Without mentioning smartphones or social media, what societal changes have you noticed over the course of your lifetime?
-
I grew up in the farm-y outskirts of a big-ish city. I got to catch lizards and tadpoles and toads in the creek nearby, and we'd collect reeds from cattails and weave them into little mats for fun. we'd walk/bike to our friends house without parents, just yell that your going to so and so's and off you trot. We knew the farmer who grew the sweet corn we ate all summer, and the farmers who had the peach orchard and tomato fields we'd harvest from at the end of summer to can cheap produce for the winter.
The foothills behind our neighborhood were covered with grass and shrub, spattered with bike trails and caves right up to the tree line. There were foxes and racoons that you'd need to protect your chickens from. Deer would chill in our yard in fall eating the fallen Apples from around our trees. Flocks of starlings covered our huge cottonwood trees making a huge racket and pooping everywhere. I'd take a metal baseball bat to our big metal clothesline post to make a big gong noise to scare them off cuz they were so loud.Then a fence went up, blocking us from using the hills, and they started construction on a bunch of high end mc mansions. They filled in the caves, killed the foxes and racoons, and paved over the creek to make a walking trail. More and more deer ended up as roadkill till they stopped coming to eat the apples altogether. Developers bought out the farmers to build more houses, first the tomato fields, then the corn, and finally the peaches were ripped out and paved over. The dairy became a giant strip mall for a Staples, and a Kohl's, a donut shop and a sandwich shop. The road I walked alongside, barefoot, to play in the creek became too busy to be safe for kids to walk next to.
In summer we'd play outside and drink from the hose till we were too hot, then we'd run inside and stand under the swamp cooler to cool down. Year after year it got hotter and hotter till the heat was too much and we couldn't play outside for too long because the swamp cooler wasn't enough to cool us down anymore. In winter we used to make snow men and build igloos with buckets full of snow as bricks, and we'd trample paths into the snow drifts that came up to our hips. But year after year the snow banks got shorter and shorter and the snow came later and later until... I remember the first year we had no snow till after Christmas. The decorations looked so sad and stupid sitting on brown grass instead of coated with bright snow. That's the last year I bothered to put them up. The more people moved to the area, the thicker the smog got in the winter. All the stagnant stinky car exhaust and fumes from the refinery got caught in the bowl of the valley all winter, till the hazy air was so dense you couldn't see the mountains that surrounded us.
The world got hotter and more full of cars and houses all while the people got more stranded inside. Yes by the lure of Internet, but also to try to escape the heat and dust and smog. New neighbors in the big houses would snap at us to get off their lawn then smile like they gave a fuck the next Sunday at church.
Neighborhoods full of community became individuals in houses.
I'm only 34.
Hey, I just wanted to say this was a pretty great read, even if it was depressing as hell. You've got a knack for painting a picture with words.
-
I would gladly take the Texas Eagle to Chicago on a regular basis to see family if it didn't cost $1,800 for a very small room in the sleeper car. I prefer the train to flying or driving. It's just a LOT cheaper to load up the minivan and drive 12 hours instead.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I feel lucky living in the Northeast: Acela works. It’s not actual high speed rail by world standards, but it is convenient enough, fast enough, cheap enough to be the most desirable option to travel between major cities. But we don’t have this anywhere else.
How can we get this level of service between cities everywhere?
-
Even with high speed rail you're looking at 30+ hours from Seattle to NYC. And that's optimistic, ignoring the numerous alpine mountains. No thanks.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Why do people always go here?
- Fine: coast to coast, north to south should have flights. However almost all domestic flights are shorter and most of those are between city pairs where rail could be more efficient.
- Fine: keep your bush pilots and feeder airlines, but 80% of the population is in metro areas.
- high speed rail advocates generally speak in terms of population density and distance for choosing the right option: generally city pairs less than 500 miles apart can be more efficiently served by rail. That’s most cities in the US, and metro areas are 80% the population
We don’t need to argue about it not being absolute,if you can recognized the predominant needs
-
Sometimes I forget that smoking is a thing, and then (after sometimes a whole year) I see someone doing it, and I’m like, “woah, people still smoke.” It was everywhere when I was a kid—even inside restaurants.
It always surprises me that pot smoking is now worse. Don’t get me wrong: go ahead with your vice. But the world used to smell like an ash tray and now it smells like skunk. Realistically the world doesn’t stink as much, which is excellent, but that means pot smokers really stand out as annoying stink
-
Why specify the year? Everyone knows what 9/11 is, it's not going to get confused with another 9/11.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Because over time people will forget the year. Like many hear July 4th and couldn’t tell you it is for 1776. People get lazy, and knowing the year gives a nice reference for time and how it has gone by.
-
More aggressive driving. Statistics even support it so it's not just an anecdotal thing.
I’ve noticed that too. I also noticed a very large uptick after Covid and things opened back up. It seems like people genuinely forgot tact, decency, and rules. It’s weird because Covid wasn’t THAT long that we were locked down.
-
Bigger cars, wider roads, more lanes, more noise, longer commutes
Brighter lights
-
Because over time people will forget the year. Like many hear July 4th and couldn’t tell you it is for 1776. People get lazy, and knowing the year gives a nice reference for time and how it has gone by.
Man sometimes I forget just how utterly brain dead some people are. Forgetting 1776.
-
Originally it was going to be "over the last twenty years" but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, "no one talks to each other in person, they're on their phones always" and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
In not particular order, and a kind reminder that I'm not from US so some things may look different if you are from there:
People are far noisier, as there is less concerns by being judged by your neighbors. People used to behave purely out of shame. Now the shame is gone and people are wild.
Vast increase in dog ownership. There's literally more dog than small kids in my country from several years now.
Vast increase in immigration. Statistics are weird here, as we give citizenship to a great amount of migrants in just two years, and here is illegal to record statistics based on ethnicity, country of origin or any aspect that would identify anyone's ancestry. But my neighborhood went to 90-10 national-immigrant to 40-60. I live in a poor neighborhood so it's not the same in all parts of the country, but immigration increase is there and it's a big change.
Less violence overall. Street violence overall seems lower. Also there's less of a terrorists threat as we used to have (there were several active terrorists groups here that are now gone).
A housing problem. People used to get a house without issues. Now it's one of the biggest issues of young people.
Increase of tolerance towards homosexuality. It's view as something very normal nowadays I think, and it use not to be that way.
Increase of equality between men and women. Direct discrimination is completely outlaw and hard to see. Indirect discrimination may still exist but is on a all time low. Most bosses I have had in all my jobs have been women (for giving a small example).
People go on vacation more often and further away. When I was young people used to just go one time a year on vacation, most of the time to a national place. Now people go several times a year to foreign countries, and "travel" have become the most important thing in many people's lives (how many dating profiles have I seen in which the person pointed traveling as their life moto).
Most people have university studies. It didn't used to be that way.
There's probably much more. Those are the first things that came into my mind.
-
Originally it was going to be "over the last twenty years" but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, "no one talks to each other in person, they're on their phones always" and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
smoking
gay
Amazon
conspiracy
racism
mental health
-
Originally it was going to be "over the last twenty years" but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, "no one talks to each other in person, they're on their phones always" and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
I've watched things go from "how can we profit from this?" to "how much can we profit from this without quite killing the plebs?"
-
Man sometimes I forget just how utterly brain dead some people are. Forgetting 1776.
Is 1776 an American thing? Because it does not seem to ring a bell for me...
-
Originally it was going to be "over the last twenty years" but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, "no one talks to each other in person, they're on their phones always" and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
There are more idiots. Flatearthers, space deniers, antivaxxers. The more information people have access to the less intelligent society seems to get.
Surveillance Capitalism is getting more out of hand every year. Combined with more data breaches it's not great.
-
I want to add Adventure Time to the good list. There definitely are some episodes that feel "lol random" but there's a longer story arc that's actually really deeply explored
Absolutely. I didn't realize they did more of a story arc until I ended up seeing clips on yt. I definitely remember some of the lore episodes but I definitely wasn't smart enough to piece together any lore. I might have to suffer through the occasional "lol random" episodes just to see the lore through.
-
Is Arcane a cartoon?
Don't 100% sure whether it is or not. Also, I couldn't tell you anything about it since I haven't watched it as someone who doesn't play League.
-
Outside of formal settings, I'd say that it's uncommon for women to wear skirts or dresses in day-to-day life now.
Menswear is considerably more casual. This is a trend that's been going for over a century or so, so it certainly didn't just happen during my life, but it did significantly change in that time.
I was a nurse in the US from 2015-2020 and in that time I saw one “old school” nurse who wore a white scrubs dress and white stockings/shoes. Every day that I saw her she was dressed this way so it wasn’t like for an event or something. Just working on the L&D floor. No hat though. Honestly no idea how anyone did the job of nursing in a damn dress anyway but they all did for a very long time before I was in the profession. Every time I saw her I was just jealous that she must not be cleaning up like, ANY shit where she works. For graduation we all wore the little hat, then that was the end of that forever.
-
I was trying to think of specifics, but they're already getting mentioned. I'd just say a lot of these things stem from there being literally double the amount of humans alive right now than when my dad was born. An individual is devalued immensely and cultural cohesion is completely shot.
Yes, absolutely, as the population has increased, so has the feeling of being in the proverbial crab bucket.
-
It absolutely has. Before Rodney King it was always fine. From 1992 to about 2014 it was mostly fine. From 2014-2020, it was a debate, and after 2020, they're pretty much always guilty. There's a whole interesting conversation to be had about why it was that all kinds of riot and peaceful protest had basically 0 result until 2014-2020, and then in 2020 it all of a sudden starting working significantly.
Anyway, now under Trump, some of the reform is going backwards. There were some outlier departments that were still in the 1992 mode, and the feds were doing some things to try to come down on them, whereas now it's the opposite, Trump is actively pardoning dirty cops. Great stuff.
It was not fine. There was a whole riot about it and everything.
The only thing that's changed recently is that cops can occasionally be held accountable if they cause enough embarrassment to the powers that be.
-
It was not fine. There was a whole riot about it and everything.
The only thing that's changed recently is that cops can occasionally be held accountable if they cause enough embarrassment to the powers that be.
Can you name three incidents since 2020 where the cops have not been charged? I know of one, and even that one has an asterisk next to it. Before 2020 it was multiple every year, there used to be these massive walls with names written on them.
-
If a single act of terrorism can remove an entire ethnic group from whiteness, then I wanna see the rest of the world agree that European Americans aren't white. It would be funny
some European right wingers already believe this
