It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new material and… etc. All of these gradually drop the cost, drop the price, improve the quality at the same price, remove irritations or limits not explicitly noticed, or so on.
It all adds up.
So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would include many hassles I’ve never known at all).
Progress is usually debated in terms of the big things like lifting the Third World out of poverty, eliminating child mortality1, or science & tech: discovering gravitational waves, creating world champion AIs, turning AIDS into a treatable rather than terminal disease, conquering hepatitis C, or curing deadly cancers with genetically-engineered T-cells. But as cool as those big things are, and matters of life-and-death for many, such achievements tend to be remote from ordinary people, and not your everyday sort of thing (or so one hopes). Small stuff matters too. What about the little things in an ordinary life?
The seen and the unseen. When I think back, so many hassles have simply disappeared from my life, and nice new things appeared. I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpeners, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space is now dedicated to cats. Ordinary life had a lot of hassles too, I remembered once I started thinking about it. (“The past is a third world country”, but America in the 1990s could also have used some improvement.)
These things rarely come up because so many of them are about removing irritations or creating new possibilities—dogs that do not bark, and ‘the seen and the unseen’—and how quickly we forget that the status quo was not always so. The hardest thing to see can be that which you no longer see. I thought it would be interesting to try to remember the forgotten. Limiting myself to my earliest relatively clear memories of everyday life in the mid-1990s, I still wound up making a decent-sized list of improvements to my ordinary life.
The 1980s Desktop
Re: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s | Post by Gwern
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 11:07 am
by funkervogt
The variety of food available in the U.S. has grown since the 1990s, largely due to the increased number of immigrants. I don't remember seeing things like Peruvian rotisserie chicken, Guatemalan fried chicken, or Indian-Italian fusion restaurants back then.
Re: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s | Post by Gwern
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 11:26 am
by Time_Traveller
funkervogt wrote: ↑Sun Jul 03, 2022 11:07 am
The variety of food available in the U.S. has grown since the 1990s, largely due to the increased number of immigrants. I don't remember seeing things like Peruvian rotisserie chicken, Guatemalan fried chicken, or Indian-Italian fusion restaurants back then.
That last one sounds odd Indian-Italian fusion restaurant. Kind off abit like a Indonesian-Chinese restaurant that's just opened in my city.
Re: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s | Post by Gwern
funkervogt wrote: ↑Sun Jul 03, 2022 11:07 am
The variety of food available in the U.S. has grown since the 1990s, largely due to the increased number of immigrants. I don't remember seeing things like Peruvian rotisserie chicken, Guatemalan fried chicken, or Indian-Italian fusion restaurants back then.
That last one sounds odd Indian-Italian fusion restaurant. Kind off abit like a Indonesian-Chinese restaurant that's just opened in my city.
Eat and Indian pizza or Indian calzone if you can.
If you live in South Africa, have you ever tried indigenous San cuisine?
Re: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s | Post by Gwern
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 12:00 pm
by funkervogt
Here's something Gwern didn't write about: flatscreen computer monitors and TVs. In the 1990s, they were voluminous, heavy objects that were often comparable to pieces of furniture. Now, a huge TV can be hung on a wall like a (admittedly heavy) painting.
I can still remember the pain of moving my prized CRT computer monitor in and out of my dorm rooms during my college years.
Re: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s | Post by Gwern
funkervogt wrote: ↑Sun Jul 03, 2022 11:07 am
The variety of food available in the U.S. has grown since the 1990s, largely due to the increased number of immigrants. I don't remember seeing things like Peruvian rotisserie chicken, Guatemalan fried chicken, or Indian-Italian fusion restaurants back then.
That last one sounds odd Indian-Italian fusion restaurant. Kind off abit like a Indonesian-Chinese restaurant that's just opened in my city.
Eat and Indian pizza or Indian calzone if you can.
If you live in South Africa, have you ever tried indigenous San cuisine?
Unfortunately, i don't live in South Africa. I live in the UK so i have never tried that.
Re: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s | Post by Gwern
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 5:57 pm
by Nero
Something that has certainly changed since 1990's is the appearance of most vehicles on the road
Most everything would be squared or boxlike in appearance modern traffic:
