Ask Lemmy

I've been arrested, held up at gun point, and spent a few weeks in a Texas jail in the 90s because I like smoking weed. Now I have 3 weed stores within 2 miles of me, and it's as mundane as buying a loaf of bread. So that's a positive in my book.

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.

The circa 1990 nature of American society has been erased so completely that it is hard to believe how drastically it has changed.

Movies used to depict child molestation (Indiana Jones) or outright rape (Revenge of the Nerds) as normal and to be celebrated when it was done by the heroes. A lot of crimes got viewed through the lens of whether it was “our people” doing them. The thinking features in a lot of old movies.

The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. Drunk driving was fine, as long as you were one of the right kind of people. The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine. The factory in town could be polluting the river and it was fine as long as dad had a job. And so on.

The uniformity of thought that TV enforced, before the internet, is really not well understood. If you thought Israel was bad, then you and Noam Chomsky were literally the only ones. Even as late in the arc as the Iraq War, I would say about 95% of the people who didn’t get their news from the internet supported the war. Watch one of the debates where Ron Paul was speaking against the war with everyone else (except the audience) just weirded out and confused by it, or the “Media-Opoly” short that aired on SNL once and then never again, to get some idea by contrast of how airtight the lock on narrative used to be. TV and newspapers are still kind of that way, but they don’t have the media monopoly they used to. It used to be that someone probably would live their entire adult life without ever hearing the kind of political viewpoints you see every day on Lemmy as normal things.

On the other hand, along with the expectation that everyone was kind of a piece of shit and that’s how life is, came a kind of backbone for resistance that I feel like is missing today. Woodstock ‘99 would be a pretty normal “yeah they robbed us” badly organized festival today. It was way better than the Fyre Festival, and people at Fyre just took it, or called their lawyers. At Woodstock ‘99, the kids threw bottles and batteries at Kurt Loder, broke in the ATMs and stole their money back, and then ripped the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground.

I swear that before 9/11, middle eastern people in the US counted as "white", or at least white-but-you-can-make-fun-of-their-accents-and-names like Italians or Polish people did

No smoking indoors anymore. I remember when you could still smoke in a hospital. Then they limited it to just a "smoking lounge" on each floor. Followed eventually by a ban inside...to finally no smoking anywhere on hospital property.

Not to mention airplanes, restaurants and movie theaters.

It still feels a little odd to me that restaurants don't ask "smoking or non?". Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted everything stopped smelling like ash. But it's surreal to remember my grand parents chain smoking over pancakes at Dennys.

I got started on the Internet in 1988. You had to learn Unix (Linux didn't exist yet) and the command line (GUI Internet didn't exist yet), and had to manually piece together files to download them (www didn't exist yet).

Everyone has reduced their perception of the world to a Bad Apple-esque black and white extreme of good or bad. All In Support or Nuclear Strike Disapproval. No inbetweens allowed.

The mall was full of stores with good quality products that you would value for a non insignificant amount of time if purchased.

More aggressive driving. Statistics even support it so it's not just an anecdotal thing.

When I was still a kid, we went from bring a plate of cookies to your neighbor and introduce yourself to DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS!!

The most noticeable change I see is how everyone buys stuff they can't effort all because of how easy it is to get a loan. With interests of course. Now everyone has a house, a car, an expensive smartphone, nice vacations, eats at fancy restaurants and nice café. Compared to previous generation this was mostly impossible for the vast majority of the population.

So life go easy in the facade because everyone just gets a loan.

When I was a kid, it was assumed that boys asked girls to dances and not the other way around. In the recent Pixar series Dream Productions, a tween girl is asked who she's going to ask to the school dance. It's now treated as normal for girls to ask boys. She also ends up not going with a date and just going with her friends.

Cartoons went from the majority of them having a unique enough art style to distinguish them from one another. If you take a silhouette of heads/faces from cartoon characters in the 90s and 2000s ( don't have experience with prior decades besides the standard MGM cartoons, Jetsons/Flintstones, or things like Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry ) you'd be able to tell the characters apart, even if you don't even know who they are. Try doing that with most all 2010s and upwards new cartoon characters and you'll get the exact same ugly, generic, and sanitized bean shaped head/face/smile imaginable.

There have definitely been some examples that might deviate a little from that mold, like Summer Camp Island, but those are far and few between anymore.

Also, for the most part, I would consider the overall quality as having been declining as well. I haven't seen a lot of shows, so my experience should be taken with a huge lump of salt, but besides shows like Steven Universe, Summer Camp Island, etcetera, the storytelling hasn't been as tight ( all of this in my opinion ), they're banking on you not actually paying attention to the show itself so they can cheap out on every single step, art style is being sanitized and overly simplified to cut costs, and jokes are all devolving into "LOL RANDOM", but that might have been a 2010s thing and I hope it's dead.

It also doesn't help that fans and fandom culture over time have become worse as well as you'll usually find a vocal minority who will kick and scream while doxxing you because you ship the wrong 2 fictional characters together or don't believe their exact highly specific headcannon, regardless of whether you are the creator or nor. Though, I'm debating of getting rid of this section because it might bleed too much into social media.

Better but much more expensive insulin, although price has gone down significantly since Affordable Care act.

Cable TV use to be something that teathered us all together in a way. We were all stuck on the same schedule for premiers of new episodes of different shows so we all had a common thing to talk about come the next day. Now I have no idea what’s playing on what service and have just given up on staying up to date on the new shows. I could have access to $TVShow but probably won’t watch it because I don’t like to binge watch so it takes me longer to catch up and by the time I do it has already left the minds of my peers so why bother.

Smoking cigarettes isn’t just not cool anymore, You’re actually likely to be socially ostracized in a lot of countries where it used to be popular. My perspective is the US, which is a very clear example of this.

Weed, however, is way more accepted. To the point where if I’m using a vape I almost feel a social pressure to clarify to people I’m getting high and not smoking nicotine.

It’s rather funny when you think about it

“no one talks to each other in person, they’re on their phones always”

No one talks to each other on their phones either. They send texts.

Extreme drive for individualism leads to the society where nobody cares about others and the strongest wins. I wonder for how long the community can survive in these conditions.