People Are Sharing The Dangerous, Destructive, And Problematic Things They Hope Will Go Extinct In 25 Years, And It's Starting Some Major Debates

Imagine explaining some of our everyday habits to someone living 50 years from today. I have a feeling they would say something like, "How was ever acceptable?" when hearing about how our society operated.

So when user CarGreat6486 on Reddit asked, "What is completely normal in society today, but will probably look absurd or cruel 50 years from now?" I was fascinated to see what people had to say:

1. "The opposition to allowing people to pass peacefully, with dignity, on their own terms when their death or severe decline in quality of life is reasonably foreseeable and medically unavoidable. Trying to force someone to suffer through immense pain or a severe decline for the remainder of their life because you're uncomfortable with your own mortality is absolutely awful."

—Siendra

2. "Treatment of mental disorders and accessibility, along with accommodations for people with them. The way we treat mental disorders is on par with lobotomies, just in a different direction on the skill tree. None of the treatments are actually effective, because they all presume that you have a stable job and financial situation, and also that you can afford to deal with the inevitable consequences of the one episode you manage not to suppress."

—Jmackles

3. "For Americans, not having free daycare. It's nearly impossible to have two adults working full-time and have kids. If you make good money, sure, but for the average person, the cost is absurd. We pay $16,000 a year, and that's pretty average for one child in my area, in our low-cost-of-living city. Earlier generations either had a stay-at-home parent or an active and supportive community of helpers, like grandparents and neighbors, to lean on. As more people choose to have fewer kids because they can't make it work, it will become apparent that free childcare needs to be made available."

—Kippenkat

4. "Plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures come to mind first. Putting needles in our faces; heavy, glued-on lashes; lasers; injecting products; and major, full-body surgeries with a risk of death, all done voluntarily for aesthetics. Beauty standards change, and who knows? Maybe in 50 years, there will be more advances in this realm."

—talijj

5. "Microplastics. We know they're terrible, but we aren't doing anything about it. Leaded fuel and lead paint had their day. Today is microplastics' time to shine."

—Extreme-Island-5041

6. "Posting a child's entire life online before they're old enough to understand what privacy is. Imagine going to a job interview and knowing your future boss can find videos of your toddler's meltdowns because your parents needed content."

—hk_ipo

7. "Transphobia. It’s just not gonna last. So much of it is deeply illogical and is artificially fueled by the rich needing a scapegoat. Eventually, people are going to stop buying into the manufactured anger and realize how dumb their hate is."

—Aspirationally_Lazy

8. "God willing, privatized health insurance. Our current system is completely untenable."

—Conscious_Raisin_436

"It’s privatized today, which is the problem. We need a public solution. The CEO of my health insurance company made over $20 million last year. Cut out all that fat."

—forsythia_rising

9. "iPad parenting will be looked back on as if we were giving children actual drugs, in my opinion. I genuinely think it will be remembered as equally idiotic as someone giving their kid whiskey to shut them up during dinner."

—scarytrafficcone

10. "Animal ownership without proper schooling, permits, and oversight. Some of y'all don't deserve animals, from cats to birds. It's disgusting how poorly you care for your pets."

—Prestigious-Dark4152

11. "Probably car accidents. Self-driving cars will likely advance to a point where car accidents won't happen anymore. (For example, some cars these days are already equipped with autonomous self-braking.) People will be shocked to learn about the number of annual deaths that were routine when individuals relied on their skill, judgment, and temperament alone to drive their own cars. More specifically, they will learn about how car accidents were the leading cause of traumatic spinal cord injuries and how normalized it was for victims, some of whom were still in their teens or 20s, to be paralyzed and use a wheelchair for the rest of their lives because of such accidents."

—Fedditline9

12. "Cutting down forests for short-term profits: more space for data centers, more palm oil, more profit, calling wood renewable energy, burning wood for electricity, and more profits, just because they can do it."

—Familiar_Face_5375

13. "If I had my way, prison (except for offenders who are a danger to society)."

—redical

"This is actually a very common-sense idea. If someone isn’t dangerous, they shouldn't be locked up. There's too much profit in prisons, though."

—The-Wanderer87

14. "50 years is a very short time. Give it a couple hundred years, and capitalism will be looked on as some weird, brutal system, in the same way that we look at the feudal system now."

—Dry_Yogurt2458 

15. "When cloned meat is cheap and safe, and ethically farmed meat is still available but a luxury item, I think current meat farming and processing practices will be considered horrifying."

—ofBlufftonTown

16. "The way we demonize people with paraphilias, personality disorders, or other less wholesome mental conditions instead of giving them help."

—FURRYL0L1Y401TR4PDSM

17. "Making kids take endless exams and putting them under stress from a very young age. I would guess that, in the era of AI, education will look completely different 50 years from now."

—secretside80

18. "Chemo sucks. You poison yourself to kill the cancer, but you’re still poisoning yourself. The hope is that newer, targeted treatments will make it obsolete."

—inspectoroverthemine

19. "Hopefully, judging people for how they choose to identify or live their lives, who they date or anything else they do, really. Fingers crossed religion will die, too, as that seems to cause a lot of problems."

—JCDU

20. "Having kids despite having been diagnosed with genetic conditions that can negatively affect a child's quality of life significantly."

—SpecialistSeaweed90

21. "I’ve heard from others that the kind of surgeries we do now, where we open up the whole body, will be seen as awful in the future."

—LopsidedTaste9106

22. "The failure to regulate the internet properly, and allowing big tech to mine us for all our data while giving us very little in return."

—PantsLio

23. "Successful businesses making employees work for tips because they're too damn cheap to pay a living wage."

—nurdmann

24. And lastly: "Creating a 15-character password with uppercase and lowercase letters and special characters that can’t resemble a word or match my last five passwords."

—alaskacontribution

What's a normal thing in today's society that you think will seem unhinged to do 50 years from now? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form!

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.