Complex Numbers

Plus C'est la Même Chose

More fun with "JAFBG"  [XGC]...

We look back on some historical practices with disbelief. What current practice do you think will be ridiculed in the future?

All of them.

Especially fashion.

You know all those fashion trends that we look back on and go, "What in the hell were they thinking?" Almost every one of them, at one time, was considered the pinnacle of self-decoration. Powdered wigs. Low-rise jeans. Feathered-back hair. Polyester disco suits. All of these things were the Hot New Thing when they came out, and all of these things are currently the butt of jokes (in the case of low-rise jeans, I mean that literally).

Each of them certainly had their haters at the time (or as I like to call them, "sensible people"), but they wouldn't have been trendy if the followers hadn't outnumbered the detractors.

It's not just clothing, though. I've had the misfortune of seeing those hardware store ads masquerading as reality TV, you know, the "buy a shit house and fix it up" genre. Some have legitimate aging problems, but others? "Ha ha, look at this green shag carpet; how blind were they in the 70s?" What they forget is a) At one point, green shag carpet was the In Thing, and b) In 40 years, that open-plan kitchen/dining/living/sitting/family/breakfast/study room with the granite countertops and burnt orange backsplash is going to seem ugly and stupid.

Those, though, are just the matters of taste.

100 years ago, the average life expectancy of someone in the US was around 50-55 years. (Source.)   Now, it's pushing 80. We look back on the medical practices of the past -- leeches, trepanning, whatever -- with horror and disgust. Our current medical practices seem bright and shiny now (hell, some of them seem like sorcery to me), but give it another 100 years and people be like "You mean they treated cancer with a combination of nasty pharmaceutical chemicals with horrible side effects?"

Obviously, what we consider right and wrong changes over time, as well. We're pulling slave-owner statues off of pedestals now. In a few decades at most, we of today will be cancelled by our robot overlords for having the audacity to own computers.

But hopefully -- assuming we make it that far, which is an assumption I'm not willing to grant -- the biggest thing people in the future will look back on with shock and anger will be: "They... burned... fossil fuels?"

But yeah. History backs me up on this: whatever the practices of a certain time period are, they will be mocked by those of a later time period (though to be fair, there might be a time of nostalgic references somewhere in the middle). Hell, even the "futuristic" architecture styles of the 50s and 60s don't say "future" anymore, but "past." The generation war now, marketed to be millennials versus boomers, is just the same shit all over again - back when the boomers were young, there was a "generation gap" and the then-younger generation (boomers) was going to Save the World. And when today's millennials and/or Zeds reach retirement age -- assuming they're still around and are able to retire, which, again, I'm not sanguine about -- they'll be pitted against whatever they'll call the younger generation, too.

I guess some things never change, after all.