What has changed in daily life and the large culture in the 32 years since I finished my education (law school in my case), and joined the "adult world"?
* Checks as a payment system have become dramatically less common. I probably write less than half a dozen checks a year, and I doubt that my children write even that many. People are increasingly paid for their work with direct deposits rather than with checks. We pay most of our bills via auto payments, or phone authorized payments, or payments authorized online via a website, or with credit or debit cards presented in person. Increasingly, other payments to households, like investment distributions and mutual insurance company dividends are made that way too. Casual money exchanges between friends and family and to people like lawn mowers providing household services are increasingly done with person to person through apps like Zelle, rather than with cash or checks. I spent a semester class in law school mostly learning about how checks worked at the nuts and bolts level and most of that knowledge is now obsolete.
* Cash was on a strong trend towards a decline, but the state legalized marijuana industry that was shut out of the federally regulated banking industry, prevented it from declining as much as it would have otherwise, both due to people needing cash to buy it, and people being paid in cash wanting to spend it. Widespread undocumented immigration has also probably helped cash, as has an increasing recognition that non-cash transfers siphon money off to big business financial companies.
A few countries have basically gone cashless.
* Tolls on toll roads are paid via a transponder and an account, or with license plate recognition and billing that can be paid with a credit or debit card online, instead of transferring money at a toll booth. Parking is increasingly paid for with credit or debit accounts, or via an online app as well.
* Lots of goods that used to be purchased in brick and mortar stores are now ordered online and delivered, creating a surge of delivery jobs, and making it tough for the brick and mortar retail sector. Even things that used to be delivered, like take out food, is now often ordered via an app or a website instead of by phone interacting with a person.
* Cheap international shipping and online retailing have dovetailed to drive "fast fashion" where ultra-cheap clothing can be purchased directly from abroad without the intervention of a U.S. based importing brick and mortar retailer middleman. Fast fashion has also boosted thrifting, where people can buy lightly used second hand clothing that was donated or sold for a pittance compared to retail.
* The Trump tariffs mucked this up a little, but the reality is that domestic clothing manufacturing had almost completely vanished well before the 1990s, as did domestic manufacturing of electronic retail goods and lots of other things (steel, for example). Removing the middle man is still cost effective, even with tariffs that are also paid by brick and mortar importing retailers.
* Communications with businesses that involve dealing with an actual person, like customer service and making delivery orders, are now frequently done in apps or websites with online chatbots (my son is employed doing the software engineering for them), or with offshore call centers (or just offshore call takers who work from their cell phones at home). When I was staying in a hotel on the Las Vegas strip a few years ago, even calls about housekeeping and room service that would historically have been handled by people at the front desk were handled by an offshore call center in the Philippines.
* Many states, including Colorado where I live, and Washington State, where my sister-in-law's family live, have largely replaced in person voting with mail-in ballots. And despite the name, increasingly, the mail-in ballots are delivered to 24/7 drop boxes run by local clerk's offices, that are available once the mail-in ballots are distributed to voters by mail. This has been especially true this year as President Trump has threatened to use the USPS to interfere with mail-in ballot delivery. One of the Baltic nations, Latvia maybe, has transitioned entirely to online voting.
* Snail mail is waning, in favor of email, text messaging, and other online messaging apps. We still get a few bills by mail - our water and sewer and trash bills, our gas and electric bill, some of our insurance bills, property tax statements, bills from our dentist and health care providers, a rarely used credit card statement, and our photo radar tickets. But increasingly our bank statements, our credit card bills, our phone bill, and our investment account statements come online and more are sure to follow.
At work, the vast volume of copies of court filings delivered to other parties in a lawsuit, which it took a couple of full time employees in an eleven lawyer law firm to send out every day, and then sort and distribute when they were received, are now filed and delivered via e-filing (apart from a tiny trickle of audio and video file exhibits that are delivered on USB drives to the court and send to other parties via a cloud based data transfer app). This has also meant that court deadlines to file things can now be met at minutes to midnight and not by 4:00 p.m. or so, in time to copy and mail them, and to hand deliver them to the courthouse clerk.
We still get junk mail advertising goods and services of all kinds and providing coupons, but now, at least half of the advertising communications that I receive are via email, or more annoyingly and often illegally, via text message and robocall.
The United States Postal Service is steadily losing parcel delivery market share to third-party parcel delivery services like UPS, DHL and Insta-cart, to in house private parcel delivery (mostly from Amazon, but also from grocery store delivery services).
Younger people don't even know how to properly address a letter or what to do with stamps. Denmark discontinued its letter delivery service this year.
Certain legal notices and tax returns are still sent via certified mails (although tax returns are now overwhelmingly e-filed, and refunds are increasingly direct deposited).
The demise of snail mail has been hastened by slower delivery times and lower reliability as volumes fall, despite surging prices for stamps. Few newer homes even have home mail delivery, replacing it with collective mail receiving boxes for an apartment complex or subdivision consolidated in one place.
The demise of the U.S.P.S. has also put hundreds of thousands of postal workers, predominantly men, and predominantly veterans, with well-paying, lower skilled, union jobs and good benefits, out of work, retiring early, and dried up those job opportunities for newly discharged veterans and less skilled workers.
* Faxes are virtually obsolete and are used mostly for tax information and medical information because fax transmissions are more secure than email and texts from third-party interception.
* Steaming services have displaced almost all of the video rental business, a huge share of broadcast and cable TV, and a significant share of movie theater attendance. They've even made a big dent in broadcast radio (although the switch from analog to digital broadcast radio and TV was virtually invisible from a consumer prospective). Entertainment and news content is increasingly asynchronous, so you don't have to tune in exactly at the moment it is made available, as you used to have to with broadcast radio and TV and cable TV.
* Streaming has made global popular culture much more accessible.
* The advent of widespread videoconferencing has been huge. This together with cloud based computing, and the extra push that the COVID pandemic created, has made remote working (at least part of the time in a "hybrid" position) has swept the world of office workers. I am allowed to work remotely two days a week, although, in reality I am an old timer who only does so once couple of weeks for a specific reasons like dog sitting my daughter's dog while she is away or being at home to receive someone doing home maintenance or because I expected the weather on my commute to be bad. Lots of my meetings with opposing counsel in lawsuits, witnesses, clients, and co-workers are done remotely via videoconference. My daughter works remotely four days a week. My son-in-law works remotely one day a week.
Depositions and ordinary non-evidentiary court hearings are now routinely conducted by videoconferencing. Court hearings are mostly live streamed for the general public and interested parties to watch, vastly reducing the amount of travel to depositions and short hearings that lawyers have to do. During COVID, even some U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments were conducted via videoconference.
And, it isn't just work - events like birthdays are often celebrated with a family videoconference. My daughter's college graduation, during the COVID lockdown, was held remotely. At the last funeral I attended, of the mother of a family friend, half of the guests and speakers participated remotely and half were there in person. Many churches offer the chance to attend Sunday services online. Civic and political groups sometimes have online meetings or hybrid meetings where some people involved participate online and some are in person.
* Many schools have replaced snow days with remote days. Some students, especially at the high school and college level, attend some or all of their classes remotely. Many school districts, especially in rural areas, have switched to four day a week schedules.
* Videoconferencing and online retailing has also made a big impact on the real estate market. Demand for office space is cratering everywhere. Retail space is in a slump. But residential real estate has gotten a boost in demand (until a recent rapid surge in interest rates that have made it unaffordable for buyers who need mortgages to do so, before home sellers have responded by lowering their prices) with many office workers feeling the need for more space to use as a home office. In between, flexible co-working spaces for hybrid workers who don't want to work in their homes has emerged as a small but important office space sector.
* Electric cars aren't predominant, but they are now common. Government tax credits helped this along at first, and high gas prices and expanding charger networks and more rapid battery charging have also helped. A car charger is now expected in newly built home garages. So far, however, gas stations haven't been too hard hit and many have installed charging stations of their own. Electric cars are slowly, but surely, however, reducing demand for gasoline and diesel (and for the services of car mechanics because they require far less maintenance).
* Lots of services that used to be provided by people are now handled heavily by kiosks. Full service gas stations barely exist, and the gas pump is basically robotic. Grocery stores have kiosks that handle basic DMV functions. Cash withdrawals and a fair amount of business cash deposits are done at ATM machines. Postage can be purchased at kiosks. Before they vanished almost entirely, video rentals could be done at kiosks. Tickets at in person movie theaters and museums that aren't purchased online are often sold at kiosks. Fast food restaurants now take orders for dining in mostly at kiosks. Grocery stores handle a big share of their sales through self-check outs. At airports, luggage is checked and physical boarding passes (where they aren't just downloaded to a smart phone) are handled at kiosks. Kiosks issue tickets and receive payments to let you out at parking garages. Large medical facilities have you check in via kiosks. Some rental car companies use kiosks heavily.
Airports and places like the Las Vegas strip, are testing pilot projects in having automated vending machines deliver hot food, and not just cold or room temperature pre-packaged snacks.
* The kiosks, and chatbots, and offshored customer service lines, and electronic payment and messaging systems, and online retailing, are wiping out vast numbers of low and medium skilled jobs, in a way similar to the way that offshored manufacturing eliminated low and medium skilled manufacturing jobs, outside the delivery sector.
* We are starting to see drone delivery systems and self-driving Waymo taxis cut the need for jobs that used to require humans to deliver things and people. It will take time, but self-driving long haul trucks may slash the need for hundreds of thousands of truckers, leaving that to the last mile delivery drivers.
* Very short distance driver's jobs (rickshaws and big city style cabs and now illegal cab ride-sharing services) are being cut into by rental scooter and e-bike services.
* Lawn mowing robots and vacuuming and mopping robots may make a little dent in lower skilled jobs doing these tasks. My cousins who are dry land farmers in Eastern Colorado have self-driving tractors that they trained to go up and down the rows of their fields tilling, sowing, and harvesting.
* Ukraine has led the world in a revolutionary way, at replacing front-line soldiers jobs with drones.
* The trend towards increased automation has not run its course. Self-driving vehicles, AI taking over low, medium, and high skill non-physical tasks, robots that don't replace human workers but increase their productivity and the skill needed for the jobs that are being eliminated, and more are continuing to make an impact and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
* More affordable solar and wind power technologies, in addition to environmental concerns disfavoring utility based coal power plants, have put coal as a fossil fuel into a death spiral, and provided a more affordable way to power an increasingly electronic world. Improved and more affordable solar panels have also decentralized the power grid.
* Improvements in heat pumps and electric hot water heating and insulation, have made a bit of a dent in demand for natural gas (offset my utility generation of electricity with natural gas as a substitute for coal) and heating oil.
* Reduced coal consumption has reduced freight rail and barge transportation demand.
* We have turned the corner on some environmental issues. Forest cover is starting to be regrown in many places where forests were cleared for farms, like New England. Amazon deforestation has slowed. Coal sourced pollution is plummeting - less air pollution, less coal waste, less strip mining, outside Wyoming. Lead and asbestos have virtually vanished from new build things and gasoline, and are steadily being removed from older houses and water pipes. We generate more GDP (inflation adjusted) per energy input than we used to. We've cut down on water wasting in the arid west and are continuing to make progress on that. The air is a lot cleaner than it was in the 1970s and even in the 1980s, apart from wildfire smoke. Chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the ozone layer were phased out worldwide and the ozone layer recovered. The aerosol dispenses they were used in are now scarce.
* The reality of climate change is now indisputable, even though many folks are resistant to taking the steps to curb it. It is driving droughts, extreme weather like more hurricanes and in different places, snowless ski resorts, wildfires, and higher temperatures that change the biodiversity of places towards those neighboring to warmer places. Glaciers are melting and disappearing entirely and sea levels are rising.
* A large share of household and business solid waste is being diverted from landfills to recycling and compositing, which makes household trash duties more complicated but has become a part of life.
* We bring out own bags to the grocery store reducing that waste flow a little.
* Organic foods have grown very significantly in market share, although they aren't dominant.
* The share of people who are non-religious has surged, especially among younger people (who are also more liberal than older people even when the older people were their age). This has been widespread but most marked among white Catholics and white mainline Protestant denominations. The white Christians who have not become non-religious are more conservative, however, often much more conservative than mainline Protestant clergy.
* Schools at all levels are seeing lower enrollments as the cohorts of children get smaller due to falling birthrates, something that is especially noticeable now that Millennials, the Baby Boom echo generation, have made there way through the system and are having fewer kids than their parents did, and a growing proportion of children who are in school are children of immigrants, are mixed race, or are otherwise non-white. As a result school districts in most places are closing school buildings that aren't full. The pressure is most stark in rural areas which have continued their relentless secular trend towards depopulating.
We are starting to see small liberal arts and religious colleges not just downsize, but start to close, as the rate at which people are going to college has stopped growing rapidly, and as the cohort of college aged people has shrunk.
* While professional football is as popular as ever, middle school and high school football programs have grown far smaller. Rural schools that have football increasingly play in leagues that use smaller teams like seven a side, since they don't have enough players to field full sized teams.
* Soccer and lacrosse have grown in popularity.
* The study of Latin, Greek, and the humanities more generally has plummeted in high schools and colleges, and social sciences that aren't perceived as useful in getting a job are down, although economics and psychology are hold on better. These disciplines are being squeezed out by business majors and to a lesser extent, STEM fields.
* Adolescents and young adults are smoking less, using hard drugs less, having sex less, getting pregnant less often, committing fewer crimes, starting to drive later, working part-time jobs while in school less often, and in general, are less independent than Gen X was, for example.
* Young people are getting married later, having kids later, not getting married at all more often, having kids at all less often, who are marrying tend to be closer in age than they used to be. Interracial marriages are more common (and are especially common for Asian American and Hispanic young women). People are marrying people of the same socio-economic background more often, and are much less likely to marry someone of a different political party. Marriage rates are rising and divorce rates are falling for college educated couples, while marriage rates are falling and divorce rates are rising for non-college educated couples. Weddings are trending smaller in the U.S.
* Housing in economically healthy urban centers, health care, child care costs, and higher education have all gotten much less affordable. Household goods have gotten cheaper. Young adults have much less of an ability to afford higher education without big debt loads, to own homes, and to have kids than the Boomers did, and even than Gen X did.
* There are fewer blue laws. In Colorado, banks and car dealerships are pretty much the only businesses uniformly closed on Sundays (although online options and ATMs have made this less consequential in banking). Most retail businesses are open on Sundays now, including liquor stores, and wine and beer can now be purchased in grocery stores in Colorado.
* NIMBY is being pushed back by the YIMBY movement in ongoing political battles over land use, but everyone hates the sudden surge of data centers which are sucking up a huge share of business construction and investment resources, to great ready for an AI future that the general public is ambivalent about.
* Duplexes and townhouses are gaining market share in new construction relative to condos and single family homes. Apartment buildings are being made much more often than architecturally identical condos. Single family homes are being held as rental units more often and are even being built in the first place for that purpose.
* People are trying to make more productive use of roofs in buildings, as decks, as solar panels sites, as gardens.
* Acceptance of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals has risen profoundly in the last three decades, and acceptance of transgender people has also surged but is in flux and has been made into a political football by MAGA Republicans who want to scapegoat them for political gain.
* Election fraud is become a predominantly conservative Republican thing because they are being told, falsely, that everyone and especially immigrants are doing it.
* A global anti-immigrant movement and anti-globalist movement has emerged, mostly as an extension of past racist movements (which are also resurgent). Neo-Nazi and far right movements are resurgent in response to the stagnation of working class, native born, whites with little education, who the economy doesn't need anymore.
* The anti-vax movement has emerged.
* Medical advances have continued. Cancer death rates are falling as one improvement or prevention after another is devised. More things can be vaccinated against. Opioid overdoses can be counteracted. A seriously effective class of weight loss drugs is being developed. Near sightedness can be cured with laser surgery. Gene therapy can cure certain conditions. Surgeries are increasingly less invasive and more effective. More conditions have effective treatments. Access to healthcare is a huge problem in the U.S. but the value that healthcare can add has steadily grown. More medical advances are around the corner.
* Diet and exercise trends have come and gone and there is a declining consensus on these things, even though there is a growing consensus that appropriate exercise and a good diet are important.
* Marijuana legalization has gone mainstream and has more or less fully run its course in many states.
* Abortion rights have recently been dramatically curtailed in red states, although this extreme shift is losing steam and being reversed in some cases as ill-effects of this policy are becoming evident, and as traveling to states where abortion is legal and the use of abortion pills and Plan B contraception (which is not abortion but eliminates the need for it) has limited the effectiveness of these restrictions.
* Fashion has gotten more casual. Litigators only wear suits to hearings and depositions now, rather than to work every day. Many business people, and transactional lawyers, and politicians and top government officials often wear jackets without ties. Business casual has to a great extent replaced the suit among mid-level office workers. People don't dress up to shop as much. Trench coats are rare.
* For reasons not easy to determine, exterior and interior design for buildings has gotten more corporate and more gray and beige and black and white and metallic, with color drained away, and whimsy and originality suppressed. Even cars and trucks are increasingly white, black, and gray in lieu of colors.
* Everyone has high quality audio-video recording equipment and the ability to share it with the world on the Internet in their pocket. Door bells routinely have cameras. Surveillance cams that can be monitored in real time and tracking devices are ubiquitous. Ankle monitors for people on probation and parole are common place.
* Apps have replaced maps and stand alone GPS navigation systems.
* Cars often have keyless entry and starting by key fob.
* Many businesses, almost all hotels, and some apartments have electronic swiping or codes in lieu of mechanical keys.
* Office work isn't paperless, but it does use far less paper and most information storage is electronic rather than on paper, and increasingly the information storage is in the cloud rather than local.
* Software is increasingly an ever updated subscription rather than a piece of digital consumer property that you own.
* Incandescent light bulbs of all kinds have been almost completely replaced by LEDs (light emitting diodes), which generate less heat, last vastly longer, and use far less electricity for the same amount of light. They are as rare now as natural gas lighting systems were before LED lighting became widespread.
* Manned space exploration mostly ceased for a generation and is only recently showing signs to restarting at a meaningful level.