It is hard to overstate how common that was in the nineties, at least here in Spain.

Clouds would come out of family bars and diners when you opened the door. Movie theaters and art galleries would have people smoking inside as it was part of their intellectual aesthetic. During weddings giving out Cuban style cigars as a present was assumed. Schools would not allow it officially, but every bathroom and teacher lounge would clearly smell from the people hiding for a smoke. Same for hospital waiting areas and bathrooms. Trains had smoking and non smoking wagons, which people complained about, feeling smokers were being ostracized. Beaches were full of cigarette buts to the point that accidentally stepping on a not yet cold one was a common concern. Not "going for a smoke" at work was considered socially isolating, and particularly for men saying you don't smoke would lead to others questioning your heterosexuality in a non PC manner. Teenagers would start smoking around the family as a "proof of adulthood" as soon as they had their first part time job to pay for it.

Smoking on airplanes is the one that just seemed like an accident waiting to happen. And yet there were (relatively) few incidents caused by cigarettes.

The Sixties where the time!

in the office: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/14040813590...

in university: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1315981/mediaviewer/rm154904524...

in airplanes: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/15032513024...

You don't have to go back 30 years to see it. Just take a shared taxi in Sumatra. Most of the men and some women will be smoking. Inside the car. With the windows closed. Sitting next to babies and young children.

"You're too young to smoke. You're going to set this whole place on fire."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma_XNn1bwOM

https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/2620/how-do-they-...

I was recently watching some TV show and there was this one scene in maternity hospital. The doctor(!) was smoking while talking to the main character. Insane for today's standards.

You can still smoke indoors in public places in many places in the world

Airplane!, 1980.

I remember transatlantic flights with smoking sections

I quit in 1999. I don't need to tell you how hard it was. A year of still wanting a cigarette, having to fight the urge, every single day.

Two years quit and I was still having dreams where I am lighting up…

Twenty-seven years since now and it's all a distant memory. Even forgotten in dreamland…

Congrats! I quit around the same time cca 2012-2014.

I did not smoke on a plane, but smoking on trains (and many places indoor) was "normal" before like 2010 around my place. I did not like it even as a smoker and rather went out.

But fully echo you that quitting was one of the best decisions of my life.

Not only teflon, but pfas. Overuse of pesticides. The second coming of authoritarianism 80 years after the last time. Not doing enough about climate change. Anthropocene extinction.

> plastic everywhere.

plastic will still be everywhere. The major catastrophe that could happen is for evolution of plastic eating bacteria like the creation of (dead) wood eating bacteria. Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.

> social media as news

Mainstream news isn't going to get any better.

> teflon

teflon has gotten a lot better since it was introduced. It will stick around.

> fossil fuel cars

will be seen like rotary phones: they will not understand why they are so cumbersome or why so many people had resistance against electric cars. It's like electric lights versus living with only oil/candle lights.

I think a near term would be: "you had to go to a cinema to watch a movie?"

Ha ha, the replies to your comment have become a laundry list of people's grievances and/or agendas.

Meat not as a treat, but as a staple

> fossil fuel cars

All or almost all of fire is my guess. My guess is that celebratory fire is last to go, bonfires, fireworks, in 2070 probably roasting marshmallows is at the edge of reasonable behaviour, but the idea that we deliberately burned things as part of normal life will seem very odd.

In 1870 fire is the usual (and incredibly wasteful) way humans make light and heat everywhere. In 1970 there's more abstraction, the light is electrical but from thermal generation, so there is still fire but it's somewhere else, and your heat is more likely from fire inside a metal box in a distant room, a gas, oil or in some cases coal boiler to heat air or water.

My guess is that even in pessimistic models in 2070 that's all electrical and the electricity is generated from sources which do not involve fire. PV, wind, hydro, even the geothermal and nuclear plants don't actually make fire to heat steam, they're just hot.

Perhaps overuse of medication. No real proof it works, severe side effects, "misterious" rise in cancer and other dissieases, state sanctioned censorship, billion dolar corruption scandals...

Medication for normal emotions

No, it's going to be about either the roll back of nuclear reactors or various social movements.

Covid vaccines to young and healthy individuals

> Groovy

PHP / Wordpress I think.

Hug of death

Works now!

I get what you're saying. And seeing your detractors here, I can't argue with the data.

I wonder though if we didn't trade the low-hanging fruit of lung cancer for the kinds of things that kill us now. I won't argue that we didn't add a decade to our average lifespan, but it does seem our lives have become more sedentary than they were. (Mine certainly has—but then I'm also forty-plus years older, ha ha.)

I wonder how 70's man and 70's woman fared who didn't smoke or live with a smoker—if you compared just that group with modern man and woman.

What seems to me is the ads seem less staged and processed than current ones. They're wilder and not as softened as every media are now.

As for people pointing at lifespans for the healthy part, how much of the change is systemic use of anticoagulants? And of course less tobacco, but I wouldn't rush to say people are in much better shape now.

If you wear your nostalgia glasses it sure does "seem" more healthy. Life expectancy at birth in the 70s was 70.8. Now it's 79.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/data-finder.htm?&subject=Life%2...

“Seemed” is the key word here.

It wasn't. Lifespans were almost a decade shorter.

Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of lung cancer in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics

https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87

[dead]

Have you tried doing something similarly meditative instead?

Nope!

It's up now!