I was born in 1999 and am therefore completely qualified to talk about life in the 1900s. It was a lot of milk drinking and shitting in diapers.
man, we used to fill those diapers. Not like the kids these days
The good old days.
Ah I’m glad to hear from a typical 90s kid about it! Lol <- to prove I’m older than that.
Everywhere smelled like an ashtray until the late 90s when smoking bans started picking up steam.
Now everyone vapes and smells like Barbie farts instead.
If you went to a bar, or a bowling alley, everything you had on you smelled of smoke until it was thoroughly washed.
Don’t miss that, or trying to get across a dance floor without getting burned …then in 2008 everything changed. Kind of bitter sweet.
All US college campuses had this smell until around 2010 when they began banning smoking even outside. I miss that smell so much.
Ew
Ya it’s weird. Ever since I was very little I’ve loved the smell of second hand smoke, maybe because it was everywhere. One of my earliest memories is playing with a half full ash tray INSIDE a McDonalds.
I graduated in 2k. I rarely smelled smoke. Even at the parties there wasn’t that much of it. What I did smell came from the older staff and such taking smoking breaks, which were always outside. And I went to school in a red state.
I graduated in 1988, in a blue state.
I saw things go from smoking everywhere, to there being non-smoking sections, to eventually no smoking inside
While there were still way too many smokers, they were already becoming less common. I saw smoking go from something the “cool kids” did, to individuals saying “come on out with me for a smoke so I’m not alone”
I liked the smell of fresh cigarette smoke. Still do, actually. But yeah, smoking indoors is wild. Can’t believe thst was normal when I was a kid.
The problem is it isn’t usually fresh. At the time I didn’t mind that so much either but the lingering smell of stale smoke and ash tray over clothes, hair, buildings, was always a problem.
Now that we don’t live with the constant stench, I realize even fresh smoke was never good. It was only less bad than the stale lingering stench and we didn’t have clean air to compare to
there was no expectation to be constantly immediately available. you didn’t have the world at your fingertips, so there was no pressure to immediately resolve all situations.
it was nice. slower. less pressure.
oh and the lower level of blatant exploitation and theft by mega corps and the uber wealthy was nice. not good enough still, but better than now
Hyper capitalism of the 1980’s would be considered quant, by today’s standards
Anybody can trade like they’re a registered broker on Wall Street, so that’s new, and gig work with no employee protections is increasingly the norm. Antitrust regulation is old-fashioned, while it was still kicking in the 80’s. Whether monopolies are more or less capitalistic is up for debate, but we all know they’re not good.
On the other hand, the financial markets are still much more regulated than before the Recession (or, we hope so), and you can’t get away with money laundering or creative accounting quite as easily. There’s also more environmental regulations, especially outside the US.
Everyone’s saying what was better.
Bullshit, lol.
We were still people, and we still had all the people problems. Misogyny was worse, racism was worse, homophobia was really bad still, and “trans” was just a guy who liked wearing women’s clothes. Not that any man would ever admit that. Schools were super clique-ish, bullying was public and not prevented. Rapes were swept under the rug even worse than today. Pollution was really bad. I don’t think anyone born after 1990 has a clue how shitty the air quality was in cities back in the ‘80s and earlier. I can personally vouch for how amazing the environmental laws are and have improved air quality. Want to buy something that wasn’t available at a local store? Plan on waiting a month or more for it to arrive on order. Cars were more unsafe, often only had lap belts, and wtf is an airbag, lol. Car seats for kids were all but nonexistent. Air travel was crazy expensive, too.
All that said, yeah, there were some good things. We weren’t tied to screens all day. If someone stayed in and watched TV all day all the time you thought something might be wrong with them. We weren’t “on-call” 24-7 with cell phones. Basic jobs were easy to get. All my first jobs were walk in and ask if they needed anyone or just word of mouth, show up, and start working. Mass shootings weren’t the thing they are today. You actually owned the music or games you bought. Local stores had a huge variety of stuff and hadn’t been crushed by walmart and big box stores (I actually remember when big box stores were new and touted as sources of better variety for consumers. Lol, that worked out great). Concert tickets to top bands were less than $10. Local radio was great, your DJ told you about local events, and we had Dr Demento and Casey Kasem on weekends. Nobody was forcing you to pay subscriptions for everything, homes and cars were more affordable, so was education, and health care hadn’t gone nuts yet. You could actually talk to your political opponents, you wanted the same things mostly, it was just how you wanted it to happen was different. Crazy wingnuts were just that. Crazy wingnuts and not mainstream. Nobody gave them platforms unless it was “The National Enquirer.”
So yeah. We had plenty of problems. But there was a lot of good shit too.
One other thing that was ubiquitous… Cigarettes, and consequently cigarette smoke; EVERYWHERE!! Doesn’t matter whether you smoked or not, you smelled like cigarettes. Every bar, every restaurant, every club… Bus stops, movie theaters, trains… Cigarettes
In the EU or at least Finland, smoking in bars was still a thing in the 2010’s almost. 2007 definitely I was dancing and smoking a cigarette on the dancer floor of a club. Then 2007 they had go get non-smoking sides as well. And then the smoking rooms came in for some years, but you weren’t allowed in with a drink. (And you couldn’t get special dispensation, even for a bar which sold cigars as their thing, nope, can’t have your drink with you in the smoking room.) Idk how long ago the last tobacco rooms got banned as well.
But yeah in the 90’s it was fkin everywhere, not just in nightclubs and bars.
All cars were pretty much smoking as well. Any car from the 90’s definitely has a cigarette lighter and an ashtray. My -06 Huyndai still has an ashtray.
You’re right, lol. I completely forgot. “Smoking or non?” was a completely normal question when entering a restaurant, and bars or whatever didn’t bother asking. A night out meant smelling like cigarette smoke when you got home.
How quickly we forget.
Pollution was really bad
1970-1980’s was the first environmental movement. We were all excited to change the world. Some of the worst cases of pollution were because people finally cared enough to find them. Some things didn’t work and something’s had backtracking
This was the era of huge successes like the clean air act, clean water act, and bottle deposit laws! Superfund cleanup for the worst of the worst.
Cars were more unsafe
Car safety was becoming a concern and we started doing something about it
Air travel was crazy expensive
But also the rise of discount airlines
No shit. The question was “what was life like?” Not “what changed everything?”
I’m well aware of the things I mentioned because they’re different than today which is what the question asked for.
Pollution was really bad. I don’t think anyone born after 1990 has a clue how shitty the air quality was in cities back in the ‘80s and earlier.
Yeah, 'member leaded gasoline? I wasn’t there, but I 'member. Just burning an extremely toxic metal in a city full of people and kids.
And then there was the insane 70’s crime/violent crime rate suspiciously about 20 years later…
Pff. I used to wash motor parts off with leaded gas and no gloves when I was young. I’d probably be a goddamn Einstein if it weren’t for that.
Grew up in the 70s and 80s.
After school, kids would roam around on bikes. We’d go to grocery and convenience stores to play the latest arcade games.
Alternately we’d find an empty lot and make our own bike parks out of dirt and whatever scrap wood we could find.
No mobile phones, so nobody knew where anyone was, we’d just agree to meet some place at an agreed time.
Parents didn’t care. “Come home when it gets dark.” When the street lights kicked on, you knew it was time to head home.
You had to think for yourself, because nobody was there to help you. If you wiped out on your bike, blew a tire, got attacked by a dog, or threw a chain, you fixed it yourself or dealt with it yourself, nobody was coming to save you.
Same here. When we weren’t outside in the yard or the pool, we were out in the woods.
My parents installed a large bell that my Mom could ring for dinner time, that we could hear from far away.
The only time my parents objected was when we described the fort that some neighbor kids had built, “you know they stole that material from our house under construction, right?”
It’s funny to hear my childhood years described and it feels like this when past times were described when I was a kid:
This depended entirely on where you lived. My parents were divorced and one lived in the country and one lived in the suburbs. I could ride freely around the neighborhood in both places, which was literally within sight of my house, but beyond that were dangerous roads and nowhere nearby to go anyway.
Neighboring kids were hard to find. In the country, there were 5 houses on our road and only one had kids my age. We were kinda friends but they were kinda weird.
The suburban neighborhood had 25 homes, and all the kids were older or younger. I never met anyone my age in that neighborhood.
Hanging out with friends meant you called them to see if they could come over. If both parents agreed and one was available to drive, you had a friend for the day.
If you wiped out in your bike
This was in the late 1990’s. I fell off my bike and got myself scraped up pretty badly. I was nowhere near home, so my friends and I knocked on a random woman’s door and she patched me up. Headed home and freaked my mom out when she saw my arms.
Back when neighbors could post up signs that told kids “Hey, if you’re in trouble, this is a safe house.”
You could be unreachable and your job would have to accept that fact. There was typically a single landline per house so if it was busy or you weren’t there then they had to suck it up.
You weren’t pressured by society that you must be efficient in your leisure time. Play a game, best become the best at it otherwise you’re a loser now. Painting something? You best be Van Gough in quality or it’s shit. Feels like people forgot you’re not supposed to monetize your hobbies, there were there to get away from work.
The streets were paved with gold and everyone said “hello” to strangers in the street with a smile. Getting a job was a matter of walking up to a person in a suit and giving them a firm handshake. VAR wasn’t a thing in sports because the referees got every decision right. Cats and dogs got along fine with each other. Everyone had enough friends to play Goldeneye on N64 multiplayer. People didn’t gain weight despite eating no vegetables. They hadn’t invented 2nd hand smoking yet so everyone was free to smoke inside without it affecting anyone else. Musicians did drugs but never OD’d, just produced classic albums on demand. People read books constantly and you could expect to strike up a conversation with a petrol station employee about Satre where you’d get caught for hours marveling at their insight. You could have 3 pints at lunch during the working day with your boss. Concorde took you across the Atlantic in a matter of hours. Everyone had a tamagotchi and none of them starved.
The not gaining weight despite a shitty diet thing is kinda real, at least.
and the weed was better too. That might just be the high tolerance speaking though.
High times top strains 1977.
Led lights have done amazing shit for weed growers. Granted the 90’s already had good buds despite people having to use HPS lamps ans whatnot but LED has still been awesome for homegrowing, especially in countries where you can’t grow outside. Also autoflowers just came in like early 00’s. Well they technically existed in the 90’s but first successful commercial strain was Lowryder in 2002. (That shit was good smoke too, very creative high.)
This is what they took from us.
Well there were a lot more bugs and a lot fewer wildfires, for starters.
I’m not going to sugar coat it. There were good things and bad things, just like in any era.
On the good side, the standard of living was higher, especially for younger people. Wages, though already stagnating, had not reached the unliveability stage yet, and unions were still common. Communities were stronger because people hadn’t holed up online yet and local media hadn’t collapsed. What existed in terms of an online world was more open and trusting. They didn’t even have encryption on the www before '95 if you can imagine? Politicians were as corrupt as ever, but the media in general were more accountable.
On the bad side, there were a lot more incurable diseases. The Cold War was fucked up. Just knowing everything you know and love could end in 20 minutes just because some idiot turns a key somewhere. The air was actually really dirty in a lot of places. I know there are a lot of parts of the world where that’s still true, but clean air acts did work where implemented. Also, bars were all smoky as fuck. I couldn’t go near one with my asthma.
I could go on, but I’ll end on a more positive note. I was thinking just the other day how astronomy has been going through a golden age of discovery all throughout my life. In my childhood, they were sending out probes to give us the first close up looks at planets in our solar system. Then in the 90s we got the Hubble Space Telescope, we discovered our first exoplanets (planets around other stars) and that there is a 2nd ring system in our own solar system: the Kuiper Belt. Then we found a moon of Saturn with active geysers, Pluto sent us a ❤️, and now we have the James Webb Space Telescope joining massive ground-based telescopes that are just bursting with discoveries across the board. I just can’t get enough of this stuff!
Earth, 2150:
As the last embers of organized human civilization crumbled in the hothouse Earth catastrophe, a handful of astronomers remain in cloistered study, pouring over the data from the last of the great space telescopes, built at the height of 22nd century science. What have they learned? We are not the outlier. In the light of other Suns we find them. Dead world after dead world. Once bastions of life reduced to wastelands of ruin by technological civilization. The majority of Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars are tombs, rendered unto sterile husks by the actions of their own offspring.
To firmly tease such a conclusion out of such ephemeral evidence as a stellar spectrum was truly a feat of the astronomical art. It required techniques undreamt of and inconceivable by 21st century scholars. But, the last of this civilization’s great astronomer’s found a way. And the conclusion was damning.
Intelligent tool-using life is a terminal disease for life on a world. Once a biosphere has dreamed up a species like ours, that world’s days are numbered. There are many forms that extinction can take, some more exotic than others. But most are through mundane causes like self-induced ecological collapse. For every one case of a civilization destroying itself in a science experiment gone wrong, there are a thousand cases of simple ecological catastrophe.
We are dying. We are alone. We are surrounded by the dead.
Ooor it could be fine-ish.
But I wanted more cosmic horror!
Cosmic horror is fun. When posted unprompted in response to something factual, it seems like it’s trying to be a real prediction, though.
Maybe, but the usual survival strategy in sci-fi is a diaspora. If we had multiple homes, a disaster is less likely to hit all at once.
I don’t know if such a thing will ever be doable, but it is a worthwhile goal to work toward
If you’re talking about a true offworld backup to our species, that is a very very long ways away. Even if we were to really take that effort seriously, it would take us millennia before we truly established and independent presence in space.
The key is that it’s not possible to have a non-industrial civilization on a place like Mars. Our cultural model for such things is always the Age of Sale and similar exploratory waves by European imperialists. But this cultural analog is flawed. People could sail from England to the Americas and live off the land once they got there. They could build houses, find food and water, and really form a farmstead with the tools and knowledge they already possessed. They could even cut down local trees and repair the ships they used to get there.
But Mars? There’s nothing there. You want water? You need to build a water purification plant. You want air? You’ll need a huge air cleaning and reclamation system. And all of this will require massive amounts of power. And all of this infrastructure requires vast supply chains to keep, both to build the things and to build the things that build the things.
What this ultimately comes down to is that until you have hundreds of millions of people living on Mars, you can forget any idea of them truly being able to survive without Earth. You could have a million people on Mars. But if Earth collapses, unless Mars is already self-sufficient at that time, the Martians are on borrowed time. Sure, once you start a colony, there will be strong incentives to make Mars as self-sufficient as possible. The transport costs alone will ensure that. But it will be a very, very long time before Mars is self-sufficient in something like, computer chips for example. Every colony would be built from the start with its own water and air systems, but inevitably most of the components for that equipment would be shipped in from Earth. It will be a very long time before such a colony is capable of producing all the tools and equipment it needs to keep operating. And remember, on Mars, going organic farm and returning to the land is never an option. It’s full industrial civilization or death. The planet is not capable of sustain life (or at least life like ours) without extensive technological supplementation.
It may never be doable but it’s worth working toward.
We’re at the point where we ought to be able to maintain a small permanent station on the Moon. Think like ISS but farther away and with some gravity. That will let us answer question like is the moons gravity sufficient to live healthily, or what are the effects of radiation on whatever level of shielding we can afford. It will let us develop all the technologies from power to food, to most especially mining. If we can successfully use local resources for shielding and building, water, air, food, and rocket fuel, then we can afford a larger base or bases
Before we can do more than set boots on mars, there’s a lot of self-sufficiency that needs to be automated and is now only a good idea. When your “emergency resupply” takes nine months, you’d better be confident of no emergencies
Mostly people miss it… Unless you were gay. Then you probably have some unhappy memories about that time. Of course there’s nostalgia for other stuff, but civil rights were way worse for lgbtq.
I’m surprised no one brought this up yet. Being gay in the 90s would be about as controversial as being trans now, and it would not be okay to walk around holding hands with your same sex partner unless you were in a known gay area. it might not be illegal, but it would’ve attracted attention, probably people would’ve said slurs at least. The f slur was used in television and movies until around the 90s. People just used it like “nerd” or “dweeb”. Cocksucker was a pretty bad insult, insinuating someone was gay being pretty damn insulting at the time.
Things were significantly worse for lgbtq people, and there was the fear of HIV being basically a death sentence, and it wouldn’t have been long after people called it the “gay disease”. Some people were very uneducated about that stuff. My mom, who believed that gay men were our equals and should have equal rights, told me not to touch my gay teacher or shake his hand or anything because he might have “a disease”. Thankfully my father was more medically knowledgeable and told her it doesn’t spread like that, even if he had it.
It wasn’t until around after the 2000s at least that gay people were proudly saying, “HIV is no longer a death sentence”. It used to be a disease running rampant that no one gave a shit about because of homophobia basically. Fucking Reagan.
It was illegal in Texas to be gay actually
It was a struggle. We lived in caves and had to hunt for food.
Things were getting better and people still had some hope.
There were a lot of parallels to today, where there was increased awareness of problems and a large societal movement to fix them
Some of the most fundamental changes from back then had lasting effects, but the broader movement seemed to fade after the successes
Today we are living in the backlash, where regressives are rolling back the fixes, even the fixes from back then. I’m not just depressed with them fighting EVs and renewables from this time period, but them fighting the clean air act and clean water act that were the centerpiece of the earlier mivement
There are some very cool videos on YouTube of people from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s describing the experience, and worth listening to.
As for myself, life in the 80’s and 90’s was an adventure every fucking day. I grew up on county land with a huge forest behind it, and my brothers and friends and I were there so often that there were trails we’d made from walking so much. If we weren’t in the woods we were on bikes zooming around the neighborhood or up to the gas station for snacks and drinks. I gained a love of reading and spent a lot of time at the school and local library picking up books and having more adventures in my head. We had huge video game arcades where you could spend hours with your friends too. We watched plenty of TV and movies, but you actually had to commit to it because streaming didn’t exist. (Though VCR’s later mitigated this somewhat.) Lots of us have great memories of video stores though, and yeah, I miss them. And without phones feeding you constant dopamine, it was easier to focus on these things and you enjoyed them more.
Most of us had very few rules and weren’t as closely-minded by our parents as kids are now. We just had to be home by sundown. We took care of ourselves and figured shit out for ourselves, partly why GenX and elder millenials aren’t complainers by nature now.
The downside is, when your friends moved away, they were just gone. You might exchange addresses or phone numbers, but you basically just never stayed in touch because you made new friends to replace the old ones. Long-distance calls were expensive and letters took too long to write when you had shit to do, and with such a big, wide world to explore as a kid, you always had shit to do.
For me, the best way to describe it was that it was just quieter and much more peaceful. It was really nice not being able to read everyone’s mind all the time and not knowing everything that was going on in the world. If someone hated certain types of people, they actually had to say it, and most people weren’t willing to translate their personal biases and hatred into action without the veil of anonymity.
Most of what you said was true for me as well. However I wasn’t able to provide that for my kids. Part of it is personal electronics, part societal as it is frowned on, but also economic since I have to live where the jobs are and that is not where the land is.
And I’m reminded just last week: ticks. We’re were out in the woods all the time and rarely worried about ticks. Now my kid gets one playing frisbee
Yeah. :(
I don’t visit my childhood home anymore because much of that forest gave way to new roads and homes and it just makes me sad to think about how little of it is still there.
Yeah I don’t visit either, but it’s because it’s the land that time forgot. Our major employer left and the town never recovered. It’s exactly the same but a lot more worn and run down.
I last went back for a reunion, and discovered the same with the people. The few who are still in town never moved on from their high school selves
Back then it was boring, but the trade off was you could be someone without being the best in the world. What used to be “let me tell you about my friend” became “let me show you this internet video.” You didn’t have to be the top player in the world to be the top player at the arcade. You didn’t have to be a prodigy to have people think your art was cool. The internet moved the goal posts out of reach and we were all suddenly nobody, consumers, wannabe influencers at best. The technology thought to allow everyone to find an audience put us in our place and we’re all nobody now. You get zero views, zero interest, the famous get a billion.
I was born in the late 70s so I can comment on the 80s onwards.
It was ok. It’s better now though. Some stuff got worse. A lot got better. We know more, have better toys, live longer, cheaper travel and so on.
The major thing that’s worse is the internet blasting every negative thing into your brain 24/7
