“Everything that’s happened since 2016 has been incredible for society at large!”: a sentence no one has ever uttered. The last 10 years have been Rough Stuff™ to say the least. It’s almost hard to keep up with all the changes that have happened, both small and large.
1.
“Location sharing has become so normalized, and it kills me. All it takes is one boundary-stomping or creepy person in one of your circles to make it a nightmare. Admittedly, I’m also at an age where I just do not want to have people around me at some points in the day. A friend of mine once said they like location sharing because they’ll wait to see their friends at the grocery store, ‘And then I can go grocery shopping with them!’ I hate everything about that idea. Let me run my errands quickly and in peace.”
2.
“It’s so hard to find any actual information on the internet these days. I was googling something, and it gave me a Google AI answer, and at the bottom it said, ‘Remember! AI can be wrong, so make sure to fact-check this result!’ Why the fuck do you think I’m on Google, Google? I didn’t know something, so I came to you to find the answer. Now this answer you’re forcing in front of me might not be accurate, so you’re telling me to find a more accurate answer? THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO! The AI answer is just a needless middle man in all this, because you have to do your own research anyway. It’s so exhaustingly frustrating. Big Tech just has to ruin every single thing about our lives.”
3.
“Constantly canceling plans with your friends at the last minute. It used to be inconsiderate; now, they call it ‘protecting your peace.'”
“Unfortunately, the rise of therapy speak has done this. Look, I understand, sometimes you have a shitty day, and you don’t want to do stuff. But now it’s ‘my social battery is drained,’ ‘I have to protect my peace,’ etc. It really comes down to you just being a damn flake, but when you give people ‘mental health’-based reasons, they can now feel morally okay with being a damn flake.”
—u/illini02
4.
“Even when you try to protect your child’s privacy, schools are posting pictures of your children on Facebook, sharing what they do in the classroom CONSTANTLY. Go check out your child’s school’s Facebook page, and you might be surprised to see your kids’ faces and names plastered everywhere. Perfectly legal, too, since you sign the photo release form at the beginning of the year. It’s absolutely mind-boggling how many parents have no idea how many pictures of their child are on the internet.”
5.
“It’s now completely normal for someone to be on their phone while having a conversation with someone. A lot of people do this and have no sense of how rude it is.”
“I think the rise of smartphones came so fast that society didn’t come up with etiquette quickly enough for people to be shamed about this sort of thing.”
6.
“It’s not that everyone is dumb; it’s that our ability to concentrate has disappeared. People don’t read things fully, and aren’t able to remember what they’ve read 10 seconds ago — they’re just dopamine scrolling without stopping to use their brain. And that’s mostly adults. From what teachers have been shouting for the past dozen years, it’s a lot worse with kids. I’ve read that it’s the first time the new generation is dumber than the last.”
—u/VikingTeddy
7.
“So many people today are using AI as their stand-in therapist, which is wild, but I do wonder if it’s just a symptom of inaccessible mental health resources.”
8.
“In the US, voting for a presidential candidate with zero political experience was normalized in the last 10 years. At the very least, Arnold Schwarzenegger served in a federal role under George H.W. Bush for three years before becoming the governor of California. Jesse Ventura served in the Navy and served as mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, for four years before becoming the governor of Minnesota. Ronald Regan was even the president of the Screen Actors Guild for many years and campaigned for established politicians like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon before becoming governor of California for two terms, before then becoming president. All of these people were mainly known for being entertainment personalities, but at least they had even the slightest bit of political experience prior to running for office.”
“Trump stands alone as someone without a lick of political experience going straight to running for president, taken seriously by the voting population, and then winning. And we are deeply suffering the consequences of voting someone like him into office. And I’m still surprised the majority of the American public who voted for Trump still don’t see how batshit this was and how horrible the result of normalizing this has become.”
9.
“We now fully film strangers in public without a second thought. People don’t seem to realize the full consequences of this. Say a company, or some person or group with nefarious plans, wants your data; they can now get it even more easily. Say I was filming in a restaurant, and didn’t blur your face or remove the metadata. That company can now view the video, know when you were there, what kinds of clothes you are interested in, the demographic(s) of who you’re with, what you like to eat, and what they like to eat, and predict when you might go again. They can then sell all of that as a data sample.”
10.
“Today, people take pride in their anti-intellectualism. Just yesterday, I was a little aghast when I told someone my baby horse’s name is Svele. She said, ‘I could never pronounce that!’ proudly. I asked her if she could say Sven, and she could. Then I asked if she could say Ella, and she could. Then I said ‘Svee-Ell-Uh,’ and she said, ‘Vell’ and laughed it off. That’s just a tiny example that surprised me, but it’s this joy and pride in not knowing things and not being able to do things.”
11.
“I’ve always seen myself as a fairly casual dresser, generally getting away without a tie in corporate environments for years, but I still show up to weddings in a suit or throw on a polo shirt for a smart casual look at social events. I feel like somewhere along the line, society decided to reverse leapfrog me to the point where I often feel like I’m overly formal.”
—u/Tzunamitom
12.
“Every year we see fewer and fewer people reading books, especially men. If you ask parents to read with their kids for 15 minutes a day, they look at you like you’re out of your mind. Why would they possibly do that when the whole fam can sit on their phones and tablets instead?”
—u/hollowspond
13.
“Gender reveal parties. While innocuous on their own, the drama and damage they cause in the worst cases make you wonder why they’re so popular.”
“Sensible Party: ‘We gave my results to a baker, and we’re gonna unveil a cake! YAY!’ Not-So-Sensible Party: ‘An update to a story broken earlier today, a pink-smoke forest fire continues to consume the lives of the helpless.'”
—u/sadhoovy
14.
“People need to stop publicly documenting every single moment of their child’s life on the internet. Sure, post a nice family photo with them in it or an occasional ‘proud parent’ moment; I’m not a monster. But I don’t need to know that random friend’s kid took a shit on the toilet for the first time, with photos of said kid sitting on the toilet. Think for a fucking second about what you’re posting about them. For one, it can be an invasion of their privacy; who knows how kids will feel later on when their entire lives are publicly documented? Most importantly, though, and I say this as a parent myself, no one other than you, your spouse, and maybe some very close family/friends gives a shit about the day-to-day of your kid. Not saying others don’t care about your kid, but I don’t care to know the daily life of some random friend’s kid. Major milestones and accomplishments, yes; daily poop charts, no.”
15.
“I can’t believe that people cheat as much as they do academically. It’s been like 10 years since I’ve taken tests and done assignments, and it’s just wild how often people pay for the exact questions on the test they are going to take and find any way around just learning the content. I’m not saying there wasn’t a lot of cheating, etc., when I was in high school and college, but these days it seems like a Quizlet with the exact test questions or assignment answers is just a couple clicks away. I honestly can’t say I would act any differently if I were 10 years younger, so I’m not saying anything about the character of younger people, but it really blows my mind how accessible all of these resources are that allow people to skip the work required to learn something.”
16.
“I do not appreciate how casual and acceptable swearing has become. From TV shows to political press conferences, it’s everywhere now. It seems like there’s very little in the way of decorum or standards anymore. I was watching Craig Ferguson’s travel show about being an American on CNN the other day with my daughter, and he dropped an f-bomb that was not bleeped. I was like, ‘Welp, guess this is what CNN is these days.’ Fifteen years ago, that would have been unheard of. I’m not some prude about language; I will swear when and where it’s appropriate, but I fail to see an upside to how recklessly and commonplace it is nowadays. It limits people’s already limited vocabulary and adds social tension.”
17.
“All the betting/gambling that is taking over. Ten years ago, I never would’ve imagined something like Kalshi becoming so mainstream. Gambling was straight up illegal where I grew up.”
18.
“Watching TikTok or other fucking garbage on speaker on the train. It enrages me when I’m trying to read. You know what I do when I want to listen to music on the train, and I don’t have earbuds? I wait until I get home!”
“I hate this shit. I work in two restaurants, and at one of them parents will just let their kids blast two or three iPads at full volume the whole time they’re in there. If they can’t go 45 minutes without whatever cartoon or YouTuber they’re watching, there’s a problem.”
19.
“This is going to sound so petty and ‘get off my lawn-y,’ but I have to say one that really gets me is people bringing a water bottle with them literally everywhere. Even if we have guests over for a nice dinner, I will ask them what I can get them to drink, and they just plonk their huge water bottle down at the kitchen table and say that they are good; they’ll just have their water. It’s so weird to me, and it seems like a rejection of hospitality, but I can’t point out anything objectively wrong with it?”
20.
“Taking your dog with you everywhere you go, even if they are not service animals, has become the norm. I think it’s because COVID dogs didn’t learn to be home by themselves away from their owners, so now a bunch of people have dogs with severe separation anxiety (and people also probably got too used to having their dog around all the time too).”
21.
“Our growing dependence on our smartphones has made it so that people expect you to be available at ALL TIMES. I started leaving my phone at home because of this, and I’m amazed at how many people think just because you have one, you should have it with you 24/7 and get pissed that you didn’t answer your phone.”
—u/Henchforhire
22.
“It’s wild to me that openly being a bully to strangers online is just part of life now. I’ve been online since 2003, and I said what I said. You might not agree, but I think it’s way more accepted now than it’s ever been before.”
—u/Ginnabean
23.
“How superficial friendships have become. It used to be an exchange, back and forth (in person, text, phone, email), etc. Now people just post everything on social media for people to see, and the interaction boils down to a like or a short statement/comment. That’s what modern friendship has become.”
24.
“It’s genuinely terrifying that 2016 was a decade ago, considering my brain still treats it like it was last Tuesday. Back then, admitting you met your partner on a dating app or demanding to work from home in your sweatpants was super rare. Now, those are completely normalized, and the real social crime is making someone talk to a server instead of scanning a QR code.”
—u/ionis_9846
25.
And finally, “In 2016, people at least made a token effort to fact-check a claim before starting a comment war over it. Now, actual critical thinking has been entirely outsourced to algorithms designed to feed us whatever outrages us the fastest. We somehow transitioned from ‘don’t trust everything you read on the internet’ to letting 15-second video clips dictate our entire worldview.”
—u/ionis_9846
What new norms do you think would have shocked people 10 years ago? Tell me in the comments, or use the anonymous form below. Your response may be featured in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
