30 Things We’re Used To Now That Will Lose Public Approval In 25 Years, According To This Thread
Interview
Researcher Roy Amara was an American futurist who famously coined the following adage, which eventually became Amara's Law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
Expanding on the notion, Reddit user Every_Cartoonist3965 made a post on the platform, asking everyone, "What is normal now but won't be in 25 years?" and people immediately started sending in their answers.
Continue scrolling to check out the most popular ones and set a reminder to come back here after a quarter of a century — we'll know if there are any Nostradamus successors among us.
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Hopefully, influencers.
There will just be another type of advertising replacing them. A.I. influencers are already being utilized by companies.
I hope it will be single use plastic
There is some kind of plastic made from cacti that naturally decomposes after 5 years. Those would be great to replace single use plastics
We managed to get in touch with Every_Cartoonist3965, whose real name is Pierre, and they were kind enough to tell us more about their now-viral post.
"I had seen multiple posts asking 'What was normal 25 years ago but isn't now?' and began wondering how people would answer a similar question in 25 years, so I asked it 'in reverse,'" the Redditor explained its roots to Bored Panda.
ELDERLY POLITICIANS
I say if we have to be at least 35 to run for POTUS then it's only fair to have an age ceiling! Tie it to the retirement age and watch our country improve!
"I haven't had the time to read through all the comments, but I already saw a lot about things on paper or material that will all be online later (think CDs, DVDs, books, and so on)," Pierre added.
"Also, I saw the answer 'being heterosexual' very often. I have to say that I disagree with this; I have absolutely no problem with non-heterosexual people, but I don't think heterosexual people won't be normal in 25 years, simply because, biologically speaking, they're the majority."
"Many other popular comments revolved around fears of AI, including people losing their jobs because of the technology."
Hopefully, animal abuse and neglect. I feel like we're moving really slow, but every once in a while there's a big change for the better.
Affordable college. Most degrees don’t need students to be in a brick and mortar building, I hope in 25 years the cost of college is significantly cut down.
The Book of Predictions is a 500-page anthology from the 1980s, assembled by the same people who gave us The People's Almanac. It's a simple conceit: they asked various experts and sci-fi types (with the occasional psychic or spoon bender) to imagine the next 50 years.
But if there's anything that the publication has proved, it's that humans are really bad at seeing the future. "All of the predictions are wrong," writer Paul Ford highlighted in his review of the book.
"Every now and then someone writes something like 'By 2000 you'll be able to listen to any album in a record store through a data service,' and you can squint and see Spotify. Or someone else describes wrist phones ... [But] when you aggregate hundreds of predictions, the result is a special, concentrated kind of wrong. Everyone was trying their best, and everyone missed. And these 40-year-old predictions don't seem wrong in the fun, steampunk way that, say, late Victorian predictions of personal blimps or hot-air-ballooning robots might seem wrong. They're just saggy middle-aged predictions."
Young adults having the ability to read and write. Gen Z is functional, but Gen A seems to be severely behind in their academics and they don't care.
If they actually are a little behind at their age I would argue that is due to the pandemic. School age children had a more difficult time learning from home, and most younger children went without preschool.
TikTok “influencers” sharing their kids daily lives 🫠
"People could imagine a future for their disciplines, a future with wars, a future on Mars, or a future with laser dentistry. What no one could see was the potential of all the layers of infrastructure coming into being right around them," Ford explained, concluding that the real vision lies in seeing connections.
56754 different streaming services which amount to more than anyone ever paid for cable
Wondering about flaws in our collective perception, Pierre, the Redditor who started this thread, thinks that "climate change is a really big topic, which a lot of people seem to underestimate. They are like 'Oh, the Earth is warming up a bit, that's okay,' but if we want a livable world for a few generations behind us, we really need to change things."
Broccoli head haircuts.
People are totally going to look back at them and laugh or cringe.
Hopefully workplace abuse. 💪 f**k blind following in the workplace, especially unethical or common sense immoral actions.
In general, Americans aren't optimistic about the nation's future, either. A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center found at least two-thirds of the nation believes that by 2050, the US will become economically weaker, less important in the world, and more politically divided. A 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC survey discovered that nearly 80% of Americans do not expect life for their children’s generation to be better than it has been for them.
At the rate things are going probably being able to use water whenever we want.
Humans are the only animals that don't reduce breeding when resources dwindle.
In our town in Massachusetts, we've been on spring-through-fall water restrictions since at least 1996(several times all year round). They even put a well near the town border and drained the neighbor town's pond to a mud flat. The town's solution: allow and encourage developers to continue to build on a massive scale.
I think this is going to depend on where you live. If you are in the Great Lakes region, you are okay but if you live in the desert, you are SOL
I catch and filter/treat my own water. I have more than enough. No questions about quality or chemicals. County water lab says it's very clean -- free testing.
No, it's correct. The list is about things that won't be the same in the future.
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The current s**t of an education system
Hey, parents need to parent. Teach your kids to behave. Teach them life skills. Teachers have 30 kids for 6 hours a day and then the parents don’t back them up. They can’t raise your kids for you. I swear like 90% of the world’s problems would improve if people went home and read to their kids.
Owning things. Everything is slowly turning to digital or subscription models
Streaming channels - why should I pay you 15.99 a month and still get commercials? There's free apps for that.
We’re slowly seeing paperwork die out in hospitals as nurses. I often think about down the line when employees will think it’s crazy I worked when they still used paper. Everything is online now.
The sad: glaciers and snow during winter
The good: single use plastic and 5 day work week
The pessimistic: civilization
The optimistic: nuclear threat
Being smart/well read.
I am amazed that the people that were afraid of chips being in the covid vaccine aren't up in arms about Musk's neurolink implants.
Probably a lot of the insects and wildlife around you, basically anything that doesn’t thrive by eating trash the way raccoons and crows do.
Even if not every species goes extinct, we may soon live in a world where few have ever actually seen a butterfly, dragonfly, ladybug, toad, firefly, etc. simply existing outside. Just like how many of us today have never actually looked up and seen a sky full of stars and the Milky Way, thanks to light pollution.
The current shorelines. The beachfront is going to be moving inland a ways
This is so true. The number of properties that have been lost to the eroding coast.
Fax machine in offices
I had to send a fax recently to a company that was intent on making its administration procedures as difficult as possible - without a doubt highly intentional. Anyway, not having used or owned a fax machine for 25 years it was a challenge. I eventually found an online company. You send them an email with a PDF and they fax it for you. lol
Where I live: snow
Maybe we'll get snow in the Caribbean....our houses are not ready lol
Single family homes in major cities owned by the middle class.
Commercial property investors are now residential property investors. I see plenty of the homes in my town becoming cheap unsafe unpermitted flips every month (asbestos siding and roofing!) while our housing inspector runs around "inspecting" occupied rentals for nickel and dime fines.
Retiring
No! I WANT to retire! No one should have to work past 65 unless they WANT to…
I hope that loot boxes in video games will become obsolete after several countries change the laws so that a customer should always be able to know what they are buying. So microtransactions would still be a thing but no more buying random items without knowing what you will get.
I also wish that getting punished by police because you used cannabis will become rare in 25 years. I live in Finland and here using cannabis without doctor's prescription can ruin your life in many ways.
Having a 9-5 among the younger people
Note: this post originally had 43 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Wish I could upvote this more than once. Both extremes are becoming insufferable.
Load More Replies... I would hope that trend of wearing jeans below your underpants would die, but I’ve already been hoping that for the past 25 years.
fashion goes in cycles, highrise jeans > lowrise jeans > highrise jeans, never ending
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Advertising. Wealth. Religion. Politics. War. If we don't end these, they'll end up ending us.
Where? edit: my bad, misunderstood your comment
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Casual hate, including racial hatred, gender hatred, sexual identity hatred. I honestly believe we'll see a tremendous reduction in hate in the future. Right now, the world seems full of hate, only because it's out in the open and we're TALKING about it. We can't end hate, but I honestly believe we're going to see a better world someday where all people can be respected as individuals.
Wish I could upvote this more than once. Both extremes are becoming insufferable.
Load More Replies... I would hope that trend of wearing jeans below your underpants would die, but I’ve already been hoping that for the past 25 years.
fashion goes in cycles, highrise jeans > lowrise jeans > highrise jeans, never ending
Load More Replies... Advertising. Wealth. Religion. Politics. War. If we don't end these, they'll end up ending us.
Where? edit: my bad, misunderstood your comment
Load More Replies... Casual hate, including racial hatred, gender hatred, sexual identity hatred. I honestly believe we'll see a tremendous reduction in hate in the future. Right now, the world seems full of hate, only because it's out in the open and we're TALKING about it. We can't end hate, but I honestly believe we're going to see a better world someday where all people can be respected as individuals.
