Society is certainly changing, and so is the list of things that are and aren’t socially acceptable.
More and more these days many of us question how politically correct society has come and some express concerns about the “falling standards” of our society.
Let’s face it, people are more stressed these days.
The news cycle is 24/7, we’re hooked on our technology, everyone is so busy!
But aside from that, just what has changed?
Let’s take a look back at what has changed when it comes to etiquette and socially acceptable behaviour and practices.
If you’re a child of the 50s and 60s, you’ll remember a time when you played outside unsupervised, when people smoked in restaurants, when women rarely wore pants and tattoos and piercings won’t commonplace.
It was a time when swearing wasn’t considered okay, especially on TV and when most people waited until they were married to shack up and have kids.
The Metro in the UK compiled a list of things last year that were socially acceptable today but wouldn’t have been considered socially acceptable in the 1960s.
The list included smoking being banned (remember, people still smoked on some airlines right up until the 90s), people moving in together and having babies before marriage, people openly admitting to masturbating and shaving their pubic hair, kids hardly playing outside (let’s face it, how many neighbourhoods do you see kids out on the streets playing together) and people having less privacy.
The often we talk about most often here on SAS is the children playing on the street. We all did it as kids, our parents let us roam the neighbourhood, ride our bikes around town with friends and return home when the street lights went out.
A survey, reported in The Telegraph found, children nowadays spent an average of less than half an hour spending time outside, while 80% of parents admitted to never taking their kids fishing or star gazing.
But look at your adult children and grandchildren now.
They don’t have it that way. In most circles it’s not considered socially acceptable to let your children leave the house unsupervised – and it’s certainly not considered socially acceptable to not know where your kids are!
While that’s great from a child protection era, many in our generation think what is socially acceptable today is vastly different to the good old days.
The Telegraph wrote a story a few years ago about the things our generation never thought would become socially acceptable.
Aside from the smoking ban, they also considered things such as the death of the telephone box.
How many of us predicted we’d one day never need to pop down to the telephone box to make a call?
Who would have thought one day we’d be carrying a phone with us everyone and making calls whenever we felt like it?
Remember when an explicit scene on TV was the parents on the Brady Bunch climbing under the sheets in the same bed together?
Isn’t it different nowadays?!
A survey in 2014 found of 10 episodes of TV found F-word was used 170 times while the word hell, damn or God were used 308 times in 37 episodes.
How about the things from the good old days we wished we still had today?
Remember when the attendee at the fuel station would fuel up your car and wash your windows for you? How about the milkman coming to fill the milk bottles in the morning? It seems they just don’t have service like that anymore.
The good old days were a time when we didn’t use hand sanitiser and still survived, when there were no recycling bins, when the car keys were always left in the car or in the ignition because you didn’t have to worry about someone stealing your stuff, and when kids only got toys on Christmas, birthdays and special occasions.
Today, sadly there’s so much talk about PC. About the things you can and can’t say.
Granted back in the good old days there were just some things you never spoke about. But have we lost our ability to laugh at ourselves and others in a harmless way?
Perhaps that one comes back to the views of each generation.
Sadly, things do change as time goes by. By wouldn’t it be nice to have some of the good old days back?