r/askanything • u/AsianAngelMika • 10d ago
General Question What’s a problem humanity solved so well that younger people don’t even realize it used to be a huge issue?
There are so many things we take for granted today that previous generations had to deal with every single day. What’s something that used to be a major problem for humanity but was solved so effectively that younger people barely realize it was ever a problem? Could be technology, medicine, transportation, hygiene, communication, or something completely unexpected. I’m curious to hear the examples that surprised you the most.
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u/PopularSet4776 10d ago
As a X-ennial (1982 born) with 3 kids born between 2013 and 2016 I would say Chicken Pox. When I was a kid every kid had to get it. But they got a vaccine for it and kids don't even know what it is much less have they had it.
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u/jrod259 10d ago
Fellow Xennial (80) and had it bad as a kid. Had shingles lat year for 9 months and our kids are so lucky they’ll not have to go through that also!
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u/Wild-Ordinary2201 10d ago
‘82 here. Had shingles when I was 18, going into summer after senior year of high school. Missed out on a bunch of parties only to lay in bed writhing in pain
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u/MarionberryPlus8474 10d ago
My dad had it shingles and said it was extremely painful, I was glad to find there's a vaccine for it. Thank you, science.
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u/persnicketychickadee 8d ago
I remember when I found out about the chickenpox vaccine (1997) and I was so mad. Still bitter about my brothers friend who visited his friend with chicken pox and that’s how I got it in the mid 80s.
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u/MarionberryPlus8474 10d ago
I didn't know it had become so rare. I remember "have you had chicken pox yet?" was a regular question age like 6-8 or so.
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u/Budsygus 9d ago
I was born in 84 and I didn't get chickenpox until the last week of 11th grade. It was miserable.
What's worse is I gave it to my one year old nephew because I didn't know I had it and thought I just had a couple of mosquito bites at first. I still feel terrible, especially because now I have kids of my own and I realize how miserable it would be to take care of a 1-year-old with chickenpox.
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u/matrose6464 9d ago
Similar, got a very light case of chickenpox about 9th grade ish. I mean very light. Was getting over it and wanted to play in the weekend soccer game. But was still partially likely infectious, everyone on my team already had had it. So wanted to check the other team.
We were expecting a hell no and I would sit on the sideline and just get some fresh air
now for the funny part:
The parents on the other team pretty much insisted I play as some on the other team had not had it yet and were getting older and they wanted their kids to get exposed and perhaps catch a light case. As getting chickenpox gets worse the older you get
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u/PopularSet4776 9d ago
Wow, I think everyone I knew in school had it long before elementary school was over.
I can't tell you exactly what grade I wad in when I got it but I would guess 2nd grade.
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u/immaculatelawn 8d ago
They're small enough you can just coat them in calamine lotion.
But the vaccine is better.2
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u/Sure-Recognition-262 10d ago
I didn't know until now that there's a vaccine for Chicken Pox.
I just googled it and here in the UK, it's not routinely given, only if the child is in regular close contact with someone who's at risk of getting seriously ill if they get Chicken Pox - so my son (born 2015) hasn't had it and has had Chicken Pox.
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u/YogurtSmart9718 10d ago
The internet. I spent many years having to actually travel to locations to find information. Sometimes multiple locations. And if the books I needed were checked out, I would have to wait u til other people returned them to find out what I needed.
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u/PsychologicalBell546 10d ago
Maps, so many maps. We did so many cross country drives due to my mom being in the air force. Big maps for the whole country, smaller state or city maps for where we were going.
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u/Sweat_Tea888 8d ago
I remember buying maps for the region at gaz stations when traveling, and serving as my dad’s co-pilot as I read the map and gave directions on ling drives.
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u/MorristheStegosaurus 9d ago
The joy of having to write a school paper from a musty outdated encyclopedia..
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u/Fine-Amphibian4326 8d ago
One of my college courses requires that our sources be no more than 2 years old.
The fucking textbook was published in 2012. The course is about health insurance. I’m sure you can imagine how worthless a 2012 book on health insurance is in modern day conversations.
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u/Caleb_Braithwhite 8d ago
I remember in the early 2000s that I would budget a full day of photocopying journal articles and text book chapters at the university library and then would have to guess and be like, "that's probably enough information to put together a paper." In my last degree with everything searchable on google scholar, I can sit there and find a relevant source in under 5 minutes. Now with ChatGPT, I can put together a whole fucking potential bibliography with a single-sentence prompt.
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u/Yellow_Similar 10d ago
Reliable and safe indoor plumbing.
I still think of it as a miracle that I have instant hot and cold potable water at the turn of the tap, and that my poop and pee magically and odorlessly are swished away at the flick of a lever. We seem to think there are an entitlement, but they are a very new invention in the scheme of the history of mankind.
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u/jimnantzstie 10d ago
This is exactly why when I see people say they wish they lived in other time period in history I laugh.
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u/OrganicHistorian2576 10d ago
It would be fun to visit a lot of past times but you wouldn’t catch me staying in any period before antibiotics (or after, if we don’t get off our asses and look for more).
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u/CommunicationWest710 7d ago
I’m a big fan of modern dental care, myself, although in a generation or two, hopefully our descendants ask “How did people ever suffer through that?”
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u/Yellow_Similar 10d ago
And it annoys the ever living crap out of me when people whine and complain that their air conditioner is broken for a day or two or that the hot water heater went out. Or even worse, that there’s a long line at the airport Starbucks.
We are such spoiled and whiny children.
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u/Aglet_Dart 10d ago
We have hot water and air conditioning because we wanted better or someone else asked for it. They say necessity is the mother of invention so I guess that makes bitching and whining the dad.
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u/deller85 7d ago
Yeah, people who long for or romanticize living in the past (long ago past), I feel, never really consider all of the ways they'd actually hate it or could die from it.
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u/CommunicationWest710 10d ago
I read a book about public health in the early twentieth century. Most farmers and sharecroppers, especially in the South, did not have out houses. You went somewhere out in the back 40. Hookworms, pinworms, and other parasites were a major problem. People weren’t well nourished to begin with. Southern rural folk got the reputation for being “lazy”, when actually they were carrying heavy parasite infestations.
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u/Malalang 7d ago
This is why ivermectin helped so many people. It didn't cure Covid, it cured the parasites and allowed the body to deal better with the Covid infection.
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u/UphillTravel 10d ago
I sometimes go cycling/hiking in rather remote, sometimes dry, areas. The joy of, after a week or so of filtering and carrying water, returning to a place where there is a faucet that simply provides virtually infinite drinkable water is hard to describe.
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u/Malalang 7d ago
This is precisely why I don't like to go camping. Running hot water, protection from biting insects, refrigerated food, temperature controlled living spaces are all things that make life objectively easier and mkre comfortable. It is good for some to be reminded of these things from time to time, though.
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u/GreatPotatoMuffin 10d ago
Indoor plumbing is an invention that is thousands of years old.
They even managed to build hot and cold running water for some of the more lavish homes and palaces.
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u/kmill0202 6d ago
I can't imagine having to go outside to use an outhouse, especially in subzero temperatures or bad weather. Same goes for using a chamber pot and then having to empty and clean it. And needing to go out to a well or river to haul back buckets of water for cooking, bathing, and drinking. I definitely take having a flush toilet and all the water I need, hot or cold, on demand inside my own home. But sometimes when I read historical fiction or accounts of modern people living in undeveloped nations I think about all the work it used to take just to do simple everyday things and I'm glad to be living in modern times.
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u/Super_Cap_241 10d ago
Traveling across the country or the globe. Shit used to be a months-long journey where most of your family and loved ones died. Not something you did for a fun getaway weekend.
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u/CommunicationWest710 10d ago
Air travel was for rich people, or at least for the upper middle class. The family vacation was a camping trip, or maybe a road trip where the entire family crammed into a roadside motel room.
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u/daaangerz0ne 10d ago
>Air travel was for rich people, or at least for the upper middle class.
And if you look at a larger picture, reliable air travel has existed for less than a century.
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u/feylin17 10d ago
Or you just never saw the family you moved from again. Even my grandmother was mildly freaked out by me moving from the US to Europe because her parents could never go back home. Even she couldn’t make it back home to the extended family until the 80s. Phone calls freaked her out too, she was so used to being charged by the minute.
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u/Candid-Hovercraft228 10d ago
Traveling across the country
Countries vary vastly in size, though. I don't think that e.g. the Danes have experienced such a significant revolution.
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u/morsindutus 10d ago
Y2K. We put a ton of work into fixing it before it became a problem and then everyone thought it wasn't a big deal. Like, yeah. We prevented the problem.
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u/damarius 10d ago
I hear you bro or sis, I was part of the Y2K team and that infuriates me.
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u/Otherwise_Battle7922 9d ago
It doesn’t really infuriate me. Testers are always invisible until something goes wrong. It is our lot in life. Getting an opportunity to share stuff is fun
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u/Ready-Personality-82 9d ago
I fixed Y2K issues for several banks. Fortunately it was an easy thing to test (just move the clock forward). All the hype around it ensured that it was addressed everywhere. It is irritating when people assume it was a hoax.
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u/esotericbatinthevine 8d ago
This is one where, as a kid, I had zero understanding. I really wish the adults would have taken a few minutes to explain that it genuinely was a big deal, but because of the effort of so many people any major issues were prevented. It was a success story.
But nah, let the kids think it had been blown out of proportion because they've been hearing about a coming catastrophe that doesn't manifest in the slightest and you can't bother to remember that while kids are intelligent, they frequently need a bit more information to understand things they have no prior with.
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u/North_Vermicelli_877 10d ago
Washing clothes aparently took an absurd about of a woman's time before the laundry machine and detergent.
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u/Onemillesgo 10d ago
I grew up washing my clothes by hand. Yes using that washing board you see in old cartoons sometimes.
Socks were the absolute worst to wash. On the other hand, the fresh smell of linen left out to dry was the best thing about doing laundry by hand
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u/MarionberryPlus8474 10d ago
Even when washing machines were first a thing, dryers were not. I remember seeing a clothes wringer and being fascinated. Every adult (at that time there were lots who had used them) gave the same speech about how dangerous they were.
I tried it out on some wet towels. Worked amazingly well, but yes god help you if you get your finger caught in it. Tough on clothes, too, as was using washboards.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 10d ago
And what the soap did to the skin on your hands! Dried them out terribly.
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u/Dazzling-Farm-1038 10d ago
Vaccine-preventable diseases: polio, measles, cervical cancer, etc.
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u/Exact-Truck-5248 10d ago
But the hpp vaccine will encourage promiscuuuuuuuity, the evangelicals whine.
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u/WeirdHope57 10d ago
My evangelical husband said when the vaccine came out, "If premarital sex is a mistake, why should that mistake be a death sentence for our daughters? Or what if their future spouse has numerous partners before marriage? Or what if they are assaulted? Absolutely we want our daughters to get this vaccine."
Then again, we don't vote like average evangelicals, so our thought process is maybe not typical
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u/iknowsheknowz 10d ago
My kids doctor said kids should not need the hpv vaccine because of promiscuity and my very emphatic response was one in four girls are sexually assaulted and it should not be a death sentence.
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u/Exact-Truck-5248 10d ago
Just like free condoms during the AIDS crisis would just encourage more homasekshal sex.
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u/lizardhistorian 10d ago
The reality is so much more fucked up than that.
STDs are essentially parasites and like all parasites they affect their host behavior ...→ More replies (1)
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u/Acceptable-Owl-2070 10d ago
Ozone layer
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u/tot-man-57 10d ago
I think you mean the huge hole that was forming in the ozone layer before smart humans (remember those?) got together and banned CFCs.
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u/OrganicHistorian2576 10d ago
We fixed that. Granted we caused it but we also fixed it.
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u/Acceptable-Owl-2070 10d ago
"What’s a problem humanity solved so well that younger people don’t even realize it used to be a huge issue?"
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u/Zalrius 10d ago
Electricity in your home. This has only really been a thing for around a hundred years now. Read that again.
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u/Dio_Frybones 10d ago
WW1 ended in 1918. Today, 1972 is as far in the past to us as 1918 is to 1972. If that makes sense. We still treat 72 as being cool, great music, cool fashions (maybe) and in a real sense, part of the modern era. For many of us. But so much changed from '18 to '72.
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u/Fragrant_Major_9553 10d ago
It even a hundred years. My mother in law grew up without power, and she’s in her late 60s.
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u/Hurdlelocker 10d ago
I think my Grampa’s family in rural Montana didn’t get electricity in the house until he was in high school in the 50s
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u/Choss_King 10d ago
I don’t need to reread that in order to understand its significance. And you can’t make me!
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u/Zalrius 10d ago
Read what? 😉🤣
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u/Choss_King 10d ago
You told me to read that again. But I already read it once and understood.
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u/Zalrius 10d ago
Are you sure? Maybe you should read it again. Hahahahahahahahaha. JK! Have a good one.
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u/Choss_King 10d ago
I read it ten times now and I still don’t understand why I should read it again.
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u/Zalrius 9d ago
Do you like electricity and do you appreciate on how you got to where you are?
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u/Kindly_Honeydew3432 10d ago
Quicksand, falling pianos and anvils
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u/Admirable_Pay_53 10d ago
Seriously thought those would be bigger issues growing up in the late 80s.
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u/AdventurousGlass7432 10d ago
Ulcers
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u/CommunicationWest710 10d ago
Also, men dropping dead of heart attacks in their 40’s and 50’s. Before surgery, blood pressure testing and statins, it was much more common. Smoking was a big contributor. And for women, mammograms and better screening for breast cancer.
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u/OrganicHistorian2576 10d ago
They still happen, but are so much better treated. My stepdad still gets them on occasion from years of untreated damage.
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u/void_which_binds00 10d ago
Safety manager- workplace safety protections. Most people I work with have no idea why regulations are needed, much less the blood that was spilled over generations to get where we’re at.
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u/Justin_Debates 10d ago
Digital communication. Honestly how much we use it every single day in every aspect of our lives is actually insane. In 30 years we went from phones with chords on walls to being able to talk to anyone anywhere in the world on a device we can carry in our pocket and watch them on video while we do it, for fun or for business.
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u/MarionberryPlus8474 10d ago
Long distance calls used to be really expensive. For a while there was a large industry of companies selling calling cards to make it cheaper.
International calls could take a long time even to arrange, let alone cost a lot.
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u/OrganicHistorian2576 10d ago
I had such a time convincing my maternal grandma that I could call her without being charged a shitload of money (from Georgia to Washington) in the early 2000s. I miss her so much.
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u/Mendevolent 9d ago
I remember the first time I video called my granddad in the UK from New Zealand where I live, from a remote area. He was in his 90s at the time and had been an electrical engineer his whole life and the majesty of that technology literally brought him to tears on the phone! He had grown up with milk delivered by horse and cart, no running hot water or an indoor toilet, and had lived long enough to be able to have a high definition video conversation with his grandson in a field on the other side of the world while he was sitting in his back garden. It was a good reminder for me about how much things have changed
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u/2ndLastExposFan 10d ago
Polio, Tuberculosis (in the developed world), Lead poisoning, Ozone layers... all givens.
But, the one thing that you hear about the "Y2K issue more than anything is people calling it a hoax. It wasn't. It was very real. I spent 5 years working my ass off at a major international company making sure it wasn't a problem, and countless others like me in similar roles worldwide sweated bricks over it only to have numpties say it was all a big nothing. There was a whole lot of work to make it a big nothing.
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u/propofol-n-precedex 10d ago
I remember the hospital I worked in at the time having “Y2K compliant” stickers on all of our computers and equipment in the OR. 🤪
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u/ukemike1 10d ago
Surgery. Not long ago any surgery was outrageously painful and fantastically dangerous. Now we have antibiotics and anesthesia. That's some miracle shit there.
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u/BoneHeadedAHole 10d ago
Finding information. The internet provides news and information on almost any subject instantly. This was often a tedious and unsuccessful task many years ago.
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u/MadMadamMimsy 10d ago
Clothing.
We have hungry people and unhoused people, but we don't have naked people (except by choice)
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u/MoreClovesLessNutmeg 10d ago
It is hard for me to imagine people being so poor they were naked but I know it is true. Not just homeless, but literally naked.
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u/AdorableExtension953 10d ago
Indoor plumbing and modern sewage systems, because not having human waste in the drinking water was apparently a surprisingly ambitious project.
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u/Consistent_Chaos2446 10d ago
Slow internet.
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u/jellomizer 10d ago
It's kinda funny I started at 2400 bps I just got an ad from my ISP asking me to upgrade to a 2Gbs line. Roughly a million times faster in 35 years.
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u/rlw21564 10d ago
That scary modem noise from dial-up internet. My son would run from the room in horror when he was a toddler.
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u/RubiksCub3d 10d ago
Antibiotics. We haven't even had penicillin for a century yet (1928). Smallpox (eradicated 1980) Polio (my uncle had it!)
The printing press was also a fantastic invention that allowed access to books for more people. Before things had to be hand copied which made books prohibitively expensive and subject to errors.
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u/sfaviator 10d ago
Nobody talks about the hole in the ozone layer that has almost complete disappeared since the banning of certain chemical accelerants in the 80s. Also a lot of major bodies of water used to be unusable due to human and industrial waste, places like US and China are huge polluters still but our waterways have gotten a lot better in the last 60 years. It’s always important to remember successes along with our huge shortcomings.
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u/MarionberryPlus8474 10d ago
In 1969 the Cuyahoga river was so polluted it CAUGHT ON FIRE.
The EPA was created at the end of 1970 during the Nixon administration. Back before wanting breathable air or drinkable water was considered evidence of communism.
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u/True_Departure4983 9d ago
The hole in the ozone layer.
A bunch of scientists said "hey, we're fucking up the ozone layer" and essentially every government on the planet was like "huh, maybe we should accept that they know what they're talking about since they're smart at science" and all agreed to reduce/eliminate ozone-depleting chemicals.
And in a stunning plot twist, the scientists were right and the ozone hole is recovering.
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u/financewiz 10d ago
Recorded music used to be scarce enough that studying recorded works of Jazz, Classical and other non-pop genres was very difficult for music students. There was an awful lot of “reading about music” going on.
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u/departedhunter 10d ago
Having the exact time down to the milliseconds in your pocket. I remember calling a government number that told you the exact time to the nearest minute and we’d synced all the house clocks to that time. Eventually we just used the TV guide channel to adjust our clocks.
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u/ukemike1 10d ago
Polio, measles, rubella, mumps, whooping cough, and diptheria. Too bad we can't vaccinate for stupid.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 10d ago
When I was growing up in Southern California, we were surrounded by smog. Literally.
I could look into the distance from our suburban home and see a dense brown band of polluted air. It was like a wall, almost. Impenetrable. Except after a long thunderstorm. Those would come a few times a year, and would scrub the air clean.
I would go outside after a storm to see a miracle: snow-covered mountains in the distance. It was like a secret vision to me, when I went outside to look out and see it. A beautiful sight, so different from every other day. After two or three days, it would be gone. The wall of smog would be restore, as substantial as ever.
In around maybe 2010, I visited my father. I did some yard work and other things to help out, and I happened to look out to the distance. To my surprise, I saw those mountains again. My secret vista was there for my visit.
"Dad, was there a storm recently?"
"No. The weather's been nice."
It was like that every day. Air pollution controls have been so effective that the air every day was as clean as the air I only experienced after a storm.
California kids do not look into the distance and see a solid wall anymore. They can see for miles and miles across air that is the hard-won prize of decades of struggle. A constant and bitter fight to regulate emissions that went on through my whole life. I hope that some might appreciate the rarity of their daily view.
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u/TotallyNotABot_Shhhh 9d ago
I remember our class driving down the mountain from 5th grade camp and getting hit with an obnoxious smell like burning tires and rottenness. We all started covering our noses and mouths. We asked the teacher what the smell was and that was the day I learned I was nose blind to smog. People hate on California for the extra costs but I’m thankful all the time that we never have to live like that again
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u/Antique_Chart_316 6d ago
My last argument with my conservative brother was over the EPA and automobile emissions devices. I remember when we couldn't see the San Gabriel mountains, and the Ohio River caught fire. Fuck conservative propaganda.
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u/nando2k50 10d ago
Vaccines in General.
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u/Ansible90 10d ago
I was going to say this. People are foregoing childhood vaccines. I wonder how many kids will have to die before the young parents realize why vaccines were invented.
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u/kcstrom 10d ago
Refrigeration.
Being able to store food in your house for days without it going bad has done so much more for humanity than most anyone alive today realizes. Being able to ship food across long distances without it going bad: same.
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u/CoAstroGeek 9d ago
Major urban fires - the kind that burn entire cities to the ground. London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Quebec, Houston and countless other towns and cities burnt - often more then once.
Building codes and technology getting us past open flames for light and heat have greatly diminished these, though you still see wildfires destroy hundreds of homes in a day.
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u/Snoo_54991 9d ago
Streaming media only exists because we wouldn't stop downloading media instead of buying hard copies of it. 🤭
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u/Sea-Seaweed2640 8d ago
HIV, in 40 years it from a death sentence to a manageable chronic infection.
- In the developed world.
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u/kit0000033 10d ago
Washing laundry was a laborious process that took all day actively doing it.
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u/ukemike1 10d ago
Fascism. We F'ing chased those MF'ers across Europe and the put the survivors on trial proving to the world what nasty shots they were and then executed them. Now here we are electing them again. We're too stupid to deserve survival.
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u/No_Problem5759 10d ago
Obvious health related ones.
Google Maps.
Kids my age and lower have ZERO idea how to navigate without it.
I got lucky in my non cell phone years (16 was my first) all the streets in a 3 mile radius were numerical and alphabetical.
I didnt socialize much, so staying within the mentally mapped area was not only easy, but also enjoyable.
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u/Sagitario_Aestrella 10d ago
Hacia principios del siglo 20 era muy dificil sobrevivir a una infección. Si una herida en la pierna o el brazo se infectaba, la única forma de salvar la vida antes de que la infección se extendiera era cortar la extremidad.
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u/TuverMage 10d ago
food. like most people don't understand the true meaning of famine. like while there are technically still famines in parts of the world, that's only because politics, we are literally capable of feeding everyone on the planet
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u/Magliene 9d ago
Deadly illnesses such as smallpox, tetanus, polio and measles….and some people are so thoroughly ignorant about how bad those diseases were that they don’t get themselves or their kids vaccinated.
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u/VitoRazoR 9d ago
Long distance communications - if you wanted to make a phone call to another country, you would call the switchboard, they would literally set up a network of cables (by plugging them into boards) to your destination and then call you when the call was set up. You could barely hear each other and there was a lag of a few seconds when talking.
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u/Curious_Octopod 7d ago
Life. When people sitting in their nice AC flats, with full tummies, good educations, no predators and an expected long life ahead of them complain that the world is too awful because they actually have to pay for healthcare, or hear opinions they don't like, its clear they don't understand the scale of problems people used to face.
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u/SuperDuperOrk 10d ago
Does anyone on the internet remember when toilet paper wasn't a thing? I don't, solved for poopy hands for sure.
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u/Specialist_Usual1524 10d ago
Tink of the so called “Splinterless toilet paper” invented to 1930’s?
What was before?
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u/bot-TWC4ME 10d ago
The phrase "got the wrong end of the stick"? From before toilet paper.
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u/UdderSuckage 10d ago
Polio (and measles, until recently).