Vivaldi - 2025-03-26 at 06

I like Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, Wonder Woman usually gets to work from home, so I get to spend the day with her, even if we don't get a chance to interact all that much. I just like to be able look across the room to see her sitting with her laptop on the couch. When I make tea, I get to make two cups, instead of just one. In all the years before the pandemic, except a snowy day or two, I don't remember her ever working from our home. Like many jobs, hers recognized that today's technology, coupled with the work ethic of modern employees meant that people could indeed, get things done without sitting in a cubicle all day.

Thinking about that got me to consider how many things are different now than they were in the past. Change happens slowly, but when you look back over time, you realize how weird it would be if things you once took for granted became commonplace again. Take smoking, for example. So many people used to smoke and they did it everywhere. My high school had a smoking area outside the cafeteria for students to light up. You could practically see the smoke billowing from the teacher's lounge between classes as the staff went in for a nicotine fix. You could smoke everywhere - in the library, airplanes, restaurants. Hell, you could get an ashtray brought to your hospital bed. At the prison where I worked in the 80s, if an inmate could not afford cigarettes, they cost 45 cents a pack, the state would give them loose tobacco and rolling papers.

Grocery shopping was a different experience too. You used to have to wait for fruits and vegetables to come into season. There were no refrigerated containers bringing you fresh blueberries from South America in December. There was much less variety, too. I don't think I ever had anything but iceberg lettuce until I was well into adulthood. There were two kinds of apples available, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. Eventually Granny Smith made her way in, but forget having the choice of a half dozen different types like we have today.

Before the gas crisis of the early 70s, most people went to full-service stations where you didn't have to get out of the car. The attendant would check your oil and wash your windshield while you got a fill-up of that sweet 50 cents a gallon leaded gasoline. Other than the time I had to get gas in New Jersey, where the law forbids you from pumping your own, I don't think I have ever had someone gas up my car but me. By the time I was able to drive, we were well into the era of expensive gas. In fact, in terms of real purchasing power, has never cost more than it did when I was in high school, driving my family's 1975 Impala.

Even my kids can wax nostalgically about how things used to be in tech. They remember when they had to beg to use our landline in the evenings because I kept it tied up with my dial-up Internet. My daughter used to wait until after 9pm to talk to her boyfriend because that's when her free cell phone minutes started. She dated a guy once whose cell phone number was long distance, and she racked up a giant bill talking to him, even though in reality, he was just a few miles away. She even had to ration her text messages because her plan only let her have a small number for free.

Some things have gotten worse instead of better. At my high school, the student government, all the clubs and sports teams were racially diverse. All of us Gen X kids had started school a couple of years into the integration era, escaping the last remnants of Jim Crow by a couple of years. I've been disappointed to see self-segregation become the norm in many areas. My younger cousin went to the same high school I did. By the time he got there, white kids had just about stopped playing on the football team. He was one of only three to even try out. I worked in education for 20 years and saw too many mono-cultured events take place. It's depressing.

There are so many little things too:

  • Paying for everything with plastic. People used to scoff at you if you had a credit card purchase for only a dollar or two.
  • Standard transmission cars used to be the cheap model, not the special order that they are today.
  • Only upper middle-class people could afford a $700 VCR and the steep membership and deposits at the first video stores.
  • Actors either made movies or they made TV show. The thought of Robert De Niro starring in a TV series was laughable. Now here we are.
  • There used to be liberal Republicans (Nelson Rockefeller) and conservative Democrats (most of the southern ones). Today the GOP is batshit crazy and any Democrat who thinks people ought to have food, shelter, and medical care gets called a Commie.

What are your favorite examples of how things are different today?

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