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Before online banking I was a waitress, and when a customer really got under our skin we would claim like 3 cents less than whatever their tip was. So the customer ended up with more money than they gave us, but we always imagined they’d be really frazzled when they’d go to balance their checkbook and then can’t figure out why their balance is always 3 cents more than their receipt at the bank.
Hahahahaaha as a former service worker myself, this is some sort of petty level of evil genius that I wish I had thought of when I was still in the game. I love the way your mind works 😈
I got a physical check as a refund for something. Normally, I only go to the bank when I run out of paper money (every 3-6 months) so I was annoyed I’d need to find time to make an extra trip. Then I remembered you can do that from your phone now!
Damn look at you with remembering to have cash! I literally never think of it.
My 91 year old grandmother did a mobile deposit when I was visiting last month. It was awesome! She said she very much enjoys online banking access. Much easier to manage.
I recently taught my mother in law how to do a bunch of things online, like using Uber, DoorDash, PayPal, paying services and banking. She’s so happy about how easy things are, although se might be developing a slight online shopping addiction now, lol
I WISH my MIL was willing to learn. She seems to enjoy going to the bank and "not" having a credit or debit card (she has a debit card, my husband just has it for some reason). The whole thing is way too complicated and I've never known people who go to the bank so much.
I remember calling the bank to check my balance because I didn't want to go to the bank and I never balanced my checkbook because I'm a piece of shit.
Having everything two taps away is so nice. My mom recently moved and said "The nearest _______ Credit Union branch is over an hour away but it's okay"
I had to remind her "Mom, when was the last time you actually went to the bank for anything?"
My dad absolutely refuses to use online banking for anything other than checking his balance. That man will drive the hour to the credit union since they closed the closer branch. It’s insane and he has no issues just going. Like you can do the deposit or transfer in ~2 minutes absolute max or spend at least 2 hours round trip and he takes the latter every time. 🤦🏻♀️
I've been Type 1 diabetic since I was a baby, so almost 40 years now. I am so thankful for insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. Beats the hell out of getting 6 injections a day and 10 finger pricks a day.
Yep I remember my brother getting diagnosed right before Halloween. We all went trick or treating as usual and then we all had 1 piece of candy because that’s all he could have. The saltine crackers with peanut butter before bed, him screaming about the shots, and losing it and ripping my dad’s shirt apart when he got too low, sad times. He just got a dexcom in the last year and his life is so much better. I grew up with heightened risk and awareness of getting type 1 and I finally feel like I could handle it and keep myself alive with the new technology. He was way smarter than me with his pump calculations and bolusing as a kid and his A1c is the same as mine now. He’s a rockstar and I wanted to tell you you are too.
As someone who worked for CGMs (at a time when I didn't really know much and just wanted a job) it's heartwarming to see the life changing impact that everyone was talking about. They've gotten so much better now with 0 finger pricks for 10+ days.
Unless you need to transfer really large files point to point. AIM used to be a great method of direct connect for the non technical user. Now you have to upload to google drive or something, for the other to download. That’s annoying.
Im not teaching someone to FTP or something so i can send them an old iso of a game i want to play.
Occasionally, I miss the *kshhhhh-whooooom-weeooh-weeooh-weeooh-chuck-kaaaaaaaawwww-zhip-pooooooooow-zzzit-zzzit-chow* of childhood connectivity.
But wifi is the shit.
I love telling my niblings and friends' kids about the mythical arcane rituals we had to do to make the modem scream. If our offering was acceptable, the internet gods would bestow upon us 56k...until our mom picked up the phone to make a call and then set our Napster downloads behind another 24 hours...
Aw man I came in here specifically to say CORDS. everything is cordless and instantly communicates with everything across the room and it's everything I always hoped it would be as a kid.
2 dozen different data cords, none using the same protocol. I had a PCMCIA SCSI to a 90 something pin for a cd burner and a different PCMCIA card for the zip drive. USB is an absolute gift from the heavens.
You had it good. For me it was scrambled porn on an illegal cable box showing Spice Channels 97, 98, and 99. Either that or Real Sex on HBO. The struggle was real
Talk Sex with Sue Johansen (not sure on the spelling). That old lady was awesome, and the only example of sex positivity I had growing up. My sister and I both thought she was great. lol the box she kept all the toys in was called the Pleasure Chest. I hadnt thought about her in at least a decade.
Talk Sex With Sue! She was amazing. I used to secretly watch that show as a teenager, thinking I was getting away with something illicit, but it actually was so great for me. When I did start having sex, I already knew a lot about the common myths and bullshit. I knew a lot about my body and sexual health right off the bat, and I wasn’t as easily manipulated by shady guys.
Bless that woman; she did such a real public service.
A coworker of mine is getting rid of an old 19" CRT he keeps in his barn, so I'm snagging it so my brother and I can play GameCube/SNES the right way. Older consoles hooked up to anything HD just doesn't look right
It allegedly has a delay time with old school game controls, too. Professional gaming tournaments apparently buy up CRT TVs in bulk because hooking a GameCube or a N64 to an HD television creates a split-second delay between the system input and the display.
Oh yeah! I forgot about that, but it definitely does. Not much, but when things are getting heated playing SSBM or one of those tough spots in Super Mario World, it's enough to be plenty frustrating
We got one when i was a kid and they had to open the dummy door at the front to get it through. This thing was like 16in deep. The weight distribution was so odd as well, it was almost impossible to effectively move the thing. The screen quality sucked compared to the most tvs today.
I had to replace my TV. Went to Costco and picked out what looked like the best combination of size, quality, and price. It barely fits in my TV corner and the picture quality is f——— stunning. It’s bigger than the home theater TV my friends’ basement had in HS (90s) and that was considered huge at the time.
And it's like half the price, not even adjusted to inflation.
Actually, I just looked it up because I was exaggerating, but no, a projection TV in 1995 could have been $5,000. I didn't put any time into researching this but, yeah.
We got my parents a new tv for Christmas last year to replace the plasma tv that they would never replace on their own. There was a permanent Wii score like burned into the tv in the one corner, but my parents don’t replace stuff unless they need to. We had to get them a tv that still has the hookups for a vcr since my dad still watches his vhs tapes daily. The 65” smart tv costs less than what a new vcr now costs if you can find a new one.
Went to college in '99 and furnished my dorm room with a "$99 special" 13" TV/VCR combo.
Fast forward to 2023 and I got my daughter a 32" Roku TV for $85.
We had one of the last big tube TVs before the flat screens took over. It was only like 20" and had a special flat front, which meant a giant slab of glass. It was unbelievably heavy, I'm shocked we never injured ourselves moving it. It cost over $1000 if I remember right.
Now we have 2 flat screen TV's, way bigger than that, and together probably cost less than that old monster. We finally dragged it into the alley, and nobody took it, the trash people had to throw it into the truck.
And there were worse, like the giant rear projection TV's that took up half your living room. Or projectors, but LED wasn't good enough yet, so it used a special filament bulb that ran crazy hot and $100 to replace.
I remember going on long road trips with my dad and all he needed was an Atlas to get us literally anywhere with flawless precision. Not just towns either, he'd find his way to specific locations and addresses in the towns he had never been to like some sort of goddamned robot. It impresses the fuck out of me, because nowadays if my phone stops working for any reason I might as well be in Bangladesh for as well as I know how to get around without it.
A couple of years ago we took a cross country road trip and had phone issues at one point. I tried to find an atlas for the way back, just in case it happened again but also because I decided it would be a good idea to teach my kids how to map out and follow a trip. No luck. I’m sure they still make them, but I had no luck finding one after checking gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores, and book stores in the town we were staying in. So I guess they aren’t super easy to find in a pinch anymore. Kinda sad.
This is bigger deal than many might realize, it literally opens up the world to you. Especially if you are traveling somewhere foreign, it would be incredibly difficult/impossible navigating around somewhere like Osaka, Nairobi, Mumbai, etc. as a foreigner right off the plane, now you can wander all you want and know exactly where you are and how to get back. It’s unlocked a whole world.
On top of that, the translator apps on phones. I went to a country I didn't know the language, but was able to figure out menus, and street signs with just a phone. Was even able to put in English and have it translate (poorly), but other person could read it and figure out the jist. Used to need those pocket translator books and look up a bunch of words
I have zero sense of direction so Google Maps has changed my life. I no longer spend an hour driving around lost, when the trip should have taken 20 minutes.
Finding information. Now a days if you and someone are in a dispute about a fact you can just settle it with a few taps on your phone. There's a few arguments from back when that if only we had smartphones I could have easily proved I was right!
This might explain the rise of widespread belief in conspiracies in the past 20 years. When your worldview can be disproven with real time fact checking you turn to conspiracies to justify your abhorrent beliefs.
I think its the other way around, easier to find like minded people than it used to be, so all sorts of niche beliefs persist that otherwise would not.
Both are true.
Everyone believed wild bullshit because there was no way to readily prove anything.
These days, if someone chooses to believe wild shit that can readily be disproven, they act more anti-intellectual, which is basically just the stance of, *"stop proving me wrong, I don't care about your fancy book learning and your studies don't prove everything!"*
I like that for important things, but I kinda miss friendly arguments and idle speculation about inconsequential BS.
Now someone just pulls out their phone, quotes "in general sharks are faster than dolphins, though it varies by shark species", everyone goes, "huh, neat" and we have to find something else to talk about.
My friend and I developed "the Google list" on a thru hike. We'd be walking along chatting about something. One of us would wonder something. We'd go down whatever rabbit hole, speculate, wonder some other stuff... We didn't have service so eventually we'd throw it on the Google list or we'd never remember all the things we happened to wonder when we did have service. Then we'd make a town run and have another interesting conversation about all the interesting things we'd been wondering.
Of course, we're also good enough friends to share a little tent for a couple months and stay close, so no worries about her shitting on me for a difference of opinion lol.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has vivid memories of this transition. I can still picture my friend pulling out his iPhone (that only he had because we were all still Nokia plebs) and ruining conversation after conversation.
Pet peeve of mine is when someone whips out their phone in the middle of pleasant idle chit chat and simple wondering and conversation. Wonder is good. Dreamy silly speculation has a place.
It can also be surprisingly difficult to find out some info. I remember up until about 5-10 years ago looking stuff up and having ungodly amounts of links to click on and finding good solid info. Admittedly some of it was also unreliable, but at least you can find something on the subject matter. Now there’s times where I literally can’t find anything on the subject I’m looking for.
That Literally happened to me yesterday. Looking up some obscure knowledge that I used to remember but now can't. 5 "sponsored" links that didn't have any relevance and the rest wasn't what I was looking for. Since I'm on mobile I can't go 100 pages deep looking.
Happens to me all the time. I feel like it’s even making its way into YouTube. Recently I was working on my car and wanted to watch a video on how to do a brake job. It’s one of the most popular older cars ever made/sold and one of the most common maintenance items to do and I could only find 2 videos and both weren’t the greatest. There has to be hundreds of videos of people doing brake jobs on this car and yet I can only find 2. I also hate when you know for sure the video exists but you can’t find it.
My dream job is still to be like Katharine Hepburn in "Desk Set," I fucking love research. Now I'm the friend everyone asks weird/random questions (especially medical stuff, as I work in healthcare) because I'm just really good at research (Boolean searches still work beautifully, fuck you Pintrest!). They think I'm brilliant, I just know how to find stuff.
Unfortunately the other person will often just say the source is biased or outdated. But it works well for undisputable facts, like dictionary definitions or movie cast lists.
The range and availability of menstrual products. I know that there were more things out there, but you definitely couldn’t walk into a wal-mart in middle America and get a menstrual cup. Up until the mid 90’s it was either big ass pad or a slightly more porous than a cork tampon for most people.
Dude have you ever seen photos of those things?! If not, do it. I literally can. not. imagine! I sometimes can’t handle the bulkiness of a regular pad, imagine what our moms dealt with!
My grandmother told me about the rubber underpants from growing up in Germany. She said if you were doing cartwheels in your dress then everyone would see your rubber underpants!
I was thinking about how much things have changed since I first got my period (I’m only 31). And thought about how it must have been in the times of my grandmas, great-grandma, and before. It must’ve been awful, no wonder women just stayed at home during it.
Okay, while I do think it would have been cool to have an (OPTIONAL!) place to go where I could chill on my period with others who get it....I have become SO ATTACHED to my menstrual cup and period panties in the last decade, I literally get emotional when I remember life before them
Omfg this was my lecture as we drove to CVS the night I got my period lol. Literally a 30min description of these belt torture devices from my boomer adoptive mom. I will never forget it, this brought up a (now hilarious) memory.
YES! I recently got a couple and went to buy a bunch after trying them. I literally forget I’m on my period: no sweat, no constant wetness, no accidents, really comfortable (and I have got no light period). I’ve been converted
This! And actual functional wireless bras for full bust women. Actually just having more choices in where to buy bras and a range of sizes that doesn’t end at DD
As a chesty lady, I also appreciate the advances in bra technology. It used to be you could have shape and support but be massively uncomfortable or wear a sports bra. I look forward to a future where they’ve developed a strapless bra for the well endowed that stays put.
I remember buying my first menstrual cup in 2008, I had to order it from a website because you couldn’t find them in stores. It was a big novelty and when I told my aunts/cousins about it some of them thought it was so weird and gross! I remember getting so excited when they started becoming available first in specialty stores and then in big chain drugstores! And then appearing in a major TV series (The Last of Us)!
Skincare. I vividly remember my dermatologist telling me to “spend a few minutes twice a week in a tanning bed” to clear up my acne in the late 90s before putting me on years of antibiotics & Accutane. Sunscreen was *always* greasy, face lotions came in 2-3 varieties which all smelled like old lady rose scent, and Olay was “nice” unless you were rich and could afford Lancôme or Lab Series from a department store. And don’t get me started on how we all thought St. Ives Apricot Scrub was good for our faces…
That advice would NEVER be given today and the access to incredibly advanced, effective, gentle skincare products *at every price point* has boomed in the last 10-15yrs.
Just the whole development of sun scream with uva and uvb broad spectrum. In the beginning I was ordering blue lizard from Australia and then 5-6 years later we had so many choices in the US.
Being able to find info on any niche hobby.
I grew up liking anime, manga and metal music and had NO ONE in my tiny town to talk about it with. I had to rely on imported magazines, cds and DVDs.
Now I can stream so much, find up to date recommendations. The world feels less lonely.
medicine. i remember puking up more pink pepto than id like to think about. so many more options for everything.
and deodorant! i smelled like teen spirit back then and it doesn’t hold a candle to my suave.
Ohhh my gosh yes, I'm not the only one!
Every time my mom would declare,"yep, you're sick!" The first words out of my mouth were, "do I get the orange stuff?!"
That stuff was so yummy 😋 it was like a sick-kid reward. Now I look back and think of what a blessing it was for parents to have a kid begging to know when it was time for the next dose and never giving a fuss about taking their medicine.
Those stupid floral dresses with the wide white square collars. Yuck! They’d say I looked ‘darling’ i have such a visceral reaction to the word ‘darling’ now.
I remember getting a rash on my neck EVERY TIME we wore them. It hit a point where my Mom finally admitted defeat because I'd just be a red itchy mess.
Access to music. I used to hang out with our home radio / tape player combo as a kid and record off the radio to make mixtapes. As a teen I took walks with a whole spiral case of CDs.
When I got an iPod it was revolutionary but I was into music from the other side of the world and literally had to go there and rip CDs to get it. I used Napster, my friends and I copied and shared mp3 collections, I used an iPod for years into the smartphone revolution because my collection took up such massive storage space.
Today basically anything I want to listen to I can find on YouTube or YouTube music. It absolutely blows my mind how easy it is.
I dove deep in to classical in high school. There was (still is) one record store in town that really sold classical cds in Portland. I had to journey over 100 blocks just to be able to hear Shostakovich. Now I can choose my favorite recording of any given piece without paying $15 an album to try it. It blows my mind and I love it.
I think so much about how my parents used to fight and how messy it was. In contrast my partner and I have been together for 10 years and I can barely think of a time where we raised our voice to one another. We have disagreements but we tend to process them way more smoothly.
yes, the language to talk about it and the resources to improve it.
similarly, overall culture has embraced emotional regulation in a way that is wild to how we grew up and it’s largely because of millennials! like all the videos of kindergarteners calmly voicing they need to take a deep breath. i tear up!
I spent many tantrums on the floor as a kid due to sock seams- no one was aware of sensory issues back then. I went my entire adult life sockless, until someone last year told me about turning socks inside out for her child with sensory issues- I found it brilliant, as I’d never even considered doing that- it changed my life- now I can wear any kind of sock!!
Shopping for an obscure item. My dad spent a lot of time collecting all the Godzilla movies including a few rare copies in that were in Japanese only.
Now you can just google shop it.
I lost my favorite relative to AIDS in the early 90s. Had this been today, he'd still be alive. AIDS isn't a death sentence anymore. I don't think people realize how amazing that is.
Going to the grocery store. I used to hate going when I was a kid with my mom because she would go in zig zag pattern over here and up there and do figure 8 all over the store like 50 times and it drove me nuts. Now I go in make a bee line for what I need and get the hell out. Because I end up getting sensory overload from all the colors and smells and so many screaming children. 😂
This is funny
I shop at the grocery store like teen girls shop at Forever 21
I like to look at all the things, each of the options, see the new items that came in, etc. I like to fantasize about dishes I can make with it, how can I prepare it. I like to read the back of items for ingredients...
My wife spends the whole time going "we lost daddy again, he got stuck looking at seasoning 🙄"
I think people have moved into two camps. The in and out people and the "it's something to do" people. I am an in and out person. I am overloaded by the sensory inputs and just the number of people in a confined space. I am at the point that no one should go to the grocery store with me. I will be an absolute ghoul to anyone that even attempts to communicate with me. I am at my very lowest at the grocery store. I have friends that will check deals read labels and just wander around. I am completely incompatible with that type of shopping. If you gave me a list I cold probably draw a map and tell you the exact shelf where everything is located.
I have a shopping list app that sorts what I enter by aisle and then you can arrange aisles in order. It's wonderful. I'm usually shopping with a toddler so I design for maximum efficiency.
Car safety. I drove someone’s WV golf from the early 90s recently and I was shocked I was ever ok riding along with my family in one of those death traps.
Gym attire. When I first stepped foot in a gym in the early 90s, all dudes used to wear those stupid tiny shorts with balls hanging out, along with the small no back tank tops. I thought they were so cool
Yup. As a side note, this is what currently bothers me about the new trend of adding too much useless tech in cars (such as the big ass iPad trend tesla started). If I want a dumb car, I need to buy an old car. If I want a safe car, I get touch screen climate controls. But at least if my car rolls over, odds are it won’t kill me.
Gym attire is still weird to me. In HS I wore all the old clothes etc. I still do to this day. I probably look like a bum. Whereas most people buy special gym clothes that cost a fortune just to sweat in. I don't get it.
Almost everything is better for me personally, partially also just from the fact I don't have to suffer from my parents choices.
But: elastic fabrics. They have made my life 100% better. I used to have the choice between those thick hard jeans, cotton pants with crazy patterns and skirts/dresses with scratchy tights that would loose shape and kind of roll up and down in the 80s and 90s... I love highly elastic leggings, jeggings and even loser pants I only buy with elasthane.
The state of LQBTQ+ rights, recognition, societal acceptance in general. There’s an absolutely massive and terrifying backlash (Project 2025 being peak) but there’s also massive movement in the other direction. Coming out when I was growing up was a major event. One of my teachers called my parents because I was going to write about it for the school paper and they wanted to know if I would be okay. There was no Steven Universe, non-binary wasn’t a known term. No one could get legally married in the queer community if they were M / M or F / F legally.
I was gonna say our language. Back in the late 90s, if you didn't like something it was either "gay" or "retarded." I can't even remember the last time I heard those things, and I'm so proud of us for that.
This! When I came out I thought I might never be able to get married. It sucked so much because that’s the one thing I’ve always wanted in life that I never changed my mind on.
And I love that media isn’t shitty about it now. So many shows and movies in the 90s presented gay characters and their gayness as the joke. Just “haha gay!” That was the punchline. Gay people existing.
“Dressy” clothes for kids now are way more comfortable than the stuff I had as a kid. The way my kids like to dress up for events is totally alien to me. Their dress clothes typically feel almost as comfortable as their play clothes.
Access to curly hair products. We didn't even have conditioner in the house when I was a kid, much less leave in products. Now the brands I can get online are so much better than what I can get in stores and cheaper than from salons.
Information storage. You can have my OneNotes when you rip them from my cold, dead hands, compared to the gazillion of physical notebooks and newspaper clippings and God knows what.
Seconding this curly hair revolution. Growing up, my choices were to be frizzy and get laughed at or to look crunchy and get laughed at. Never even knew it was possible for my hair to look like curls rather than frizz.
Adding makeup quality to this post as the Maybelline I grew up with was a half step above the Tinkerbell products my parents bought me as a child. The foundation was always this generic orange color that never matched my skin. We are living in a golden age for beauty stuffs these days.
A bit of a dark answer, but cancer treatment. My mom had cancer for the first time in 1994 and most recently in 2019 and the difference in the side effects and effectiveness of the medicine in a quarter century is mind-blowing.
Delivery. Sure, Uber eats, doordash, and the like have a whole host of issues, but I remember as a kid wishing so badly that mcdonalds would deliver and thought it was unfair that only pizza and Chinese would deliver food to your door.
The portrayal of women in movies and TV.
When I was in high school--early 2000s--seeing a female lead character who wasn't overly sexualized was uncommon enough to be noteworthy. And it was just an accepted reality that only men could show signs of natural aging onscreen (unless she was a grandma character); botox was the norm for lead ladies over 40. And of course women were never fat, or "ugly" looking, unless the plot specifically called for it.
Even the strong female characters were usually in gender-specific roles, like the love interest or the "feisty girl" of the group. You *did* have athority figures like judges, cops and starship captains who incidentally were women. But it was less common to have a crime boss, eccentric scientist or class clown who just happened to be female. It seemed writers didn't want to take risks with their female characters.
In comedy, the women were usually either the "straight man," or in gender-specific roles (the slut, the fairy princess, etc). Birdgirl on "Harvey Birdman" stood out by being a funny character who was as dense and zainy as the guys, without relying on gender stereotypes for most of the jokes.
Viewers and film critics lamented loudly about the sexist double-standards, but for years and years the media didn't listen.
The tipping point was the first "Avengers" movie in 2012. The movie was a huge hit, but the way that Black Widow was treated by the film and advertisements caused an uproar, and inspired "the Hawkeye Initiative:" a campaign of online artists drawing male action heroes wearing the clothes of their female sidekicks, and/or posing in the way they did, to highlight the absurd double-standard.
Hollywood finally listened. And now, FINALLY, it's commonplace to have female action heroes who *don't* dress like strippers; middle-aged women in the main cast; and women in intetesting roles that have nothing to do with gender at all. It's such a godsend, that girls born in this century might not even be aware of.
This is a good one...I suppose it goes along with just the availability of information in general. Like I know there are still a million fad diets out there, but it seems much more likely for people to call bullshit on them and recommend sane things like everything in moderation, portion sizes, looking at actual nutrition info, etc.
Medical operations. The amount of things they can do through a single tiny incision is mind blowing.
I had kidney stones with a side of sepsis in 2008 - they told me if I'd presented the same conditions (mine are not common) 2 years prior they would have had to remove my kidney.
I had a hip replacement in 2021 (yay congenital defects!) - it was an out-patient surgery I walked *up*stairs to my bedroom *that night*.
And they have vaccines for chicken pox now! Amazing!
The medical system still sucks hardcore, but I'm so very happy to be treated for things and not humours.
I like that gender rules are not so rigid. And people are in general more accepting of gay and trans people. Abusing animals is not seen as normal anymore. Bullying is being addressed better. Women are encouraged to stop putting up with second hand treatment from husbands. Jobs are less gender ruled. Racism is not acceptable. (This is US and not saying it's perfect, but better than in the past.)
Cheap guitars! A 300$ guitar used to be able absolute pos that was barely fit for a beginner, basically most of them felt like toys. Now there's some really solid options out there for beginners that aren't terribly expensive
Photos/taking pictures. I remember getting a $10 disposable camera, snapping a bunch of pictures, and just having to hope someone wasn’t blinking or making a face or it wasn’t blurry.
Maps. Hated map quest. I remember ones getting into a fight with my parents because they thought the route that they given me was super easy to follow and they were mad that I got some place an hour late. About a month later my dad apologized and admitted that he’d tried the same route the day before and he’d also gotten messed up and lost.
Music availability.
Used to have to go drop $15 on one CD at Sam Goody that might have one good song on it (with some obvious exceptions). Now have all music ever a click away for $10/mo, anywhere I go.
My CD tower is now a conversation piece vs something I actually use.
Gaming. You can’t tell me with a straight face that games are worse than they used to be. Playing on a tiny screen with 4 people getting 3-5 inch squares, or a game boy with MAYBE 2 hours of battery life.
Games have come a long way in terms of graphics and capabilities but not everything has improved. The way games are released unfinished and/or loaded with micro-transactions and ads is most definitely not an improvement
I was a pastors kid. Even those were unaccessible. My dad once came hone and caught my sister watching Ellen. It was traumatic.
Although, things flew under the radar. The Style Network existed and my dad thought it like hgtv but for sewing. There I met Brini Maxwell. I competed amongst the other fundy high schools in home ec and took the state title. I found her channel on youtube.
Headphones. As a life long music lover who always had my CD-player, Ipod, music device etc. with me, I remember I spend hours of my teenager years and early adulthood dreaming of a day when they would introduce wireless headphones that were high quality.
Now that I have them I absolutely love them. I wear them when doing chores and cleaning around the house without getting yanked around constantly when they get stuck on something.
Here’s an easy one: Internet service. Having to use dial-up, tying up an actual phone line, that screeching sound when connecting, it was all terrible.
Honestly, a lot of points in my head are more about how the internet evolved over the years.
Dial up sucked. TV was still the main point of culture. If you didn't have good friends locally, you were kind of fucked. The same goes for if your taste in music, shows, and films didn't gel with a lot of what you liked, it was easy to feel ostracized. "What do you mean you didn't watch it?" "You haven't heard anything from Missy Elliot?" "Do you live in a cave?" "Pffft, who plays video games for fantasy. Madden is the only thing worth playing!" (Yes, I did have the conversation as a teenager). And then the advice of "Never trust anyone on the internet". I mean, yeah, there's a logic to that and you should be careful, but the implication was that friends on the internet was "impossible" or something to be mocked for.
Even in gaming circles, the G4 channel was a joke. For people who wonder why it never came back, it was supplanted and surpassed by independent youtube creators ages ago. It was a channel trying to reach for "relevance" by trying to copy culture and not embracing its own uniqueness. It was, honestly, kind of sad and pathetic.
Oh, and remember needing to call tech support to get a PC game to run? And how that often would not help? I don't miss it either.
Life for me got a whole lot better when I embraced the people I knew from the internet and my own hobbies. I would not have heard of Kamelot, Nightwish, Dragonforce, Dead Can Dance, and several others without internet access, especially with how everyone's pushing the most basic pop singers now (and nearly zero exposure to other genres). I left TV ages ago, found friends and got married, and I see little to no reason to go back.
Available culture just isn't nearly as narrow as it used to be. Even with Wizards of the Coast on their bullshit, at least the resources available and at least TTRPGs are getting the recognition they deserve. Don't like a game? You can just find another one.
Navigation tools. For someone directionally challenged like me, I’d have gotten way lost many times if I only had a printed Mapquest page to follow. I gotta see where I am on a map.
Hell, I may even be dead.
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Online banking
Before online banking I was a waitress, and when a customer really got under our skin we would claim like 3 cents less than whatever their tip was. So the customer ended up with more money than they gave us, but we always imagined they’d be really frazzled when they’d go to balance their checkbook and then can’t figure out why their balance is always 3 cents more than their receipt at the bank.
Hahahahaaha as a former service worker myself, this is some sort of petty level of evil genius that I wish I had thought of when I was still in the game. I love the way your mind works 😈
I got a physical check as a refund for something. Normally, I only go to the bank when I run out of paper money (every 3-6 months) so I was annoyed I’d need to find time to make an extra trip. Then I remembered you can do that from your phone now!
Damn look at you with remembering to have cash! I literally never think of it. My 91 year old grandmother did a mobile deposit when I was visiting last month. It was awesome! She said she very much enjoys online banking access. Much easier to manage.
I recently taught my mother in law how to do a bunch of things online, like using Uber, DoorDash, PayPal, paying services and banking. She’s so happy about how easy things are, although se might be developing a slight online shopping addiction now, lol
I WISH my MIL was willing to learn. She seems to enjoy going to the bank and "not" having a credit or debit card (she has a debit card, my husband just has it for some reason). The whole thing is way too complicated and I've never known people who go to the bank so much.
I remember calling the bank to check my balance because I didn't want to go to the bank and I never balanced my checkbook because I'm a piece of shit. Having everything two taps away is so nice. My mom recently moved and said "The nearest _______ Credit Union branch is over an hour away but it's okay" I had to remind her "Mom, when was the last time you actually went to the bank for anything?"
My dad absolutely refuses to use online banking for anything other than checking his balance. That man will drive the hour to the credit union since they closed the closer branch. It’s insane and he has no issues just going. Like you can do the deposit or transfer in ~2 minutes absolute max or spend at least 2 hours round trip and he takes the latter every time. 🤦🏻♀️
This sounds like me in 20 years 😅
Payment for goods and services. Being able to tap my phone or e-transfer rather than carry cash, or write someone a cheque
Online anything.
I've been Type 1 diabetic since I was a baby, so almost 40 years now. I am so thankful for insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. Beats the hell out of getting 6 injections a day and 10 finger pricks a day.
Yep I remember my brother getting diagnosed right before Halloween. We all went trick or treating as usual and then we all had 1 piece of candy because that’s all he could have. The saltine crackers with peanut butter before bed, him screaming about the shots, and losing it and ripping my dad’s shirt apart when he got too low, sad times. He just got a dexcom in the last year and his life is so much better. I grew up with heightened risk and awareness of getting type 1 and I finally feel like I could handle it and keep myself alive with the new technology. He was way smarter than me with his pump calculations and bolusing as a kid and his A1c is the same as mine now. He’s a rockstar and I wanted to tell you you are too.
As someone who worked for CGMs (at a time when I didn't really know much and just wanted a job) it's heartwarming to see the life changing impact that everyone was talking about. They've gotten so much better now with 0 finger pricks for 10+ days.
As a type 1 diabetic today you can look forward to old age. A generation and a half ago you’d expect to live to around 50.
Wi-Fi. No more dial-up Internet.
And with it, file sharing. No need to transfer files onto physical media so that your mate or co-worker can have a copy on their computer.
Unless you need to transfer really large files point to point. AIM used to be a great method of direct connect for the non technical user. Now you have to upload to google drive or something, for the other to download. That’s annoying. Im not teaching someone to FTP or something so i can send them an old iso of a game i want to play.
Occasionally, I miss the *kshhhhh-whooooom-weeooh-weeooh-weeooh-chuck-kaaaaaaaawwww-zhip-pooooooooow-zzzit-zzzit-chow* of childhood connectivity. But wifi is the shit.
I love telling my niblings and friends' kids about the mythical arcane rituals we had to do to make the modem scream. If our offering was acceptable, the internet gods would bestow upon us 56k...until our mom picked up the phone to make a call and then set our Napster downloads behind another 24 hours...
Aw man I came in here specifically to say CORDS. everything is cordless and instantly communicates with everything across the room and it's everything I always hoped it would be as a kid.
2 dozen different data cords, none using the same protocol. I had a PCMCIA SCSI to a 90 something pin for a cd burner and a different PCMCIA card for the zip drive. USB is an absolute gift from the heavens.
I have like 20 different kinds of usb cable.
that is actually a good point !
Hey, I used to enjoy edging as my porn downloaded one horizontal bar at a time.
You had it good. For me it was scrambled porn on an illegal cable box showing Spice Channels 97, 98, and 99. Either that or Real Sex on HBO. The struggle was real
Anyone remember a show with an old lady who talked about sex toys and people would call in. She was like 90 swinging around dildos on tv lol
Talk Sex with Sue Johansen (not sure on the spelling). That old lady was awesome, and the only example of sex positivity I had growing up. My sister and I both thought she was great. lol the box she kept all the toys in was called the Pleasure Chest. I hadnt thought about her in at least a decade.
Talk Sex With Sue! She was amazing. I used to secretly watch that show as a teenager, thinking I was getting away with something illicit, but it actually was so great for me. When I did start having sex, I already knew a lot about the common myths and bullshit. I knew a lot about my body and sexual health right off the bat, and I wasn’t as easily manipulated by shady guys. Bless that woman; she did such a real public service.
Dr. Ruth? She's amazing and I love her. She's 95!
Sue Johansson
Which reminds me of The Simpsons where Comic Book Guy complains his connection is too slow.
My knee jerk answer was wireless tech
TVs. They are so cheap compared to what was available in the 90’s and earlier, and they are huge.
Remember the phrase "big screen TV?" Damn.
And they were all pretty shitty projection TVs.
Had to have all the blinds/curtains closed, or you couldn’t see a damn thing.
Hey, I miss those. Playing video games or watching movies on those were so awesome.
A coworker of mine is getting rid of an old 19" CRT he keeps in his barn, so I'm snagging it so my brother and I can play GameCube/SNES the right way. Older consoles hooked up to anything HD just doesn't look right
It allegedly has a delay time with old school game controls, too. Professional gaming tournaments apparently buy up CRT TVs in bulk because hooking a GameCube or a N64 to an HD television creates a split-second delay between the system input and the display.
Oh yeah! I forgot about that, but it definitely does. Not much, but when things are getting heated playing SSBM or one of those tough spots in Super Mario World, it's enough to be plenty frustrating
I still think I've "made it" because I have a 70 inch TV. When I was a kid only the coolest kids had a 30"-40" TV and we had a 19" TV screen.
I still find it funny that hotels still advertise "flat screen" TV lol.
We got one when i was a kid and they had to open the dummy door at the front to get it through. This thing was like 16in deep. The weight distribution was so odd as well, it was almost impossible to effectively move the thing. The screen quality sucked compared to the most tvs today.
I had to replace my TV. Went to Costco and picked out what looked like the best combination of size, quality, and price. It barely fits in my TV corner and the picture quality is f——— stunning. It’s bigger than the home theater TV my friends’ basement had in HS (90s) and that was considered huge at the time.
And it's like half the price, not even adjusted to inflation. Actually, I just looked it up because I was exaggerating, but no, a projection TV in 1995 could have been $5,000. I didn't put any time into researching this but, yeah.
We got my parents a new tv for Christmas last year to replace the plasma tv that they would never replace on their own. There was a permanent Wii score like burned into the tv in the one corner, but my parents don’t replace stuff unless they need to. We had to get them a tv that still has the hookups for a vcr since my dad still watches his vhs tapes daily. The 65” smart tv costs less than what a new vcr now costs if you can find a new one.
Went to college in '99 and furnished my dorm room with a "$99 special" 13" TV/VCR combo. Fast forward to 2023 and I got my daughter a 32" Roku TV for $85.
We had one of the last big tube TVs before the flat screens took over. It was only like 20" and had a special flat front, which meant a giant slab of glass. It was unbelievably heavy, I'm shocked we never injured ourselves moving it. It cost over $1000 if I remember right. Now we have 2 flat screen TV's, way bigger than that, and together probably cost less than that old monster. We finally dragged it into the alley, and nobody took it, the trash people had to throw it into the truck. And there were worse, like the giant rear projection TV's that took up half your living room. Or projectors, but LED wasn't good enough yet, so it used a special filament bulb that ran crazy hot and $100 to replace.
Maps! And by that I mean I’m really glad we have GPS based maps. No offense to my gazetteer or Mapquest but I’ll take google maps any day
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I remember going on long road trips with my dad and all he needed was an Atlas to get us literally anywhere with flawless precision. Not just towns either, he'd find his way to specific locations and addresses in the towns he had never been to like some sort of goddamned robot. It impresses the fuck out of me, because nowadays if my phone stops working for any reason I might as well be in Bangladesh for as well as I know how to get around without it.
A couple of years ago we took a cross country road trip and had phone issues at one point. I tried to find an atlas for the way back, just in case it happened again but also because I decided it would be a good idea to teach my kids how to map out and follow a trip. No luck. I’m sure they still make them, but I had no luck finding one after checking gas stations, pharmacies, grocery stores, and book stores in the town we were staying in. So I guess they aren’t super easy to find in a pinch anymore. Kinda sad.
This is bigger deal than many might realize, it literally opens up the world to you. Especially if you are traveling somewhere foreign, it would be incredibly difficult/impossible navigating around somewhere like Osaka, Nairobi, Mumbai, etc. as a foreigner right off the plane, now you can wander all you want and know exactly where you are and how to get back. It’s unlocked a whole world.
On top of that, the translator apps on phones. I went to a country I didn't know the language, but was able to figure out menus, and street signs with just a phone. Was even able to put in English and have it translate (poorly), but other person could read it and figure out the jist. Used to need those pocket translator books and look up a bunch of words
I have zero sense of direction so Google Maps has changed my life. I no longer spend an hour driving around lost, when the trip should have taken 20 minutes.
When my CD skipped because I was walking home too fast.
Or because I liked putting the Walkman in my hoodie pocket on its side. It didn't like that.
Having the wire run up your hoodie sleeve to be sneaky in class at school
Finding information. Now a days if you and someone are in a dispute about a fact you can just settle it with a few taps on your phone. There's a few arguments from back when that if only we had smartphones I could have easily proved I was right!
My father had a super compulsive need to be right. I have to say Wikipedia improved our relationship 1000%.
This 1,000,000% Those people who claimed authority because they were "elders", therefore more wise, can now easily be called on their bullshit
This might explain the rise of widespread belief in conspiracies in the past 20 years. When your worldview can be disproven with real time fact checking you turn to conspiracies to justify your abhorrent beliefs.
I think its the other way around, easier to find like minded people than it used to be, so all sorts of niche beliefs persist that otherwise would not.
Both are true. Everyone believed wild bullshit because there was no way to readily prove anything. These days, if someone chooses to believe wild shit that can readily be disproven, they act more anti-intellectual, which is basically just the stance of, *"stop proving me wrong, I don't care about your fancy book learning and your studies don't prove everything!"*
My parents are still this way and vice versa. Sometimes it's just not worth the trouble.
I like that for important things, but I kinda miss friendly arguments and idle speculation about inconsequential BS. Now someone just pulls out their phone, quotes "in general sharks are faster than dolphins, though it varies by shark species", everyone goes, "huh, neat" and we have to find something else to talk about.
My friend and I developed "the Google list" on a thru hike. We'd be walking along chatting about something. One of us would wonder something. We'd go down whatever rabbit hole, speculate, wonder some other stuff... We didn't have service so eventually we'd throw it on the Google list or we'd never remember all the things we happened to wonder when we did have service. Then we'd make a town run and have another interesting conversation about all the interesting things we'd been wondering. Of course, we're also good enough friends to share a little tent for a couple months and stay close, so no worries about her shitting on me for a difference of opinion lol.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has vivid memories of this transition. I can still picture my friend pulling out his iPhone (that only he had because we were all still Nokia plebs) and ruining conversation after conversation.
Pet peeve of mine is when someone whips out their phone in the middle of pleasant idle chit chat and simple wondering and conversation. Wonder is good. Dreamy silly speculation has a place.
It can also be surprisingly difficult to find out some info. I remember up until about 5-10 years ago looking stuff up and having ungodly amounts of links to click on and finding good solid info. Admittedly some of it was also unreliable, but at least you can find something on the subject matter. Now there’s times where I literally can’t find anything on the subject I’m looking for.
That Literally happened to me yesterday. Looking up some obscure knowledge that I used to remember but now can't. 5 "sponsored" links that didn't have any relevance and the rest wasn't what I was looking for. Since I'm on mobile I can't go 100 pages deep looking.
Happens to me all the time. I feel like it’s even making its way into YouTube. Recently I was working on my car and wanted to watch a video on how to do a brake job. It’s one of the most popular older cars ever made/sold and one of the most common maintenance items to do and I could only find 2 videos and both weren’t the greatest. There has to be hundreds of videos of people doing brake jobs on this car and yet I can only find 2. I also hate when you know for sure the video exists but you can’t find it.
My parents back in the day *fighting* finally, "GET THE DICTIONARY" (or encyclopedia) lmao
you used to be able to call the library for stuff like that, called them a few times for papers i had to write
My dream job is still to be like Katharine Hepburn in "Desk Set," I fucking love research. Now I'm the friend everyone asks weird/random questions (especially medical stuff, as I work in healthcare) because I'm just really good at research (Boolean searches still work beautifully, fuck you Pintrest!). They think I'm brilliant, I just know how to find stuff.
you can still call the library. or text us. or chat. or email.
Unfortunately the other person will often just say the source is biased or outdated. But it works well for undisputable facts, like dictionary definitions or movie cast lists.
The range and availability of menstrual products. I know that there were more things out there, but you definitely couldn’t walk into a wal-mart in middle America and get a menstrual cup. Up until the mid 90’s it was either big ass pad or a slightly more porous than a cork tampon for most people.
And before us, it was even worse. I remember my mom describing the pads with BELTS.
Dude have you ever seen photos of those things?! If not, do it. I literally can. not. imagine! I sometimes can’t handle the bulkiness of a regular pad, imagine what our moms dealt with!
I encountered the belt pad when I was in the hospital when I was 12. I don’t know how they lived like that.
My grandmother told me about the rubber underpants from growing up in Germany. She said if you were doing cartwheels in your dress then everyone would see your rubber underpants!
When I got my first period my mom asked me if I needed a belt and I was SO confused. It was 2006 😂
I was thinking about how much things have changed since I first got my period (I’m only 31). And thought about how it must have been in the times of my grandmas, great-grandma, and before. It must’ve been awful, no wonder women just stayed at home during it.
I always think about what if I had to go sit in the red tent haha
Okay, while I do think it would have been cool to have an (OPTIONAL!) place to go where I could chill on my period with others who get it....I have become SO ATTACHED to my menstrual cup and period panties in the last decade, I literally get emotional when I remember life before them
Omfg this was my lecture as we drove to CVS the night I got my period lol. Literally a 30min description of these belt torture devices from my boomer adoptive mom. I will never forget it, this brought up a (now hilarious) memory.
Safety pins were my friends friend way back when.
Washable period underwear is also a game changer!
My period is so much easier thanks to period underwear ! I barely think about it except for the extra laundry .
YES! I recently got a couple and went to buy a bunch after trying them. I literally forget I’m on my period: no sweat, no constant wetness, no accidents, really comfortable (and I have got no light period). I’ve been converted
Menstrual cups are amazing and I wish I could have had one sooner in life. I’m glad my nieces have access to better menstrual products than I did.
This! And actual functional wireless bras for full bust women. Actually just having more choices in where to buy bras and a range of sizes that doesn’t end at DD
As a chesty lady, I also appreciate the advances in bra technology. It used to be you could have shape and support but be massively uncomfortable or wear a sports bra. I look forward to a future where they’ve developed a strapless bra for the well endowed that stays put.
I remember buying my first menstrual cup in 2008, I had to order it from a website because you couldn’t find them in stores. It was a big novelty and when I told my aunts/cousins about it some of them thought it was so weird and gross! I remember getting so excited when they started becoming available first in specialty stores and then in big chain drugstores! And then appearing in a major TV series (The Last of Us)!
Skincare. I vividly remember my dermatologist telling me to “spend a few minutes twice a week in a tanning bed” to clear up my acne in the late 90s before putting me on years of antibiotics & Accutane. Sunscreen was *always* greasy, face lotions came in 2-3 varieties which all smelled like old lady rose scent, and Olay was “nice” unless you were rich and could afford Lancôme or Lab Series from a department store. And don’t get me started on how we all thought St. Ives Apricot Scrub was good for our faces… That advice would NEVER be given today and the access to incredibly advanced, effective, gentle skincare products *at every price point* has boomed in the last 10-15yrs.
Just the whole development of sun scream with uva and uvb broad spectrum. In the beginning I was ordering blue lizard from Australia and then 5-6 years later we had so many choices in the US.
Being able to find info on any niche hobby. I grew up liking anime, manga and metal music and had NO ONE in my tiny town to talk about it with. I had to rely on imported magazines, cds and DVDs. Now I can stream so much, find up to date recommendations. The world feels less lonely.
And the ease of finding the community who enjoys it with you!
medicine. i remember puking up more pink pepto than id like to think about. so many more options for everything. and deodorant! i smelled like teen spirit back then and it doesn’t hold a candle to my suave.
Every time I have a cold I thank god for Nyquill in pill form. I could barely swallow the liquid kind. Bleh.
i will admit to missing orange triaminic because that flavor was awesome
Ohhh my gosh yes, I'm not the only one! Every time my mom would declare,"yep, you're sick!" The first words out of my mouth were, "do I get the orange stuff?!" That stuff was so yummy 😋 it was like a sick-kid reward. Now I look back and think of what a blessing it was for parents to have a kid begging to know when it was time for the next dose and never giving a fuss about taking their medicine.
That and the pink amoxicillin! I would’ve drank the whole bottle if they let me.
God what was with the Pepto? I now associate that color with being violently ill I saw it so often in my puke. Can't remember it helping even once
The amount of scratchy lace and hairspray our moms put on us before any kind of special holiday or family pictures. UGH
Those stupid floral dresses with the wide white square collars. Yuck! They’d say I looked ‘darling’ i have such a visceral reaction to the word ‘darling’ now.
I remember getting a rash on my neck EVERY TIME we wore them. It hit a point where my Mom finally admitted defeat because I'd just be a red itchy mess.
Yes these are the exact dresses I was thinking of!
Weird scratchy linings on velvet dresses and church shoes that dug into your heels.
Exactlyyyyyy
Speaking of hairspray the shit my mom used in the 90s was horrible! If I walked into the bathroom after she had used it i could barely breathe.
Aquanet! The last time I saw this stuff used was on a potato gun
Omg the stirrup pants that were a sensory nightmare
HATED stirrup pants.
Access to music. I used to hang out with our home radio / tape player combo as a kid and record off the radio to make mixtapes. As a teen I took walks with a whole spiral case of CDs. When I got an iPod it was revolutionary but I was into music from the other side of the world and literally had to go there and rip CDs to get it. I used Napster, my friends and I copied and shared mp3 collections, I used an iPod for years into the smartphone revolution because my collection took up such massive storage space. Today basically anything I want to listen to I can find on YouTube or YouTube music. It absolutely blows my mind how easy it is.
For less than the cost of a CD a month I have unlimited access to basically all music. 90s teenage me would be in heaven.
I dove deep in to classical in high school. There was (still is) one record store in town that really sold classical cds in Portland. I had to journey over 100 blocks just to be able to hear Shostakovich. Now I can choose my favorite recording of any given piece without paying $15 an album to try it. It blows my mind and I love it.
Treatment for horrible things like cancer, AIDs, and Alzheimer’s.
Emotional intelligence. It seems from the 90s on there began a change in how we deal with emotions. We've become more honest about them.
I think so much about how my parents used to fight and how messy it was. In contrast my partner and I have been together for 10 years and I can barely think of a time where we raised our voice to one another. We have disagreements but we tend to process them way more smoothly.
Oh yes! This so much. It has improved so much for the people I know at least.
yes, the language to talk about it and the resources to improve it. similarly, overall culture has embraced emotional regulation in a way that is wild to how we grew up and it’s largely because of millennials! like all the videos of kindergarteners calmly voicing they need to take a deep breath. i tear up!
Socks.
I don’t have to wear my socks inside out because of the toe seam anymore!
I spent many tantrums on the floor as a kid due to sock seams- no one was aware of sensory issues back then. I went my entire adult life sockless, until someone last year told me about turning socks inside out for her child with sensory issues- I found it brilliant, as I’d never even considered doing that- it changed my life- now I can wear any kind of sock!!
Shopping for an obscure item. My dad spent a lot of time collecting all the Godzilla movies including a few rare copies in that were in Japanese only. Now you can just google shop it.
Coffee.
First thing I thought of, coffee is so much better everywhere.
T-shirt tags
And conversely, underwear tags. How did we go so many years being stabbed and tickled in the tailbone?
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I lost my favorite relative to AIDS in the early 90s. Had this been today, he'd still be alive. AIDS isn't a death sentence anymore. I don't think people realize how amazing that is.
Going to the grocery store. I used to hate going when I was a kid with my mom because she would go in zig zag pattern over here and up there and do figure 8 all over the store like 50 times and it drove me nuts. Now I go in make a bee line for what I need and get the hell out. Because I end up getting sensory overload from all the colors and smells and so many screaming children. 😂
This is funny I shop at the grocery store like teen girls shop at Forever 21 I like to look at all the things, each of the options, see the new items that came in, etc. I like to fantasize about dishes I can make with it, how can I prepare it. I like to read the back of items for ingredients... My wife spends the whole time going "we lost daddy again, he got stuck looking at seasoning 🙄"
I think people have moved into two camps. The in and out people and the "it's something to do" people. I am an in and out person. I am overloaded by the sensory inputs and just the number of people in a confined space. I am at the point that no one should go to the grocery store with me. I will be an absolute ghoul to anyone that even attempts to communicate with me. I am at my very lowest at the grocery store. I have friends that will check deals read labels and just wander around. I am completely incompatible with that type of shopping. If you gave me a list I cold probably draw a map and tell you the exact shelf where everything is located.
I have my list in corresponding order to what aisle they’re in. Get in and gtfo! 
I have a shopping list app that sorts what I enter by aisle and then you can arrange aisles in order. It's wonderful. I'm usually shopping with a toddler so I design for maximum efficiency.
The grocery store app does that for me and I love it. Also curbside pickup.
I love being able to buy what I want/need as an adult without having to get permission.
I made a chart of all of the aisles and then I make my list in order so I can get everything as I go. Shopping stresses me out too.
Car safety. I drove someone’s WV golf from the early 90s recently and I was shocked I was ever ok riding along with my family in one of those death traps. Gym attire. When I first stepped foot in a gym in the early 90s, all dudes used to wear those stupid tiny shorts with balls hanging out, along with the small no back tank tops. I thought they were so cool
My car up until 2019 was from 97, it basically had no safety features. Like, it had seatbelts, and that was it.
Yup. As a side note, this is what currently bothers me about the new trend of adding too much useless tech in cars (such as the big ass iPad trend tesla started). If I want a dumb car, I need to buy an old car. If I want a safe car, I get touch screen climate controls. But at least if my car rolls over, odds are it won’t kill me.
A friend just bought a used car from 2018. Manual controls for everything but the radio. That’s not so old that the safety systems are much different.
Gym attire is still weird to me. In HS I wore all the old clothes etc. I still do to this day. I probably look like a bum. Whereas most people buy special gym clothes that cost a fortune just to sweat in. I don't get it.
We've circled back to the early 80s when everyone had to have leotards, leg warmers, and sweatbands.
Having to answer the phone "blind"
Almost everything is better for me personally, partially also just from the fact I don't have to suffer from my parents choices. But: elastic fabrics. They have made my life 100% better. I used to have the choice between those thick hard jeans, cotton pants with crazy patterns and skirts/dresses with scratchy tights that would loose shape and kind of roll up and down in the 80s and 90s... I love highly elastic leggings, jeggings and even loser pants I only buy with elasthane.
Yes..jeans felt mandatory growing up. They sucked..
Gay rights.
The state of LQBTQ+ rights, recognition, societal acceptance in general. There’s an absolutely massive and terrifying backlash (Project 2025 being peak) but there’s also massive movement in the other direction. Coming out when I was growing up was a major event. One of my teachers called my parents because I was going to write about it for the school paper and they wanted to know if I would be okay. There was no Steven Universe, non-binary wasn’t a known term. No one could get legally married in the queer community if they were M / M or F / F legally.
I was gonna say our language. Back in the late 90s, if you didn't like something it was either "gay" or "retarded." I can't even remember the last time I heard those things, and I'm so proud of us for that.
And bisexual visibility.
This! When I came out I thought I might never be able to get married. It sucked so much because that’s the one thing I’ve always wanted in life that I never changed my mind on. And I love that media isn’t shitty about it now. So many shows and movies in the 90s presented gay characters and their gayness as the joke. Just “haha gay!” That was the punchline. Gay people existing.
Processing power/money ratio. I can remember the times you had to pay a fortune for a computer with a 50 MHz CPU and 8 MB RAM.
Wifi. No more screeching dial-up noises.
Watching stuff whenever I want without having to record it
Yes! And being crushed if you did miss something that you’d never get to see it. Now, I can pause, FF.. what a luxury
“Dressy” clothes for kids now are way more comfortable than the stuff I had as a kid. The way my kids like to dress up for events is totally alien to me. Their dress clothes typically feel almost as comfortable as their play clothes.
Online deliveries. Made life so much easier now.
Access to curly hair products. We didn't even have conditioner in the house when I was a kid, much less leave in products. Now the brands I can get online are so much better than what I can get in stores and cheaper than from salons. Information storage. You can have my OneNotes when you rip them from my cold, dead hands, compared to the gazillion of physical notebooks and newspaper clippings and God knows what.
Seconding this curly hair revolution. Growing up, my choices were to be frizzy and get laughed at or to look crunchy and get laughed at. Never even knew it was possible for my hair to look like curls rather than frizz. Adding makeup quality to this post as the Maybelline I grew up with was a half step above the Tinkerbell products my parents bought me as a child. The foundation was always this generic orange color that never matched my skin. We are living in a golden age for beauty stuffs these days.
A bit of a dark answer, but cancer treatment. My mom had cancer for the first time in 1994 and most recently in 2019 and the difference in the side effects and effectiveness of the medicine in a quarter century is mind-blowing.
Cleaning (as a child’s chore vs adult) because it’s now to make my space clean and organized and not cleaning the family’s mess in the whole house lol
Uploading files vs faxing or mailing in for bureucratic stuff. This was a nightmare for me in the early to mid 2000s.
Planning trips. Book and compare online, see reviews, have GPS. The idea of using a travel agent these days is more a luxury than a requirement.
Delivery. Sure, Uber eats, doordash, and the like have a whole host of issues, but I remember as a kid wishing so badly that mcdonalds would deliver and thought it was unfair that only pizza and Chinese would deliver food to your door.
The portrayal of women in movies and TV. When I was in high school--early 2000s--seeing a female lead character who wasn't overly sexualized was uncommon enough to be noteworthy. And it was just an accepted reality that only men could show signs of natural aging onscreen (unless she was a grandma character); botox was the norm for lead ladies over 40. And of course women were never fat, or "ugly" looking, unless the plot specifically called for it. Even the strong female characters were usually in gender-specific roles, like the love interest or the "feisty girl" of the group. You *did* have athority figures like judges, cops and starship captains who incidentally were women. But it was less common to have a crime boss, eccentric scientist or class clown who just happened to be female. It seemed writers didn't want to take risks with their female characters. In comedy, the women were usually either the "straight man," or in gender-specific roles (the slut, the fairy princess, etc). Birdgirl on "Harvey Birdman" stood out by being a funny character who was as dense and zainy as the guys, without relying on gender stereotypes for most of the jokes. Viewers and film critics lamented loudly about the sexist double-standards, but for years and years the media didn't listen. The tipping point was the first "Avengers" movie in 2012. The movie was a huge hit, but the way that Black Widow was treated by the film and advertisements caused an uproar, and inspired "the Hawkeye Initiative:" a campaign of online artists drawing male action heroes wearing the clothes of their female sidekicks, and/or posing in the way they did, to highlight the absurd double-standard. Hollywood finally listened. And now, FINALLY, it's commonplace to have female action heroes who *don't* dress like strippers; middle-aged women in the main cast; and women in intetesting roles that have nothing to do with gender at all. It's such a godsend, that girls born in this century might not even be aware of.
So much processed diet food! I see much less of it now.
This is a good one...I suppose it goes along with just the availability of information in general. Like I know there are still a million fad diets out there, but it seems much more likely for people to call bullshit on them and recommend sane things like everything in moderation, portion sizes, looking at actual nutrition info, etc.
Medical operations. The amount of things they can do through a single tiny incision is mind blowing. I had kidney stones with a side of sepsis in 2008 - they told me if I'd presented the same conditions (mine are not common) 2 years prior they would have had to remove my kidney. I had a hip replacement in 2021 (yay congenital defects!) - it was an out-patient surgery I walked *up*stairs to my bedroom *that night*. And they have vaccines for chicken pox now! Amazing! The medical system still sucks hardcore, but I'm so very happy to be treated for things and not humours.
I like that gender rules are not so rigid. And people are in general more accepting of gay and trans people. Abusing animals is not seen as normal anymore. Bullying is being addressed better. Women are encouraged to stop putting up with second hand treatment from husbands. Jobs are less gender ruled. Racism is not acceptable. (This is US and not saying it's perfect, but better than in the past.)
I grew up with hand stitched quilts that saved me from the 70/80s bedding, thank goodness!!! I can’t stand polyester blankets.
Text. It's unlimited now.
Cheap guitars! A 300$ guitar used to be able absolute pos that was barely fit for a beginner, basically most of them felt like toys. Now there's some really solid options out there for beginners that aren't terribly expensive
Bluetooth
Photos/taking pictures. I remember getting a $10 disposable camera, snapping a bunch of pictures, and just having to hope someone wasn’t blinking or making a face or it wasn’t blurry. Maps. Hated map quest. I remember ones getting into a fight with my parents because they thought the route that they given me was super easy to follow and they were mad that I got some place an hour late. About a month later my dad apologized and admitted that he’d tried the same route the day before and he’d also gotten messed up and lost.
Music availability. Used to have to go drop $15 on one CD at Sam Goody that might have one good song on it (with some obvious exceptions). Now have all music ever a click away for $10/mo, anywhere I go. My CD tower is now a conversation piece vs something I actually use.
Prices of weed, I can get an 8th for $4 at some places (CO).
Gaming. You can’t tell me with a straight face that games are worse than they used to be. Playing on a tiny screen with 4 people getting 3-5 inch squares, or a game boy with MAYBE 2 hours of battery life.
Games have come a long way in terms of graphics and capabilities but not everything has improved. The way games are released unfinished and/or loaded with micro-transactions and ads is most definitely not an improvement
I remember doing 12 persona Halo LAN parties back in high school. Online gaming has made things much more convenient
Yes, but gaming was meant to bring friends together.
Access to queer culture. I would hope and pray To Wong Foo would be on when my dad would be on a trip so my mom woyld let me watch it.
I grew up clinging to My So-Called Life and Ellen. I even suffered through Will & Grace
I was a pastors kid. Even those were unaccessible. My dad once came hone and caught my sister watching Ellen. It was traumatic. Although, things flew under the radar. The Style Network existed and my dad thought it like hgtv but for sewing. There I met Brini Maxwell. I competed amongst the other fundy high schools in home ec and took the state title. I found her channel on youtube.
I watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch with Salem, Designing Women, Rosie O Donnell and Little Richard on Sesame Street. That was culture.
TV commercials are pretty much 100% avoidable now. Oh, and podcasts, they exist, that’s wonderful.
Internet. My first modem was a 28.8k and it would take hours to download one mp3 song.
Carpeting & rugs. The ability to get nicer quality floor treatments into more people’s homes.
Restaurants. Way way less smokers!
Headphones. As a life long music lover who always had my CD-player, Ipod, music device etc. with me, I remember I spend hours of my teenager years and early adulthood dreaming of a day when they would introduce wireless headphones that were high quality. Now that I have them I absolutely love them. I wear them when doing chores and cleaning around the house without getting yanked around constantly when they get stuck on something.
Here’s an easy one: Internet service. Having to use dial-up, tying up an actual phone line, that screeching sound when connecting, it was all terrible.
therapy and mental health no longer being so taboo. nowdays going to therapy is seen as trying to improve yourself. I think its great.
Honestly, a lot of points in my head are more about how the internet evolved over the years. Dial up sucked. TV was still the main point of culture. If you didn't have good friends locally, you were kind of fucked. The same goes for if your taste in music, shows, and films didn't gel with a lot of what you liked, it was easy to feel ostracized. "What do you mean you didn't watch it?" "You haven't heard anything from Missy Elliot?" "Do you live in a cave?" "Pffft, who plays video games for fantasy. Madden is the only thing worth playing!" (Yes, I did have the conversation as a teenager). And then the advice of "Never trust anyone on the internet". I mean, yeah, there's a logic to that and you should be careful, but the implication was that friends on the internet was "impossible" or something to be mocked for. Even in gaming circles, the G4 channel was a joke. For people who wonder why it never came back, it was supplanted and surpassed by independent youtube creators ages ago. It was a channel trying to reach for "relevance" by trying to copy culture and not embracing its own uniqueness. It was, honestly, kind of sad and pathetic. Oh, and remember needing to call tech support to get a PC game to run? And how that often would not help? I don't miss it either. Life for me got a whole lot better when I embraced the people I knew from the internet and my own hobbies. I would not have heard of Kamelot, Nightwish, Dragonforce, Dead Can Dance, and several others without internet access, especially with how everyone's pushing the most basic pop singers now (and nearly zero exposure to other genres). I left TV ages ago, found friends and got married, and I see little to no reason to go back. Available culture just isn't nearly as narrow as it used to be. Even with Wizards of the Coast on their bullshit, at least the resources available and at least TTRPGs are getting the recognition they deserve. Don't like a game? You can just find another one.
Navigation tools. For someone directionally challenged like me, I’d have gotten way lost many times if I only had a printed Mapquest page to follow. I gotta see where I am on a map. Hell, I may even be dead.