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How will this era be defined? Certainly not by reason or thought. It feels like we’re mired in an age of carelessness…or maybe even stupidity.
AskReddit users went on the record and revealed what we are NOT in ‘The Golden Age’ of.
1. Long gone neon
“Neon signs
Ok, people are saying that “hey, you’ve clearly never been to X, there’s a ton there!” While you’re right, I’ve never been to Austin or Vegas, that doesn’t mean that we’re still in the golden age. There’s a great documentary that was actually on the Reddit front page about the industry dying in Asia (I believe it’s been linked to in this thread multiple times). There are a lot out in the world, but there’s almost no new ones being made, and not like they used to be. I would say the golden age for neon was in the 80s. LEDs are the future and that’s kinda sad.”
2. We need an upgrade
“Toilets. Either make them all flush automatically or make them where you have to push the handle down.
If it’s one of those automatic ones, please make it smart enough to not flush while I’m just sitting down or mid poop. I like to wipe down the toilet seat before I sit on it and throw that toilet paper in the water to avoid any splash backs . Half the time it doesn’t work because the toilet will just flush before I even sit down.
And fix the bathroom stalls. No one should be able to make eye contact with me through the crack of the door as they walk in and I’m in the stall talking a poop.”
3. Fall of the mall
“Shopping Malls, they are super dead and getting a little deader every day.”
4. Muscle men
“Bodybuilding. Go look at the recent Mr. Olympia winners and compare that to the days of Schwarzenegger. Night and day.”
5. Damn shoelaces
“Shoe fastenings. We’re still using primitive shoelaces just like all of those grim people in the earliest photographs, standing there in their tall uncomfortable black boots, out in the barnyard next to the well, with the tethered mule standing dumbly by the family, all of whom look angry or like they want to die instead of face yet another brutal day trying to wrestle their sustenance out of the unforgiving ground.
The well is gone, the mule is gone, even the barnyard is gone, and we sit in our shiny air-conditioned towers talking to each other across a networked world swarmed with satellites, yet still we wear those same laces.
We tried in the 80s with Velcro; every kid had a pair, or at least some hybrid hi-tops. But Big Shoelace crushed it behind the scenes, relegating it to the shoes of wriggling infants and arthritic seniors in the painful twilight of their mobility.
So here we are still enslaved, still tethered to Big Shoelace, suckling at its teat as the only means of sustenance within the radius allowed us. We are the mules now. We will never escape. We will never escape. Congress has a golden shoelace around its neck and we will never escape. Perhaps it’s a golden age after all, just not for the many.”
6. A lot of people are sorry
“The Halo franchise. Sorry 🙁 “
7. Interesting take
“Alchemy!”
8. What’s gonna happen?
“Gene manipulation.
CRISPR is at its infancy, and won’t reach its full potential for a few decades I’m guessing. Who knows what could happen when we reach that point?”
9. Any Brits care to weigh in?
“The British Empire.”
10. On the decline
“Kmart!”
11. Not a bad thing
“Small pox.”
12. Is it in the past or the future?
“Space Exploration.”
13. Very true
“Boxing.”
14. No common ground
“Water cooler talk at work. Ten years ago if I saw something incredible I would talk to people about it at work the next day, now nobody watches the same thing so those conversations don’t happen.”
15. Tragedy
“Fishing.
We’ve killed so many fish it’s a f*cking tragedy. By some estimates we’ve killed 90% of the world’s shark population alone. Reading old books and running into offhand comments about fishing is depressing as hell.
I love seafood, but we need like a decade-long commercial fishing hiatus followed by much stricter limits and better regulations. There are a bunch of really dumb rules right now; bycatch is wasted, for example. Let’s get by on sport-caught and farmed seafood for a while and let the fishes come back.
Fishing now is nothing whatever like it was even fifty years ago. A century ago it was like another planet. And this is coming from a kiteboarder, somebody to whom sharks are a genuine threat.”
