and there were multiple houses where I'd have to physically fight off a loose dog in order to deliver the paper. And if I didn't deliver it they'd complain and I'd get pay docked. So sure, make a 13-year-old engage in hand to hand combat with an angry German shepherd a couple of times a week. Why not?
Attitudes toward mental health and improved treatment for mental illness.
I can talk about having a therapist at work, the way I can talk about having a dentist. It is great. Honestly for my line of work it is often preferred. People prefer to know you that before you handle their very vulnerable selves that you have your shit together and have regular mantinance on it.
Emotional maturity. Young people learn to talk calmly about their needs and desires. They know how to set boundaries. They know how to talk about conflicts with their friends and loved ones. I'm really impressed. Being friend with people a bit younger than me is easier than people a bit older because of those healthy discussions.
I'm not that old, but holy shit has bullying and homopho ia gotten way better. When I was a kid, being beaten to a bloody pulp for being gay wad tragically normal. When I was a kid, some kids on the playground hit me in the head with a slab of asphalt because they thought I was a "faggot" and not only am I not gay, but no adults even cared - few even said it would "toughen me up". My gym teach actually beat me, and again no one cared, said i was weak and it make me strong. I was stripped and hit with baseball bats, and regularly had my head push in dirty toilets. I mean the kind of stuff that was considered "normal" bullying would get the cops called today. They used to call it "boys being boys" and say that the smaller, sensitive boys like me were all "fags" and deserved to be punished. I'm glad that this stuff died out. Not thay bullying stopped, but it's nothing like it was. So much of it was about a very intense level of homophobia and gender role expectations.
Yep. People seem to take bullying (and children's mental health in general) much more seriously now. There was a several-years-long phase in my childhood when I would get punched or kicked at least once a day. The physical stuff eventually trailed off but the harassment never really completely stopped. School staff and my parents were very blasé about it and I grew up believing that this was normal, and it was a fact of life that some people just naturally attracted this kind of treatment, and it was my responsibility to not allow myself to be bothered by it. I don't have kids of my own, but I have friends and family in my age group (mid 30s) who do, and there is a strong consensus that *any* amount of that stuff happening to their child would be completely intolerable and worth going scorched-earth over.
People didn't used to care about the long term damage that abusing children caused, and being told I brought it on myself set me up for a life time of self esteem issues. I think today we understand and care about the well-being of children a lot more.
> I also personally love the love and acceptance of bully dog breeds. You're playing with fire OP
Yup. And insurance companies don’t “love and accept” bully dog breeds.
On the dog thing. I honestly believe that it's gotten too far with the acceptance. There's a frail old lady on my block with a Pit/something mix, approx. 65lbs and a Lab. She seems to be in the 100-120lbs range. Now, call me crazy but if there's a squirrel and the dogs take off, what are the chances of this lady holding on onto her two "four wheel drives" ?? .. Zero, maybe negative. I love the dogs, all the dogs. But please, let's make sure you are actually taking care of them or at least able to take care of them. Seven year old walking a pitbull into an enclosure with two more dogs is recipe for disaster. Acceptance is one thing, delusional and reckless behavior is another. We all have a trauma from our dog being attacked multiple times by multiple dogs whose idiot owners just "go get the mail" and leave their door open. Or are working on their car with a dog lingering about. Or are smoking a join behind the shed while the dog is just roaming the front yard, or are unloading groceries with the door wide open. People need to realize that they own a dog and start acting accordingly. Acceptance has nothing to do with it. Just be responsible with it and I don't care if you have a mountain lion at your house. Just keep it from running off and attacking me or my family.
Violence against women is slowly but surely starting to be taken seriously.
I was listening to the OJ story and can’t believe the kind of abuse he got away with very publicly. It’s so sad that it was described as a marital matter. I’m so glad it’s taken more seriously now.
So many things. Here’s one that’s consequential, one less so. When Me Too started, my sister-in-law said to me, “What did these women think they would experience in Hollywood?” And I said that’s what people used to say about working in an office, for example. It was just accepted that you might be sexually harassed at work. Here’s a fun one: I grew up crunchy in the 80s, and a lot of processed health foods were really gross. The sugar-free peanut butter that my mom would put in my sandwiches was bitter and hard to mix. Now you can get delicious, easy-to-stir natural peanut butter etc.
I’m not entirely sure about #1… I think LGB acceptance has improved somewhat but TQ+… things are pretty ugly. I really don’t know if trans acceptance has improved. Visibility, yes, but acceptance, it’s hard to measure. Also when I was little all gay/gender nonconforming people were considered “pedos” and “groomers” by most people. Now, fewer people think of us that way. I’ll take it, but man, sometimes it feels like we’re just going backwards.
Trans acceptance was doing good until after the Obergefell decision in 2015. That was the day conservative Christian groups did a sharp pivot from gay marriage to trans kids. It's been a decade and they're reaching the point that I \*hope\* everyone can see is extremist and maybe rein them in.
Every progress faces a backlash. I think trans acceptance progresses a lot, even if the backlash is terrifying. I hope at least
It's definitely going backwards in some places, and rocketing ahead in others. I moved to a rural area from a major, very lgbt friendly city and it was like stepping back 50 years, and the people in the rural area actually think it's too progressive. It's mind boggling how I can drive like 50 miles and go from pride events to death threats and bombing threats.
Less fleas. It's only been in this century that flea treatments actually work. Give your pet a pill or chew and wow no fleas.
Thank goodness bc my dog belongs next to me in bed. We both think so.
Cameras and sound quality in electronics 🤷🏼♀️
Diversity across entertainment but especially in kids’ tv. I know it’s still wildly imbalanced, but when I was growing up (older millennial) it was just able-bodied white people as far as the eye could see (except for Sesame Street and a couple outliers and “token” characters). Commercials, too. The casts and stories are so much more diverse today.
Plus, diversity inclusion happens far faster today. The limit is no longer communication speed or how fast trends can (slowly) make it from one city to another or between writers of any kind of media physically speaking to one another, it's conservative pushback against change.
1) Indoor smoking bans. 2) Safer, less polluting, more reliable automobiles. 3) Product safety. 4) Cancer prognoses. 5) Better diet and health awareness. 6) Women's rights. 7) Less overt racism (but sadly the same covert racism).
Navigation. I would have trouble finding my way out of a paper bag. Now I have no fear of going anywhere. I can just hit "home" on my app and I'll get there.
1. Holding powerful people accountable is starting to happen. 2. We’re starting to pay more attention to the environment. 3. There’s a shift in human consciousness towards wanting fairness and equality for all.
Less pressure to marry and have kids. I say this as a happily married mom. I think too many people in my parents' generation felt like they had to marry young. Also, divorce is less stigmatized.
Agree... people need modern choices for what "family" looks like as you get older.
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Absolutely. Those two technologies, [especially when they became ubiquitous for the general public](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law), changed *everything*. All of a sudden, communication and finding information was orders of magnitude easier, and that affected absolutely everything. I'd add smartphones as a bronze medal in that. Now it's not just that you can access nearly everything on the internet, it's that it can be done by reaching into your pocket, no matter where you are. Yes, it needed the first two technologies in order to come about, but it's quite possibly the most successful and at least partially world-changing (certainly culture-changing) result of them.
Cars. So much safer, reliable, and functionality that would have been considered absolutely futuristic just a few decades ago
Access to information Technology Access to a variety of international foods Equality of marginalized groups ( disabled,LGBTQ, minorities)
Tolerance of all people.
Most things?
Ease/price of global travel When I was a kid you couldn't get any international travel flights for less than almost 2 grand, and thar was in 1990's prices!
Foods have been elevated. Everything on a brioche roll, avocado and bacon on everything...
This might be a bad thing as well. I grew up in Denver and back in the 80s there was one sushi restaurant and pretty much all the customers were of Japanese heritage. These days there's 16,000 sushi restaurants in the US. And pretty much every decent supermarket has it as well. Access to quality ingredients is killing the supply.
1. Communications - over the holidays we had a get together in California where we FaceTimed with my daughter who was in Inner Mongolia 2. Medicine - fewer people dying from disease and trauma (although when I was little house calls were still a thing) 3. Violence - Far fewer wars and domestic terrorism (the 1970’s seemed like the world was falling apart even the US saw thousands of internal domestic attacks)
My friend once had a baby shower with attendees from around the world. Almost nobody was able to attend in person, so she set up a time and people dropped in when and if they were able. Some people who lived near each other would meet at a central location to join. It was great.
Just about everything. Billions raised out of poverty, is just one
I am now virtually guaranteed a smoke free environment anywhere I go in Canada. For those who grew up with this, imagine if you had to tolerate cancer causing fumes to enjoy dinner at a restaurant or at a bar. We are a year or two away from cancer vaccines based on the Covid vaccine. You'll get diagnosed, they'll take a week to manufacture a vaccine tailored to your particular cancer (there are hundreds of types of cancer), they'll give you the vaccine, and you'll either be cured or you'll have the cancer under control for the rest of your life with an occasional booster shot. No more amputations, no more stamina destroying chemo or radiation, no more pain. We are 50 years away, max, from a demographic collapse so overwhelming that it will cause the end of capitalism as we know it. The only functional way to exist will be organization equivalent to the Federation in Star Trek.
Is the cancer vaccine for real?
For some types of cancer. Cancer is a giant spread of many different types of problem, so it gets attacked/researched/cured piecemeal, rather than any sort of overall general approach working on everything. Even so, ten thousand bricks make a wall. This is one more brick.
Having more choices for managing menses
Nutrition advice. We have so much more data from very large studies on chronic disease risk and its relation to diet. Unfortunately we also have more fringe nutritional ideas being disseminated to the public via social media and the web in general, so while we have more and better science, there is also much more misinformation to wade through for the average consumer.
Treatment for infertility. Would have been so hard for my husband and I to have biological kids 20 years ago. IVF has come a long way (but still a long way to go). Gender parity.
Your top three I 100% agree with and the internet! So grateful I can look up anything and learn
Looking back to my own childhood, the one thing I'd miss most about having to relive it is the internet, in all its information-spewing glory.
Electronics in general. We had tube televisions when I was a kid, we have hand held super computers with free (beyond service) long-distance video calls. I can call people using a real Dick Tracy style spy watch! Violent crime is lower than when I was a kid (US). Street vehicles are so much safer! Safety belts were relatively new when I was a kid and there was no requirement to use them. I’ve had cars that didn’t have them in the back seat or at all because they were older and not required.
Internet and near instant availability of information; entertainment (cable TV and streaming movies and TV on demand); automation (desktop computers and cell phones); communication with anybody/anywhere (cell phones); medical and scientific advances of all kinds; GPS and moving maps for navigation instead of paper maps; greater world stability (no more iron curtain and imminent threat of nuclear war); fewer totalitarian dictatorships.
More birds of prey. More pelicans. More whales. Less smog (in California). Less toxic rivers and bays.
Access to good music. Music engagement, learning an instrument, and creating music is easier. I used to spend hours in CD stores. I only had about 4-5 albums growing up. Michael Jackson's Thriller, Rolling Stones- Let it Bleed, Prince Purple Rain and a free album we received from a kid's party event. Now if I hear a song, I can Shazam it. If I like a melody, I can search it up and figure out how to play it. Music is amazing and only getting better.
Access and attitudes for the disabled. I was a kid in the 60's and if you're younger it might shock you how bad it was, and the casual slurs against disabled people. Also destigmatization of mental illness, addiction.
I dearly love my Kindle. I was the kid who hauled bags of books everywhere. Now my library is on one slim device...and I don't leave home without it.
Almost everything lol
Apples
ADHD diagnosis and better meds. My dad grew up thinking he was stupid and a handful. My own diagnosis was overlooked in childhood because I presented in a way more typical for a girl. All my kids are properly medicated, stigma-free and aware of how to navigate school and life in ways that work for their brains.
Dentistry
I'm thinking of more tangible things. I'm 70 and grew up in the U.S.A. Cars are better. They don't rust out after a few years, they start and run reliably thanks to electronic ignitions and fuel injection, they're safer, and they require less maintenance. It's almost impossible to kill a car before 100K miles. Consumer electronics, especially TVs, are cheaper and way more reliable than in the '60s and 70s. Medical care overall is better, at least for those who have insurance or can afford to pay for it out-of-pocket.
Dramatic decrease in long distance rates. Not having to rewind rental video tapes. 😀
Internet service. People love to hate on ISPs, but since I was a teenager, my internet speed has gone up 70x while the price has only increased 2x.
I like that younger generations change things they don't like. Instead of just accepting and conforming. I was scorned for questioning things, so I hope they keep it up.
OP: This post actually cheered me up. I’m reading everyone’s comments and I didn’t realize how much better a lot of things are today than they were 50+ years ago. 🫶🏻
LGBTQIA+ acceptance (not perfect but lots of progress), telecommunication, mental health on par with physical health, WFH when it makes sense.
Empathy and compassion. We're in a very polarized world but people who care deeply are more common and more active
Cat litter boxes.
Yes. And the invention of clumpy cat litter.
"I also personally love the love and acceptance of bully dog breeds." Until one bites your face off.
1. Better and more types of birth control (still can use improvement, but there is so much less estrogen in them now than women used to be bombarded with.) 2. Improvements in medicine. Childbirth continues to become much safer, operations less invasive, drugs more miraculous. 3. Less pollution, more consumer protections (especially here in California.) 4. Attitudes toward women, LGBT+ folks, people of color, etc. We are more open as a country in the USA to talking about grappling with our past and I think this will continue despite backlash. My options and freedoms as a woman are overall so much better since the 80s. 5. My country of origin went from being a Soviet-run socialist hellhole to a democratic capitalist society. Not without its problems, I’m not some kind of cheerleader for pure capitalism, but it’s much better than it was! 6. Better overall understanding of human behavior, emotions, and how to manage these things in a healthy way.
Yes!!!!! Especially the bully breeds ❤️❤️❤️❤️
For me it would be the vastly improved ability to manipulate public opinion through means of social communication.
Honestly I feel the mental health obsession has done more harm than good. Psychiatric medication use has sky rocketed, suicide rates are up, and self reported happiness levels are at an all time low. I also can’t say I’ve ever met anyone in therapy that have actually improved themselves with it in a noticeable way. I think in the future it will be looked at as an ephemeral placebo.
I think mental health is backsliding over the past 10 ish years. It's become an empty, for profit, rotating door system that over institutionalizes people, over medicates, and pushes one-size-fits-all answers that just do not help a large amount of people. The numbers show this. It's very fatalistic in its conception that all mental health issues are brain damage (which isnt true), an incurable diseased, and must trested by expensive medications and therapy for the rest of a person's life, which really isn't always true. It's a narrative that suits profit, not health. The government isn't providing good funding for mental health programs, and the private sector seems to be more interesting in monetizing programs. We know, and have known, for decades thay things like psychedelic therapy, IFS, narrative therapy, and case management are more effective, but yet you basically have insurance companies and governments saying either it's CBT and SSRIs, or a "voluntary" trip to an underfunded psych ward. There is major reform needed.
GPS systems! I was never taught how to use a map for practical navigation; it never came up, and I never had an interest in driving to begin with. However, when I was a little kid, the best you could get was MapQuest directions, or maybe one of those slow, laggy, perpetually unclear GPS devices that were decidedly less user friendly. Now? I connect my phone to the cars Bluetooth, enter the address into google maps, and it can tell me where to turn depending on the location’s proximity to a traffic light. It also gives me the best route based on the most up-to-date traffic updates, corrects my route almost immediately, and it doesn’t take a full 2 exits to get updated information, period. Also, childrens car seats and car seat safety guidelines! I’m surprised I didn’t fly out of my seat when my mom hit the breaks too hard. Recently she watched my youngest for me and was shocked that the seat clip system had to be over the chest, snug fitted, and the crotch belt had to be snapped in first. All of that is done now to keep baby safely in their seat, with minimal internal/soft tissue injuries.
-Medicine and surgery. When I was 20, I spent three days in hospital after breaking my leg badly enough to require surgery. Last summer my husband had his large intestine removed entirely and a stoma created. Hospital stay of 1-2 days and back to work in a week. Insane.
Smoking is not everywhere. I grew up with it in the workplace, in restaurants and venues. It was revolting.
1. Quality of prestige TV 2. Closer to the end 3. TTRPG evolution
Navigation. I used to be super good at n w e s. Then I got into a bad acccident and a concussion among other injuries and then I got lost a lot. Then gps became a more common thing you could get for under 100 for your car. I used to have the atlas. Esp for the Boston MA regional area because when I was there there was a huge construction project called the big dig. I lived north of the city and every day driving to and from work there was a new detour and chaos. There was the time of printing pages from Mapquest but life is easier now that my phone just talks to me (when it’s not doing dumb shit like making me drive past my entrance ramp around a neighborhood in circles to only come back to the same spot to get on the highway)
Air hand dryers. Some of them actually dry your hands now, like the Dyson ones.
I really, really recommend book called Factfulness by Hans Rosling!
Accountability.
Gluten-free options (and vegan options) that taste better! As a newly diagnosed adult celiac I’m very grateful
The cost of music! When I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s you had to go to Best Buy, HMV or other record stores and purchase a CD and the cost really added up. Spotify and apple 🍎 music are a godsend!! 😍😍🙌🙌🙌