Here’s a bit of a personal list:

  1. Undeniably the food scene in the US has changed for the better. Sometimes almost to an overcorrection (protein-slop and all). It’s great that so many different cuisines are easy to name and find even in more traditional rural parts of the country. Organic food isn’t seen as a weird hippie thing but an investment you make for your health.

  2. A lot less smoking in the world. I say this as early gen Z but I never grew up in a time when smoking was seen as cool when I was a teenager. My uncle even quit and that was good to see.

  3. It may not seem like it sometimes, but the one consolation prize of YouTube is I can theoretically be a content creator and never need to worry about the bottleneck that is getting chosen out of millions of people in Hollywood. I could theoretically just stay in the midwest and learn to livestream or make an anime discussion channel and produce content without needing a massive studio or working in Hollywood. Of course, it’s still almost impossible to get paid for it, but still.

  4. More and more people are aware of cars not being the best way to get around which has sparked interest in walkable cities. Problem is, there’s too much demand and too little supply but seeing car culture be questioned is a great first start.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    39·
    3 days ago

    It still persists to some degree, but in the 90s and 2000s being an environmentalist was mocked to the same degree that being a vegan is today. You were just making one more moralist argument in the marketplace of ideas and climate change was as much a vague future problem as Mars colonisation currently is. Now it’s taken seriously even if people don’t know what to do about it and can’t imagine a practical future beyond what the 20th century left us with. I can talk to average schmucks about my pollinator gardens and the radicalism of it is very easily communicated where that would have been dismissed as hippie shit two decades ago.