I think the biggest and most noticeable/measurable cultural change is the prudishness and illiteracy of Gen Z.

That is substantive, and substantial.

It’s really weird for me, as a middle aged guy, that we have the same subcultures and subculture aesthetics that we did 30 years ago.

They’re tired and sputtering, have way less energy and aren’t attached to good art or good taste anymore, and for some reason they appeal to… https://t.co/hhCaqmFOdx

— Coddled Affluent Professional (@feelsdesperate) December 9, 2025

No matter what some people claim, culture has been remarkably static. As someone who lived through the very tail end of the 1970s, all of the 1980s, and the 1990s, culture used to change like a damn tornado had swept everything away before it.

Now it’s stuck, other than a few new slang terms and such. Someone who dressed, behaved and spoke like someone from 2005 would not be out of place at all now. Someone who dressed, spoke and acted like someone from 1975 in 1995…well, let’s just say they would’ve seemed like a hilarious and utterly-anachronistic dinosaur.

And don’t deny it. I was fucking there.

Maybe a very prosaic observation, but I've been reflecting on just how much the pandemic changed the world in ways that are completely unrelated to the pandemic itself. I think I've underestimated it 'till now.

In a recent interview, I was struck by the comment that so many of…

— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) October 20, 2025

It seems things got roundly worse everywhere after the pandemic. And no, clownish Covidians, Long Covid is not the cause.

My theory is fairly simple: The world was already in a slow transition period from the Westphalian bargain, Pax Americana and into resurgent authoritarianism. Covid kicked us ahead 15-20 years into that future by being a societal break that force-reset a lot of assumptions and arrangements.

We all got teleported societally to where we should have been in 2040. And like anyone unstuck in time, we’re not dealing with it well at all.

Covid was a time machine.

Social media and smartphones made men a bit worse, but made women a whole lot worse.

Not sure if it’s reversible at this point short a nuclear war or asteroid strike.

When cellphones were pretty new and smartphones were being thought of but not yet invented the conventional wisdom was, “No one is going to carry around a device all day! That’ll never happen!”

And that was what most people believed. It was the obvious thing to claim.

And it was, as it turns out, completely wrong. People in fact do carry around smartphones all day. Something in only a decade or so went from, “Impossible. Will never happen” to “Of course, who doesn’t carry their smartphone everywhere?”

That shows how fast what is obvious can change, and how little-recognized it is when it does. And it always does.

Mcdonald’s In the 70’s

Nope! That is the design motif from the late 1980s. 1970s McDonald’s had a variety of seating designs, but none like this and not in these colors. Most had cushions and upholstery that were muted brown, yellow, or even black. Many had wood paneling and brown cross-tiled floors. There were also some metal-backed chairs.

How do people always get this so wrong?

I think just as much as the economic headwinds, the expectation that every kid needs to be closely surveilled 24/7 by necessity means a much lower birth rate.

Culture cannot be ignored. And right now, children are expected to be treated like concentration camp inmates under constant guard, not allowed to stray more than 10 feet away lest the cops be called, not allowed to play alone or sometimes even be alone, and with no prospect of any of the freedoms I and most people over 40 enjoyed as children.

While children suffer, regarding the birth rate, parents in this terrible culture also must bear a heavy burden. They must devote every scrap of waking attention to making sure little Timmy or Joanna is never out of sight as CPS gets called in an eyeblink these days. This culture of extreme monitoring puts an upper limit on how many children most people will have or wish to have.

After all, who’d want to have children who could never be more than an arm’s length away where you basically become an unpaid prison guard in charge of their every move and breath?

Sounds terrible. And requires an enormous time investment, far more than previous generations would’ve devoted to any one kid. So, yes, culture matters just as much as economics when looking for the answer as to why more people don’t want to live a life like that to have some kids.

Women and men are pitiful in different ways now. Women got what they thought they wanted and it destroyed them.

Men were told to retreat and did, and the bitterness of listening to words and following them rather than observing actions and doing based on that destroyed them.

Is there a way back? Perhaps not. Diseased cultures often simply die.

For those who escaped a low income upbringing, what culture shocks did you experience?

How vastly less common casual violence is, even among men. Where I grew up it was just a thing that happened constantly, a background hum to which you grew accustomed¹.

The middle class and particularly the upper middle class and above just does not work like that.

1. The movie Good Will Hunting portrays the casualness of violence in that type of environment pretty well. Winter’s Bone too.

Broadly the larpers on here think that fertility declines can be counteracted by stripping women of their rights and implementing some sort of (this varies) hypertrad social structure with religion as the social technology to hold it together.

Of course, this wouldn’t work. https://t.co/R63KJsGcQP

— psychosomatica (@Xenoimpulse) July 4, 2025

It is impossible to recreate the cultural past by recreating the material conditions of that past. Culture simply does not work like that; as Nietzsche knew, there is no going back. That project is doomed to fail in really heinous ways.