Here’s a bit of a personal list:

  1. Undeniably the food scene in the US has changed for the better. Sometimes almost to an overcorrection (protein-slop and all). It’s great that so many different cuisines are easy to name and find even in more traditional rural parts of the country. Organic food isn’t seen as a weird hippie thing but an investment you make for your health.

  2. A lot less smoking in the world. I say this as early gen Z but I never grew up in a time when smoking was seen as cool when I was a teenager. My uncle even quit and that was good to see.

  3. It may not seem like it sometimes, but the one consolation prize of YouTube is I can theoretically be a content creator and never need to worry about the bottleneck that is getting chosen out of millions of people in Hollywood. I could theoretically just stay in the midwest and learn to livestream or make an anime discussion channel and produce content without needing a massive studio or working in Hollywood. Of course, it’s still almost impossible to get paid for it, but still.

  4. More and more people are aware of cars not being the best way to get around which has sparked interest in walkable cities. Problem is, there’s too much demand and too little supply but seeing car culture be questioned is a great first start.

  • BeanisBrain [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    5 days ago
    • Normalization of pedophilia and statutory SV in mainstream culture. Like, it’s still really bad, but not “being treated as a mildly scandalous joke in prime time sitcoms” bad.
    • Hell, casual SV jokes in general.
    • Casual ableism against neurodiverse people. Another one that’s still depressingly common, but there’s at least now active pushback against it and it’s much easier to find spaces where it’s not tolerated.
    • In the same vein, casual homophobia.
    • Edgy 90s/00s anti-environmentalism.
    • Edgy 90s/00s nihilism, including the notion that caring about anything or empathy for others makes you a stupid baby loser.
    • The all-consuming capitalist realism that followed the collapse of the USSR to the point that even “counter-cultural” movements were unable to escape its logic.
    • Related to the two above, the ubiquitous assumption that for media to be “mature” and “adult” means for it to advance a philosophy that everyone and everything sucks, nothing good ever happens, and that believing in anything except your own self-interest is naive foolishness.
    • Cringe culture (still sadly very much present, but much more confined to the right wing). I feel like this reached its nadir with the years-long harassment campaign against Chris-Chan.
    • The mid-00s saturation of popular culture with media that largely served as apologia for mass surveillance, the War on Terror, and torture.
    • The idea that liking anything geared toward kids as an adult means that there is something capital-W Wrong with you and you need to be punished for it (another one that’s far from being gone completely but that I mostly only see in older people now).