'Leaving your kids at home for the night': Things that were normal 20 years ago, but unacceptable today

Ally Perry • Writer and Editor

Mar 31, 2024 6:00 PM EDT

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the mid-aughts are now history—they're twenty years old, to be exact. No matter how many of us experience it, I don't think us human beings will get used to the passage of time that only seems to get faster as we get older.

That being said, more often than not it is best to leave the past in the past. I sure as heck don't want to retain all of the ideas and influences I picked up as a kid in the 2000s, and neither does anyone else I know who is my age.

For all it can occasionally seem like society is reaching new lows these days, we have to remember that we have progressed in some ways. This was the subject of a recent AskReddit thread that asked about everything unacceptable in 2024, but not twenty years ago. Some of these are real throwbacks.