Probably wrapping and cooking our food in volatile plastics.
Hopefully.
Putting hot food on polystyrene plates
Allowing Israel to get away with shit.
Lol, were you alive 20 years ago? same shit
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 😬)
There are parallels to when autopilot first began to proliferate in aviation. I’d have to do some research to confirm, but I am certain there was at least a segment of people who would have said they trusted pilots to fly more than autopilot. Now it’s 99% autopilot. The pilots of scheduled air services typically hand control to autopilot fairly shortly after departure, and for quite a long time before arrival. In some cases there are even autopilot-coupled approach to landings… and nobody bats an eye.
We collectively spend millions of hours in traffic, and lose thousands of lives to preventable accidents (like drowsy/sleepy/influenced driving).
Aviation made the switch to save lives, and eventually drivers will, too.
When we look back, we’ll wonder how we were such savages about insisting we drive manually.
People probably wouldn't believe we sold water in plastic water bottles or shopped with disposable plastic bags.
I think it might take a lot longer than 20 years for plastic to fully die down
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.
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
Added water infrastructure? My guy, the connection for the cistern is right there. The added infrastructure is literally a tee piece and the hose.
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.
Long live the three seashells
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
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
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.
Teflon
I'm afraid the answer will be air conditioning and indoor plumbing.
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.
Amazon has become really bad.
Amazon is like that Stoner Uncle that says shit like, "just trust me bro, you need the DKAIRBGAUENBSHDBDJS 17-IN-ONE BACK MASSAGER TAX CALCULATOR LEFT SIDE ONLY LETTER OPENER CAT FOOD DISPENSER!"
And instead of providing said Uncle with powerful psychotropic medications and 24-7 supervision we made him into a multi-trillionaire.
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
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
For most of us in the US: Having an endless supply of cheap, clean fresh water
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 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.
Probably Snow with global warming and all
I'd say traditional (linear) television. Still common enough, though even today it's clearly on the way out.
Possibly US specific: Artificial Red/Yellow/Blue dyes in food. I hope..
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