Ask Lemmy

Humanity getting dumber and dumber…

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.

No more milk delivered each morning to my door.

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.

No third places.

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.

The world has less colour.

This isn't a dramatic "I'm depressed" post, though that is a factor. Nature is still nature-coloured, for one, and it still looks lovely.

I mean that like, you'd go outside and look at the cars and see a rainbow of colours. Now it's all black, silver, or white. You only see colorful cars if they are really old beat up rustbuckets or if they are brand new luxury vehicles used by super rich people.

Buildings too. Businesses and the buildings they set up shop in would be painted with garish, eye popping colour. Now everything trends towards landlord-beige.

Edit: And it should be noted, this happened for a reason, and I am aware of that reason, and that just makes me crankier.

I think for me in my country it would be the collapse of the social contract. The bonds that society regulates itself.

From an artistic perspective, self-"publishing" (and I use quotations quite on purpose), changed writing as we know it and drastically dropped the average reading level of the public since now any chimp can bang their fist on a keyboard for an hour, upload it to Amazon and call themselves an "author" beside Stephen King or Umberto Eco.

It was always hailed as "the end of the so-called gatekeepers". Without stopping to realise that gatekeepers/publishers exist for a reason. So that the public zeitgeist isn't completely overrun with utter crap.

The response to having your short story or novel rejected used to be "okay...I'll learn, practice and get better for the next time." Now, it's "screw you...I'll pollute the zeitgeist with my 3rd grade level grammar nightmare with or without you and put it right up there on the shelf next to the actual writers."

Just imagine if a doctor flunked out of med-school, and instead of trying harder, just said "screw you, I'm going to open up my own surgery and put it right next door to you and there's nothing you can do to stop me...."

What a crazy stupid world we live in.

The country I live in turned from a poor shithole, into a developed state

There's not as many people outside just....existing. I'm not that old but I remember just going outside and seeing people just not doing anything in particular everywhere, now it seems like everyone always has some place to rush to and no one is allowed to just exist in public places anymore. Maybe that also has something to do with my perspective shifting has I got older, but I still feel like it's true.

Also bugs. There are like NO fucking bugs anymore. Couple decades ago you could walk out and get sandblasted by a million different bugs and now everything just feels so fucking dead and sterile and depressed. It's like outside was replaced by a clinic and no one bothered to complain.

Negative: Worse driving interactions (as a pedestrian/cyclist), especially post-covid.

Positive: People are generally more accepting of things, and people seem to be more comfortable sharing parts of them that make themselves different from the "norm".

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.

Watching UK 70s TV now is wild. Prime time sitcoms using camp gay sterotypes as a punchline in themselves, black characters being called Chalkie or similar. These had regular repeats throughout the 80s on the main TV channels. Hell, known ephebophilie and bigot, Jim Davidson, had a prime time game show till 2002 and would regularly do his Chalkie character on it.

Late 90s/early 2000s UK TV was still pretty homophobic and racist, see Little Britain for yellow and brown face combined with racial stereotypes, big name comedians of the time like Frank Skinner making homophobic jokes.

Early 2000s in the UK was aggressively misogynistic, mostly in the printed press, absolutely rabid.

Obviously these issues haven't been solved, but at least its unacceptable for mainstream TV in the UK to pedal this shit.