My wife and I are watching Dahmer on Netflix at the moment. Highly recommended, by the way.
Set mostly in the 80s (albeit in the US,) there is someone smoking inside a building in almost every scene. It looks completely odd to a UK viewer post smoking ban.
So my question is, what will be the thing in films or TV in 30/ 40 years time that viewers of that time will find almost unbelievable that it was accepted so readily all the way back in 2022?
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I honestly don’t believe the human brain is wired the way for how we use it
Potentially cash. “Daddy, why is he giving the man a piece of paper?”
Vaccine certificates for holidays
The sheer amount of single use plastic packaging that so many products in our supermarkets use.
High calorie meals like fish and chips.
I started work in the late 80s (in the U.K.). By that point you couldn’t smoke in the office but there was always a smoking room. It was usually pretty horrible.
Driving your own car in a city will definitely become illegal once automatic driving is perfected, it will save hundreds of thousands of lives a year worldwide…
Eating meat or sugared drinks.
I despise the smell of cigarette smoke but the effect the smoking ban had on my home town was catastrophic.
I imagine that as personal healthcare evolves and we can objectively measure metabolites / excretions then things like fast food will stop being a thing.
I’m *so* old, and so are my clothes, so some of my favourite ‘going out’ t-shirts have fag burn holes in the sides, because ‘back in my day’ it was so normal for everyone on the dance floor to have a cig on
I like to think that future generations will marvel at all the crap people with disabilities currently have to deal with. Either because (1) healthcare has advanced to a point where the vast majority of illnesses and conditions are treatable, or (2) social care and disabled access are so good that having a disability has become basically irrelevant.
The noise of cars. In an all-electric future, the sound of a petrol V8 revving, or a diesel taxi chugging (both clichés in TV/film) will be a sign of the times.
Picking up a house phone is another, although you rarely see someone using one on TV anymore.
Perhaps a boring answer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s yet another smoking ban, only this time banning it outright (or at least, introducing legislation that means you can’t buy it if you were born after a certain date).
Limiting sugar in products. Not necessarily a ban but people don’t realise how much sugar is in things like pasta sauces, ketchup, supermarket soup, low-fat yoghurts, fresh fruit juice and other seemingly normal foods. It contributes to the single biggest killer – coronary heart disease, and places massive strain on the NHS. If the entire country reduced it’s sugar intake the change in quality of overall health would be massive.