If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain about life today?

I'm just going to steal the response I read years ago.

"I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers."

And porn! So much porn!

Things they considered morally fine (smoking, dropping litter, 40 year olds dating 16 year olds) is morally reprehensible, while things they thought were morally wrong or even outlawed are totally acceptable (homosexually, porn, divorce).

You just explained a large selection of boomers.
- Yeah, a lot of them were born in the 1950s.

Why the Nazis are back

This is the 50s, I think it'd be pretty easy to draw a line from casual racism to white supremacists. A key difference this time is that it's not just Germans led by one insane man, it's instead a bunch of redneck prices and conspiracy theorists.
- Before the US got involved in WWII, there was a giant Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden...

That shitty actor from Bedtime for Bonzo becomes president.

"Ronald Reagan, the actor?!"
- "Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis?"
- And he made life worse for nearly everyone.

Why is every comment just about the US? Skin color, school shooter drills, actor president, support for Russians by US politicians...

Lemmy try something more international:

France and Germany have founded the European Union.

First Japan, and now China (and Taiwan) and Korea are the technological superpowers.

Car industry in the UK basically doesn't exist anymore.

Cuba is still communist af and yet looks like a chill place.

Czechoslovakia has split. (Funny how even 30 years after the fact some people don't believe it, so I can imagine it being inconceivable before.)

There are 8 billon people.

We still don't have nuclear-powered flying cars.

We walk around with a little rectangle in our pocket that gives us access to the sum total of human knowledge, but we mostly use it for looking at funny captioned pictures, the same pictures over and over just with different captions.

It's called a phone but no one ever uses it as one.

Also, the "video telephone" that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can't be bothered to dress up for a phone call.
- I also thought no one used facetime until I worked retail recently... The amount of people I saw come in on a facetime calls where they both just had their cameras pointed at the ceiling was bizarre and boggling.

Why the Nazis are back, and in America of all places

Depends a lot on the color of their skin.

The remote control T_T

I'm going to go on a different angle on this one and say that we are much tougher on sexual harassment. I feel like a lot of people from the 1950s who have grown up on pulp sci-fi like Flash Gordon could accept a lot of modern technology and the internet as basically just magic. To be fair is how a lot of modern people also accept it. But I don't think they would be able to process the move towards egalitarianism that we have taken.

That is not to say that modern society is egalitarian only that we have made good strides in achieving that aim.

Edit: Turns out Gordon is from the '70s, but other pulp sci-fi exist so my statement stands.

How easily we can know anything, yet how diligently we fail to learn anything.

Nothing as sobering as showing a techno-optimist what the future really looks like

#3 Why we still haven't got colonies on the moon

#2 Climate change

#1 That fascism is back

Most difficult imho would be to explain why we haven't advanced any further. If the person is 50 in 1950 he started with horse carriages and saw development to intercontinental bombers, rockets etc. The landing on moon would astonish him, advances in medical sciences and computing too but he probably would ask: "And what are you using that neat little gadgets for?"

That we've been to the moon and back, and that they can casually toss into their pockets a device with enough "thinking" power to do the necessary math for the task and then some.

And that we still can't make nylon stockings that don't "run," but that nobody cares because we don't wear them anymore.

That, and transgender is normal.

toss into their pockets a device with enough "thinking" power to do the necessary math for the task and then some.

"And then some" is a bit of an under statement. An iPhone 14 is literally millions of times faster than the Apollo Guidance Computer.

Ronald Reagan was President for 8 years.

That's heavy doc
Not to mention the Bush imbeciles.

Fediverse

This one is hard to explain to people from the 2020s

School shooter drills

"Yes, they are allowed to be on the same bus as us. No, we don't call them that anymore"

"Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car"
And we had a pretty great black president.

If your tire pressure is low, you have to pay money….for air.

It was the 50s they'd have been used to car adjustments. This was THE AGE for small- adjustment businesses

We still work 8 hours/day!

But we also won the cold war
- “”””””””“””””Won””””””””””””””

The price of housing

Also nearly everything else. Computers would be an obvious exception, a couple years ago I paid USD$40 for a smartwatch with specs exceeding a $2000 computer from around year 2000, and millions of times more powerful than computers from the 50s which cost millions of dollars at the time.