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17 things we accept now that future generations will find completely embarrassing

What we permit today could be an embarrassment tomorrow.

via Canva/Photos

Plastic bottle on the beach, a man getting arrested and cows on a factory farm.

If you look back 30 years in the past, it’s easy to pinpoint things that were once accepted and changed for the better. Back in 1995, it was normal to discriminate against LGBTQ people, and they sure couldn't get married. It was still common for people to smoke in restaurants and bars, and in many places, you didn’t have to wear a seatbelt.

Go back a few years before then; littering was so common that it wasn’t even frowned upon in many places. Kids routinely rode in the back of pickup trucks, and teen pregnancy was so common in the ‘80s that students would bring their babies to high school.

Looking back on things that are embarrassing in hindsight is a great invitation to look at life in 2025 and anticipate the things we accept today as completely usual that will be very embarrassing in 30 years. A Reddit user asked the AskReddit forum for people to share the “current thing that future generations will say ‘I can't believe they used to do that’?” and the answers ranged from how we treat animals to social media etiquette. There were also many who think that, even in an environmentally conscious age, a lot of things still need to be improved upon.

17 things we accept now that future generations will find embarrassing

1. Marijuana laws

"'They used to send people to prison for life for having a little bit of weed?!' Overheard from a Gen Z. It's already happening."

"People still do in certain US states."

2. Polluting the oceans

"Why we have treated our waterways and oceans as oubliettes is puzzling to me. Do people not realize, you need water to fu**ing live!"

"The way it was explained to me when I asked essentially this very question about 20 years ago is that it started back when people thought the oceans were so big that we puny little humans couldn't possibly have an impact on them. Now, it's just a bad habit perpetuated by the rich and powerful while the majority cry out for change."


plstic bottles, ocean plastic, garbage patch, pollution, water pollutionPlastic floating in the ocean.via Canva/Photos

3. Dialysis

"Isn't it basically running all the person's blood through a filtering machine and then back into the body, repeat every few days? Or am I missing some extra horror about it?"

"A filtering machine that only works as well as 10% of a functioning kidney does. It just about keeps you afloat but all sorts of chemicals aren't getting filtered properly and cause issues. It also takes a physical and mental toll on the body sitting for 5 hours 3 days a week minimum depending how bad your function is and for a lot of people they suffer from great fatigue. Not to mention the stress dialysis puts on the heart."

4. Posting your entire life online

"I honestly feel like it's gotten a bit better in some ways. Mid 2000s Facebook posts were WILDLY inappropriate by today's standards. A time when people were first learning that their actions on the internet can have real-world ramifications lol."

"Especially political opinions. People are just now starting to realise that if they posted something stupid and offensive when they were fourteen, employers will find out about it. In a job market where employers will scan through an applicant's social media and have a strict social media policy, that's very dangerous."

5. Using plastic for everything

"Plastics are a symptom of shortsightedness. In theory they were a great idea. A material that can be re-used so that we don't use finite/slower replenish-able materials instead? Get rid of cotton farms and animal wool/skins/furs? And for so much cheaper?
Unfortunately because of the cheapness of plastics, we made a lot more disposable materials (especially clothing) - more than any populace could possibly consume in a generation, never-mind in the ridiculously fast-paced season turnover of goods. And now we realize, plastics stick around for a long time, possible forever. Wood, plant and animal materials degrade and decompose. So you could poison the environment but not exploit some animals or not suck up all the water, or you could accept that unless we wanna be naked and live in far more limited environments, we're gonna have to use natural resources, even animals, for our clothing and goods."


trash, plastic utensils, pollution, plastic cups, plastic strawsPlastic waste.via Canva/Photos

6. Overuse of antibiotics

"Not just on humans, most antibiotics are used on livestock and animal agriculture. Human use only accounts for about a third of all antibiotic use."

"This is a country-specific problem. Some countries have medical systems that avoid prescribing. Some others can't get enough."

7. Terrible mental health practices

"The way the mental health system treats psych patients in hospitals and programs when you have severe symptoms. You’ll get drugged up and the whole experience is pretty traumatizing. It’s also quite surprising how little people in hospitals actually know about mental health. it’s not always specific people either, it’s just the system as a whole. getting sent home in the middle of a mental health crisis because your insurance cuts out. or losing a bed in a program because someone is 'worse' than you."

8. Marketing overkill

"The incessant inundation of marketing in our daily lives. Our technology gathers our data to tailor ads to sell us more useless trash. Your TV records you so people in an office somewhere can socially engineer ways to sell you another TV. We see something like ~5000+ advertisements a day, they’re still trying to put big ads in the night sky, it’s far too much and the future will consider us barbaric for allowing it."


ads, billboards, advertisements, American street, marketing, visual pollutionBillboards as far as the eye can see.via Canva/Photos

9. Bottled water

"Buying bottled water from another continent."

"My wife and I just watched Christmas Vacation the other night, and it struck me as funny that they had the neighbor Margo with a giant bottle of Evian water. To anyone born after 1995, this part is just wardrobe, but for those who were around in the 80s, it's meant to show how yuppie and 'hip' the neighbors are. We made fun of people who carried their own personal bottle of water."

10. School shootings

"Hopefully, things like school shootings will become something we only talk about in past tense. We’ll look at a graph over time, and this time period is just a weird uptick amidst a big downward trend."

11. 5-day workweek

"I'll never understand the 'go to the office' work when you can do it just fine from home. I've been working from home for about 7 years now, been to my local office once in that time to pickup a new laptop. You're not paying my internet or other stuff while I'm working from home. You can literally downsize your office space with people working from home. Recently, my manager was discussing it with me, and she's fine with it, but there may be some push from upper management."

12. Treatment of animals

"I really think a long time from now we’ll view how we treat animals pretty distastefully. Elephants bury their dead and can paint, dolphins have language and some are growing thumbs. They’re clearly more sentient then we give them credit for and we use our lack of understanding of consciousness to justify it."

"I fully believe that in a few hundred years, people will think that eating meat is as wrong as owning slaves. I say this as someone who eats meat."


cows, factory farm, animal farm, milk, grazing, feeding cowsCows in a factory farm.via Canva/Photos

13. Driving your own car

"Drive your own car, especially when drunk. Now, this is way, way in the future, but I can imagine a bunch of laughing drunk college students stumbling into their self-driving car and saying, 'OMG, how did they do it back in the old days? I can barely walk straight.' The correct answer would be, they died. That's how they did it in the old days, they died."

14. Circumcision

"My wife gave birth to my son recently and I insisted he wasn't to be circumcised. Her previous 2 boys were, because her ex just didn't care and it was done to him. I stood over my son in the warmer, saw this small, vulnerable, precious thing, and it completely baffled me how anyone could want to cut into their own child. It's such a barbaric and monstrous act that needs to stop. It only exists due to societal pressure and ignorance."

"Moreover, forced sex reassignment on intersex babies. Being trans, I've met so many intersex trans/non-binary people who are extremely upset their bodies were messed with without their consent shortly after they were born."

15. NFTs

"Yeah, that's next year. Like in 11 days"

"Future generations will laugh. The current generation is laughing now, but future generations will also laugh."

16. Urban design

"Current Urban design in the US. Someday we will realize that we have built cities 100% for cars with no consideration of people."

"I hate the term 'car brained' but the concept itself is so dam valid. It's very hard to convince people that car-centric design causes cities and towns to be laid out the way that they are. The amount of space that roads and parking take up now are going to shock future generations. Cars and roads are not going to disappear, but the alternative options will seem so much better to future generations."

17. Communism

"It has failed miserably dozens of times in different nations, leading to tens of millions dead , yet we still have like 50% of young people saying it's a cool idea. Why? Because communist criminals were never punished for their sins. After WW2 there were trials, there was widespread condemnation and disgust. Nothing like that ever happened to commie higher ups responsible for shooting people by hundreds of thousands. Nothing. Names like Mao and Stalin should disgust people just as much as the name Hitler, it should be unacceptable in society to express sympathy for them (like it is with Hitler)... yet it's the opposite, especially in colleges."

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Why LGBTQ people are leaving places like New York and San Francisco for red-state cities.

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ABC's When We Rise

When Cleve Jones was growing up, he felt different from everyone else.

Living as a gay teenager in Phoenix, Arizona, in the early 1970s was difficult to say the least. His dad, a psychologist, believed that homosexuality was something to be cured. His classmates in gym class bullied him so much, he pretended to have a chronic lung ailment so that he could stay in the library instead of the gym. And at one point, he said, he felt so alone that he considered suicide.

Human rights activist and author of "When We Rise" Cleve Jones in 2009. Photo by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images.

Jones has been a civil rights activist for over 40 years, and he is depicted as one of the main characters in ABC's miniseries "When We Rise."

His experience as a teenager was similar to that of many LGBTQ people at that time. The American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality an "illness" until 1973, and throughout the 1950s and '60s, members of the LGBTQ community risked psychiatric lockup or jail if they were "discovered." They could also be fired from their jobs or lose custody of their children. Bullying and violence was also a common threat they faced.

In the show, Jones' character reads about the burgeoning gay liberation movement in Life magazine and is inspired to seek out the movement. Jones recalls that moment vividly from his own life.

Cleve sees the 1971 Life magazine with an article about the gay liberation movement in the ABC miniseries "When We Rise." Screenshot used with permission.

"This magazine, in a matter of minutes, revealed to me that there were other people like me," Jones said in an NPR interview. "There was a community, and there were places we could live safely. And one of those places was called San Francisco."

So, Jones hitchhiked from Arizona to San Francisco in 1973 to start his new life.

Cleve leaves his family behind in Phoenix to move to San Francisco in the ABC miniseries "When We Rise." Screenshot used with permission.

Many LGBTQ people who moved out of red states to cities in blue states in the '60s and '70s helped shape those cities into the same-sex safe havens that we know them to be today.

Cities like San Francisco and New York were seen as places where the LGBTQ community could go to live as themselves and escape some of the oppression, discrimination, and violence they faced back home.

The 1979 Gay Freedom Day Parade and Celebration in front of San Francisco City Hall, which marked the 10th anniversary of the gay rights movement. Photo by Paul Sakuma/AP Photo.

Starting with the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the burgeoning gay rights movement grew inside the cities in places such as the Castro district of San Francisco. There, groups mobilized and spearheaded the fight for their rights over the next several decades.

By 1990, the LGBTQ population was largely concentrated in coastal safe-haven cities, including Seattle, Atlanta, Boston, Washington, D.C., and, of course, New York and San Francisco.

The 46th annual Gay Pride March on June 26, 2016, in New York City. Photo by Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images.

Today, that trend may be reversing; members of the LGBTQ community are actually leaving those places and moving to smaller, redder cities.

Consumer Affairs analyzed U.S. Census data and Gallup polling information and found that by 2014, large LGBTQ populations had cropped up in red-state cities, including Salt Lake City, Louisville, Norfolk, and Indianapolis. For example, in 1990, only 1% of the Salt Lake City population identified as LGBTQ, but by 2014, that number had grown to 5% — making it the seventh largest LGBTQ urban population in the country.

Economics plays a large role in the trend; the cost to live in many safe-haven cities has skyrocketed. For example, the cost of living in New York City rose by 23% in just five years between 2009 and 2014 while in San Francisco, the median rent price was nearing $4,500 by 2016.  

Meanwhile, numerous smaller cities in red states, including Salt Lake City and Indianapolis, offer shorter commutes, cheaper rent, and less competition for the good-paying jobs.

A pride flag flies in front of the Historic Mormon Temple as part of an LGBTQ protest in Salt Lake City, Utah. Photo by George Frey/Getty Images.

Progress on LGBTQ issues across the country is another reason for the exodus.

There have been a number of federal actions over the last 15 years to solidify equal rights,including President Barack Obama’s executive order protecting LGBTQ federal workers from discrimination and federal and Supreme Court actions that effectively legalized same-sex marriage across a number of red states, including Arizona, Utah, and Indiana. Several cities have also passed local laws protecting the LGBTQ community, including housing and employment protections and benefits for domestic partners of city employees.

A mother to two lesbian daughters holds a sign while watching the Gay Pride Parade on June 28, 2015, in New York City. Photo by Yana Paskova/Getty Images.

Of course, there's a long way to go — many cities are hotbeds for legal challenges to LGBTQ rights, and 28 states in the U.S. still lack LGBTQ employment discrimination protections.

Rick Scot moved from West Hollywood and bought a house in a suburb of North Carolina with his husband because of cost. But North Carolina is also the birthplace of a controversial law — House Bill 2 — that prevents cities from enacting their own anti-discrimination laws and restricted transgender bathroom access statewide. The law has yet to be successfully repealed.

"I have friends and colleagues who won’t come here," Scot told the L.A. Times.

For some in the LGBTQ community, living in a red state also offers the opportunity to be involved in bringing about real change at a local level.

Protesters in City Creek Park in Salt Lake City in 2015. Photo by George Frey/Getty Images.

New York City and San Francisco didn’t become gay-friendly cities overnight. Change was gradual and hard-fought — and it happened largely because the activists who lived there demanded it.

That's why in the ABC limited series “When We Rise,” Cleve Jones decides to stay put and fight for gay rights in San Francisco rather than go off to Europe to find a better home with his friend.

Roma and Cleve in the ABC miniseries, "When We Rise." Screenshot used with permission.

And today, LGBTQ activists have the opportunity to drive change in red-state cities that have less friendly laws. Some activists are even calling these cities "the new frontier."

That is why Tyler Curry, who calls himself a "blue-ribbon homosexual in a bright red state," has chosen to stay and live Texas — so that he can help bring about change for everyone. "People’s minds can be changed and victories can be won in each state government, no matter how difficult it may seem," Curry wrote in an editorial on the Advocate. "Twenty years ago, the state and federal rights that we now have were merely pipe dreams, but our community refused to let hate beat out hope."

He continued, "Today, we still need to be steadfast in our commitment to LGBT rights across the country, and that means staying put in our red states and demanding respect."

Watch the full trailer for ABC's "When We Rise," which begins Feb. 27 at 9 p.m. Eastern/8 p.m. Central:

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Discouraged by politics? You should check out the revolution happening in Iceland.

Iceland's newest political party — the Pirate Party — is proof that peaceful political revolutions might just be possible.

On Oct. 29, 2016, Iceland held a historic parliamentary election, and the results were pretty indicative of the political turmoil rocking Iceland right now. The ruling Progressive Party lost more than half of its seats in the election, which was sparked by anti-government protests earlier this year after Iceland Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned for being implicated in the Panama Papers.

Former Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson. Photo by Halldoor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images.

After so much government corruption was exposed, Iceland's citizens were understandably angry. They yearned for a new type of politician.

That's when the music swelled, the winds changed, and some swashbuckling pirates came swooping in. OK, not those kinds of pirates, but they did have a black flag.

He kind of looks like a pirate, right? Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images.

The Pirate Party is a group of political activists who are turning Iceland's anger and distrust of the government into real political change.

The party's humble origin stems from Sweden, where it was originally established to protest Swedish file-sharing and copyright laws. The name of the party comes from a Swedish torrenting site called "The Pirate Bay," where people could illegally download movies, music, and a host of other files they might want to get their hands on.

The Pirate Party exists officially in over 60 countries with dozens elected to government positions. As of Iceland's October election, the Pirate Party holds 10 out of 63 seats in Iceland's parliament. The other big winner of the election was women — who won a record 30 parliament seats (more than any single party).

The Pirate Party is being called radical, but really they're just frustrated voters who wanted to see some change in their political system.

The group is a legitimate political party with candidates running for (and winning) real elections around the world with platforms of government transparency and increased participation in democracy.

In Iceland, they also want to end the war on drugs, put more gender identity options on government documents, cut the gender pay gap, and increase privacy.

The pirates are young, new, and here to disrupt the system, but they're not interested in mask-wearing Mr. Robot-style hacktivism.The pirates have decided that the best way to change a system they don't like is by getting involved in it.

Their approach to politics is, well, political. There's a system in place, and the Pirate Party has chosen to work within it instead of yelling at it.

The Panama Papers, more than anything, created anger and distrust in Iceland. We've seen similar feelings in the United States this year, along with a rise of non-business-as-usual candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

There are a lot of Americans who feel disenfranchised, misled, and cheated by their government. Just like people in Iceland, Americans are angry and yearn for sweeping change.

The Pirates are taking that anger and using it as motivation for a real grassroots political revolution. They're not trying to elect a radical leader who will change everything for them; they're building their own political party based on their interests from the ground up.

Iceland Pirate Party founder Birgitta Jónsdóttir and fellow activists reacting to the election results. Photo by Halldoor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images.

Political revolution doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen with a single election. It's a slow, steady climb.

Whether the Pirate Party can accomplish everything it wants remains to be seen, but its growing success is a reminder that our hunger to change everything can be used to work with the system instead of just being aimlessly angry about it or seeking to burn the whole thing to the ground to start over. Democracy tends to work best when we're all active, motivated, and participating.

As Margaret Mead famously said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

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Feminism = fighting for equality for women. This comic breaks it down.

Women have been advocating for equal rights for centuries, and the fight is just beginning.

There's no one right way to be a feminist.

In fact, feminist history is so rich because of the diversity in beliefs, practices, and ideologies. Thanks to famous feminists like Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and so many more, feminism has transcended race, class, and time to reach a number of women and impact new laws and ways of thinking.

Rebecca Cohen, a cartoonist based in Berkeley, explains the importance of feminism as a catalyst for real change through a series of comics:  

All images by Rebecca Cohen, used with permission.

In the words of feminist author and speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a feminist is "a person who believes in the social, economic and political equality of the sexes."      

Of course, we still have a ways to go to get to a place where this definition is true. But as feminism continues evolving, I hope this is a definition men and women can get behind as we continue to fight for justice and true equality!  

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