What's something common that in 20 years from now people won't believe we used to live this way?

Possibly US specific: Artificial Red/Yellow/Blue dyes in food. I hope..

Hopefully, single use plastics would be a ridiculous thing in the future, maybe they will look back at it like we look back at asbestos.

Here is a funny asbestos ad from the past

God, I wonder how many people got those and used them regularly who are now having issues because of them?
- Probably not many. Asbestos is bad when it gets into the air. If it's within an oven mitt, even if cut, how would it get into the air?
- I'm pretty sure they put asbestos in basically anything back in the day.

In 20 years we will be shocked that we lived with all of the unnecessary fossil fuel usage while the world was slowly boiling. Oops, we fucked up the biosphere, guess we'll just move to mars and eat fucking solar rays ffs.

I'm not a doctor.

But possibly there will be a better way to treat/cure cancer, and thus chemotherapy will be seen as similar to how we today see bloodletting or lobotomy.

Poison the cancer slightly faster than the whole organism! My dad cancer treatment gave him liver disease that eventually turned into a cancer that was way more deadly than his original cancer.
I like this one the most. Chemo can be absolutely brutal.

Teflon

Probably wrapping and cooking our food in volatile plastics.

Allowing Israel to get away with shit.

Lol, were you alive 20 years ago? same shit
We have to arrange that for wealthy/corps first.

Gasoline-only cars, most likely

20 years though? That's incredibly generous and unlikely imo.

People are refusing to tackle the infrastructure issue of people charging their cars who do not own single family detached homes. It's a significant population of people for which owning an electric vehicle is a huge inconvenience. Public charging stations exist, but take significantly longer than the 2 minutes it takes to pump gas.

The second big thing is that people simply don't replace their cars that often. Might be pulling this out of my ass, but I had read recently that the average person replaces their vehicle every 7-12 years...and it is often not with a brand new vehicle. Considering how electric cars still make a very small percentage of those on the road, I can't see 100% removal of gas vehicles in 20 years in only a few generations of vehicle ownership change.

The Nissan Leaf came out around 15 years ago as the first big name, somewhat popularish electric vehicle. Yet in 2025 electric vehicles are nowhere close to even 50% of vehicles on the road.

In the more distant future? Sure. 20 years ain't happening tho.

But we'll see!
- I don't think 17% is "a very small percentage"
  
  And I believe 90% of new cars sold in Norway this year were electric
  
  Remember to discount any stats from the US, they're always at least a decade behind on everything
Even wilder than that will be some form of social compromise in fully-autonomous vehicles.

People won’t want to part with the flexibility of driving their own cars, and once things are standardized and safety records are proven, people will eventually find acceptance in automated vehicles.

I hypothesize that major thoroughfares/highways will be fully-automated and only surface streets will be self-driving. This is a sort of hybrid-solution which generally addresses a great deal of traffic issues.
- As many people as there are who won't want to hand over control to the car computer for various reasons, there are A LOT of people who would rather be on their phones than drive (many of whom currently try to do both simultaneously 😬)
- I bet at least 50 years after autonomous driving works correctly manual driving will be outlawed and only be done by enthusiasts on dedicated race tracks.
  
  Or maybe not outlawed but most people won't have a license. Seeing a normal car might be a similar novelty as seeing a horse carriage.
Not in 20 year mate.

Oil has a massive problem, it is just too fucking good at what it does, energy density of a battery is far, far below petrol, and require complex infrastructure at the point of sale, while petrol can even be dispensed without electricity.
Unless something drastic happens, there will be a decent number of cars on the road in 20 years that are already on the road today.

What the hell, I misread the OP's title and thought it was about stuff that was common 20 years ago which is no longer normal... I was very confused with everybody else's answers lmao.

Sadly I can't think of an answer for the thread, so downvote/upvote at your will 😂

It's ok

Wiping our asses with PAPER.

Nope, I can't see this happening either, unless bides take over.

Toilet paper is actually rather effective, it is cheap, easily processed, effective enough at removing most of the crap, it does not require added water infrastructure (I would not clean my ass with grey water) and simple to teach new users
- If you happened to touch shit with literally any part of your body other than your asshole, would you be happy with just wiping it with a piece of dry paper, or would you immediately go wash it?
  
  I have no more questions...
  
  Btw, don't even get me started if you have a hairy butt.
- Added water infrastructure? My guy, the connection for the cistern is right there. The added infrastructure is literally a tee piece and the hose.
Long live the three seashells
Chad

Using plastic to contain food. I'm always a little turned off when a takeout place uses plastic containers as opposed to the paper or foil ones. Plus it's terrible to animals, especially marine life such as dolphins.

Most of the paper ones are plastic coated.
Single-use plastic, yeah. Things like Tupperware will stick around unless we go back to using asphalt for food preservation.

I think we're going to see single use wax-paper or similar displace the plastic and Styrofoam for your delivery order.

porn was freely available and could be purchased at stores in many parts of the US.

sex toys were widely available and could be purchased from the comfort of your own sex swing.

now we have Qualuviagra which not only increases the size of your penis* but also makes you forget all about your low-T*

*studies shown that penis size temporarily increases but long-term use will actually shrink it. prolonged use can induce Baby-Dick Syndrome (BDS). Abuse of the product is considered a class 1 felony and you will be registered as a sex offender unless you're a registered Republican.

*low T is a myth falsified by global warming scientists in order to confuse and belittle Republicans with BDS. If you are taking Qualuviagra to treat low-T, reach out to your nearest MediRogan for details about having low-T.

People probably wouldn't believe we sold water in plastic water bottles or shopped with disposable plastic bags.

Disposable vapes...
I legitimately do not understand why so many people refuse to drink tap water. I get that an occasional bottle of water is convenient when traveling or something, but some of my neighbors seem to only drink bottled water even at home. The city will literally test your water for free if you don't trust it for some reason.
- Tap in many places has a distinctive 'taste' to it. A cheap filter is WAY more useful (and way cheaper) than bottled water though.
I think it might take a lot longer than 20 years for plastic to fully die down
- Where I live, plastic bags and styrofoam are already rare now. Now we just have to wait for people to realize water is free.

20 years is a bit short but... Eating animals will be regarded as highly immoral, "but everyone knew those animals suffered, right?", on the same level as we now judge slavery

I'm vegetarian, but I don't see this happening
- It's sadly impossible until we guarantee food for everyone. It's a luxury to choose where and what your next meal is.
This is farfetched. People love meat, and we have for our entire history. Even India only has around 30% vegetarian population. The demand for not just protein but specifically meat will never go away.

The only way I see us avoiding animal slaughter is by mastering bioengineering to the point where we can grow a perfectly marbled brisket in a lab without actually cloning the whole cow.
As is, one can only hope. Until a source of animal-like protein can be perfected and become cheap enough for sustained consumption by a lower class individual, some people (more than you realize) will not be able to get off animal proteins due to various medical conditions. I suppose accessible cures for these conditions would be a proper solution as well.

I'm not even going to touch on the luxury of choosing your next meal here, since that's been addressed already.

US health insurance industry... Either we get single payer or all of us will be in poverty.

Well, we've tallied the votes and...sigh
Brother, US is never changing, you guys hate each other too much.
- If there's one thing Saint Luigi has taught us, that the Corpos hate, it's that we can all agree we want them dead. At least a lot of people do.

The state of the air we breathe indoors.

And outdoors now too

Antibiotics

what do you mean by this specifically, are you talking about the way it's just taken willy nilly, or how they won't be as strong in the future?
- C) All of the above.
  
  I hope it will be considered insane that we pump livestock full of them as a preventative measure, rather than as a treatment, while also prescribing them for every little thing.
  
  When our current antibiotics are no longer effective at all, I hope that we'll be able to find new ones and that we'll be much more responsible with their use. I hope that people in the future will be as incredulous at our current use of them, as we are of using arsenic in makeup.

Social media, at least in the current form.

That's true. They already evolved and most of us didn't even realize. News feeds were added and gradually evolved to use information they know about is to push our buttons and affect our behavior and beliefs.

They still needed content, but with generative AI that's no longer necessary, this is why social media companies are so invested in it.

Social media is no longer social it became a platform to manipulate people. It is much worse than traditional ways of propaganda, because each person gets their customized feed tuned to issues that are more likely to influence them.

I'd say traditional (linear) television. Still common enough, though even today it's clearly on the way out.

Cancelled my subscription this week, after a whole year of not watching it. (probably multiple, but I took last year to convince my wife)

I'm afraid the answer will be air conditioning and indoor plumbing.

I'm hoping the answer is money.

It won't be, but I can hope.

Do you mean physical money in terms of paper/plastic/coins or money as a concept? If the latter, how would society function?
- The latter.
  
  And, star trek.

Food industry in current form

It's hard to feed large populations. If not for the current form of the food industry, we wouldn't be able to. It's good for a first draft, now we have to refactor (and we are slowly doing that)

Car centric infrastructure 🤣 lol back in the 2020s they had to travel in slow ass crowds of cars 🤣🤣🤣 nobody liked driving but they settled for it because it was the best they had! Although I wish I could have bought Tears of the Kingdom when it was new, I don't even want to know what cars were like.

TIL I can italicize emojis and I'm gonna try it out right now 😆

Edit: I love it ❤️
- fun fact, italicised emojis work pretty much everywhere except on apple devices

I wonder if more people will go back to flip phones. Some of my younger church friends are tired of smartphones and the amount of time and energy they suck out of your life and negative energy social media puts into it, and are switching back to flip phones. It's surprising to see young people using them.

I believe you. History is full of movements and counter-movements. I don't know if it's going to be such a big movement though. Social media is literally addictive. Most people are not strong, mindful or willing enough to kick the habit

For most of us in the US: Having an endless supply of cheap, clean fresh water

As someone who has grown up watching Card Catalogs lose to electronic search, Internet Directories lose to electronic search, photo albums lose to electronic search, Curated Network Televisions lose out to ellectronic search, large-scale advertising lose out to electronic search...

I don't know. But whatever it is, 20 years from now, we'd say "Why didn't you have a search engine that could do that for you?"

With (general) search engines being on decline for years that looks not all that probable. No popular search engine even searches what you asked it to search more of what you probably meant if you were as dumb as their ai thinks you are.
- Search engines are getting worse because they are moving towards selling you stuff instead of searching for stuff.
- Card Catalogs were these index-cards we kept in a cabinet that helped people look for a book. And don't say "word of mouth", because card catalogs didn't help with that. Card Catalogs helped you go from "Author or Subject" to "Book", so you were literally trying to figure out a book you already "had an idea" about.
  
  Tell me, how do you look for new books today? Do you use Amazon's search engine? Google's search engine?
  
  Internet Directories were these lists of webpages that we used to organize. It was before webrings. The gist is that an internet directory is a list of cool websites on a certain subject, and we can keep those lists organized. Alas, no one used them after good search engines were made.
  
  Curated TV Networks are losing out to Netflix, Youtube, and TikTok. All of which are search-engine based media consumption technologies. All hail the algorithm.
  
  Now tell me where "search" is actually losing in our society. Maybe Google isn't as dominant as it once was, but Netflix is still a damn search bar.
  
  Maybe TikTok is finally something different: you don't even search anymore. The algorithm assumes it knows what videos you like and shoves the next video into your face.

With the advancement in technology, I'm sure in 20 years augmented reality will really kick off. I'm sure they will wonder why people used to play with controllers and not a VR headset... I might be watching too much SAO and I don't even watch that anime.

Nah, I can't see VR ever going so completely mainstream that it replaces a normal screen and controller.

It is just not convenient enough.
- Greed is mainly what's killing VR imo. It's not that profitable to make a VR game compared to a normal game because everyone has a computer nowadays. Also motion sickness and cost of entry, those are factors too.

freedom to leave our houses

freedom

Fixed it for you.
- thanks 😒

Probably Snow with global warming and all