Here’s a bit of a personal list:
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Undeniably the food scene in the US has changed for the better. Sometimes almost to an overcorrection (protein-slop and all). It’s great that so many different cuisines are easy to name and find even in more traditional rural parts of the country. Organic food isn’t seen as a weird hippie thing but an investment you make for your health.
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A lot less smoking in the world. I say this as early gen Z but I never grew up in a time when smoking was seen as cool when I was a teenager. My uncle even quit and that was good to see.
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It may not seem like it sometimes, but the one consolation prize of YouTube is I can theoretically be a content creator and never need to worry about the bottleneck that is getting chosen out of millions of people in Hollywood. I could theoretically just stay in the midwest and learn to livestream or make an anime discussion channel and produce content without needing a massive studio or working in Hollywood. Of course, it’s still almost impossible to get paid for it, but still.
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More and more people are aware of cars not being the best way to get around which has sparked interest in walkable cities. Problem is, there’s too much demand and too little supply but seeing car culture be questioned is a great first start.
Music is so much fucking better nowadays, holy shit. It’s a lot easier to find random artists from all over the world. You aren’t limited to whatever is on the radio or having to spend hours combing through record stores to find something new.
The quality of every genre (except maybe country because it’s filled with reactionaries) has improved because of this. Mainstream artists are able to hear things they wouldn’t have otherwise and incorporate that into their music.
Music was so good back in the day, and it’s somehow even better now.
The ability to discover the entire last mile of indie bands globally is already pretty rocking, but they also all have access to better equipment/software/studios than was historically the norm
Yeah it’s crazy what you can do with a laptop and a microphone these days. Depending on what you’re doing you don’t even need the microphone.
Yeah, definitely. I always say it all started with Napster.
Now that I think about it, Metallica really had a whole new market to themselves if they’d just been willing to give up a fraction of their money.