The Future They Promised Never Happened

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]What's up, guys? And welcome back to my channel. And if you're new here, then welcome to our little corner of the internet. Today, we're going to be watching a video titled The 1950s Ruined Everything.

[00:00:10]What do you mean? What does this mean?

[00:00:12]Let's see what this video is about. The 1950s ruined everything. And they did it because of optimism. Today, we have so many problems that revolve around trash, fast fashion.

[00:00:25]>> Because of optimism. I feel like optimism is what's needed right now.

[00:00:31]>> Lowquality and throwaway culture. And while the roots of those problems go far back, there was something in the mid 20th century that anchored us to these issues. Originally, this was a video that I planned years ago on how sewing was ruined in that era. But as I've spent time researching everything from the history of hobbies to futurism to mortgages, I discovered there's a mindset that permeates nearly everything around this time and set us on a doomed path. Well, doomed in the sense that we've got a lot of problems to fix that have been ignored for decades at this point, but they are fixable. It just takes knowing why all of this happened before we can get there. This all started to make sense to me when I was researching hobbies. In the 1930s, we set down a 40hour work week almost immediately after creating a 44-hour one. Between technology and changes in the workplace, people Oh my god, look at it. Looks so cool. I just love the like style that they had to like draw and and everything.

[00:01:44]>> We're declaring that in the future we'd work only a few hours a week, which sounds amazing, but actually caused a panic. What will people do with all of that time? Won't they be bored? So, they went about finding a way to fix it before it became a problem. teach children to have good, healthy hobbies and they'll never be bored as adults.

[00:02:10]But what happens when those hours of time never materialize? I began to notice this pattern everywhere in my research. Plastic.

[00:02:20]>> So, so boredom is the reason that we have materialism today.

[00:02:27]It could be. It could be. I mean, it makes sense. The yellow thing you see down there is a banana costume.

[00:02:33]that I bought. I didn't buy it. Sorry.

[00:02:36]That I got the gifted that was gifted by a subscriber because uh so we so we're not bored. For example, took off in the 1950s in the form that we are used to today. Variations on the idea had been coming and going for decades. Vulcanite rubber in the mid-9th century allowed for molding. Celluloid added flexibility as a trait. Belite was easy to color and insulating. Everything had problems.

[00:03:08]>> Grandad soon found out that it was a pain in the neck and danger.

[00:03:15]>> But the next decade or so found a way to solve it and invented something new over and over. But we're still stuck with similar plastics to those in the 1950s.

[00:03:26]We've learned that some are unsafe or unstable over the years, but even now with microplastics being one of the latest big topics, it's still what we've got. Same goes for fabrics. Synthetics came in, naturals went out, and we've only just now started looking backwards because we haven't leapt to the next invention to solve the last problem.

[00:03:52]Yes, I love videos like these, by the way. I don't know. I just they're interesting. Those new ideas exist, but not on scale. Instead, turning back to wool, flax, and other natural fibers is the available option, but still tough to do. That's why I'm so pleased to say that the sponsor for this video is Birch. You spend a third of your life in bed. So, Birch for sponsoring this video. It's But I ain't going to spend a third of my life watching ads. No surprise that so much of the mid- 20th century revolved around new materials and technology. The 1950s is still considered the era of futurism. After all, the dreams of dramatic advancement in technology that made robot maids seem almost reasonable. It may seem absurd now as we watch and now we do have kind of like robot maids. I mean, have you been to Burger King? Some of them have robots that bring you your food. It's crazy. our own robot vacuum attempt to clean the same 3-FFT radius around a single chair leg for an hour. But back then, it wasn't a crazy concept because it didn't just sprout out of nowhere.

[00:05:05]For the entire first half of the 20th century, our society went through massive leaps and bounds. People saw electricity and running water go from fantasies of the wealthy to being the standard. Basic household machinery like dishwashers went from barely functional concepts to commonplace. Cars, buses, planes, and more appeared in that time.

[00:05:29]Same for radios and televisions. This this is this must have been a crazy time. I would love to see again someone from that era to just teleport here. I mean there's still people alive from that era but I mean like um like from I don't know from before this time and see everything that has happened like everything that we have like I'm talking to the whole world right now through a screen.

[00:05:53]Hello. Even just telephones would have been enough to change the world. This doesn't even begin to touch on societal changes like the idea of vacation time.

[00:06:04]Home ownership became a feasible dream during that time for many Americans as well. It's no wonder they thought that advancement would only continue in a linear fashion as it seemingly had for decades. So why didn't it? Why did we stop inventing and improving on that scale? To understand that, let's look at the first mystery I tried to solve.

[00:06:29]Sewing. I learned to sew as a child from family members, commercial patterns, and books. Rule after rule was laid down.

[00:06:37]Always finish your seams. Cut a 5/8 inch seam allowance. Bag line to make it look nice inside and out. Use bias tape to go around curved edges. Hide as much stitching as you can and hide closures with invisible zippers, maybe sometimes hooks. So on and so on. I went off to college and even helped teach others in our costume shop the same set of rules.

[00:07:00]There was a clearcut list of how to do every step with great emphasis placed on nearly everything done by machine. Only the finishing of finer quality goods was actually done by hand. Did you know that most machines can even stitch on a four-hole button? That's why they all fall off of commercial clothing so easily. There's no knots. I felt secure in knowing the best way to do everything, the way it had been done for at least three generations. And then I moved over to sewing at a historic site and learned that everything about 18th century sewing laughs in the face of those rules. With no machines, everything was different, but it looked better. and every step included. Why?

[00:07:48]Use this stitch because it's the strongest one. Use this method because it makes it that's why everything lasted longer back then.

[00:07:57]>> Easy to adjust later. A variety of seam allowances allow for it to lay better and so on. I figured it was just hand sewing versus machine. Then I moved on to learning about the 19th century techniques where machines were available but had only limited use. They kept choosing to do hand sewing. And the more I did it, the more it made sense. I had more control. The finish was incomparably different. I wasn't unpicking half my stitching when I did complex shapes. And both the process and the result were better. I thought the problem was in the history of what made us switch over entirely to machines, but that ended up being too easy of an answer. It wasn't mass production. That was well underway by the 1880s, and the mix of hand and machine continued well into the 1930s. Once we hit the 1950s though, >> but honestly if like people were sewing all the clothes by hand right now as well, just to today's person, that just sounds like a lot of work. Honestly, I mean, you can have some pieces. Yeah, but everything that's a lot of clothes. It was all set in stone. Instead, I discovered that clothing construction shifted to work for one thing, washing machines. It needs to hold up to being beat around a metal drum for a couple of hours. Can't do that with multiple layers and complex closure or structure or a lot of hand stitching. Nor can we do that with natural fibers. They all shrink and stretch a little bit differently. But synthetics can be formatted to be stable in heat and water at the expense of other features. There's a whole video that I did on that there. So, in order to make everything washable, we changed how we construct clothing and what we make it out of, which I quickly realized isn't the actual 1950s curse. These rules didn't stick around because they were the best way. They were just declared the right way. And that was that. We've formatted our laundry, our production, our materials, our expectations around the novelty of machine washing all of our clothing faster and supposedly cleaner. Thus, an oraorus of how things have to be done. I can hand wash some clothes. Like when I've go to Finland, I hand wash clothes on the lake. I don't know if that's necessarily cleaner than the washing machine and definitely doesn't smell as nice, but can't change one without the others. Which leads us back to the history of hobbies. The part that I didn't talk about as much in the original video was the development of hobbies as a requirement, a sign of success, and a well-rounded person.

[00:10:54]>> A good use of leisure time should give you a change. It should help you learn things. Although I'm not sure about the third.

[00:11:00]>> It's a good idea to have a long range goal for your leisure time activities >> with the fear that free time would overtake us after we had cut back work hours.

[00:11:12]>> Seems as if leisure time is a problem.

[00:11:14]>> Society and the literal government worked to create a system that would fill the time. Teach hobbies in school and you'll keep the populace busy and happy when they grow up. By which point they'll need it. But first, we had to teach the future teachers. So, every approved hobby, think of those extra classes in school like art, music, sewing, language, shop, and gym, had to be boiled down to a curriculum that >> shop and gym. What is shop? I want a shopping class. Shop. Shop class. I like it.

[00:11:52]>> Was agreed upon and spread throughout on a national level. However, these classes were far from able to teach an entire skill in just a few short months to a classroom full of children. The expectation was not a highly skilled population, but a curious one. With free time and a knowledge of what interested them as adults, they could go find books, take classes, or figure things out by experimentation. And all of the chosen topics were beneficial or productive to make sure people felt like good members of society and wouldn't form depression out of boredom and loss of jobrelated fulfillment. Instead, without free time, we have a population that has not only a desire to keep doing the things they discovered they enjoyed and feels like they're supposed to do, because why else would we be taught these things, but basically can't. Or at least we don't have the luxury of the time and money to go beyond the basics.

[00:12:58]If it weren't for the misguided belief that our free time would grow, this would seem a fairly devious way to keep people poor and busy by morally charging us with filling every hour with productivity. Go back much further and sewing used to be a basic skill, but making clothing was not commonly taught.

[00:13:18]It wasn't until commercial patterns, books, classes for age, and so much more laid out how to do that that it became a popular thing. Thus, nearly everyone learned the one right way at the same time. Follow the steps and you'll get the correct result. Maybe if technology had made leaps after this, we would have updated the rules for both home and manufacturing. But because we instead started looking for cheaper ways to do things instead of better, we simply took the old machinery and found cheaper labor. This created a perfect storm.

[00:13:55]What the 1950s valued was not what previous generations had because they didn't have to. Instead of highquality wood furniture, longwearing wool fiber, and handed goods, society looked to the next great thing. So trendy styles and novel materials were the ideal. They were not only affordable, but as we've talked about with everything from carpets to mill work, they were advertised as easier to care for, more sanitary, and just generally superior in day-to-day life. There weren't exactly many years between the invention of synthetic carpets and the affordable adoption of them into many homes. It would take a solid decade or more to realize they weren't longerlasting or more cleanable, but by then newer versions came out that fixed the problem and we started over. Not that the shorter lifespan was much of an issue.

[00:14:54]This is literally what's happening. The consumption nowadays is crazy though with all the adverts and everything.

[00:14:59]It's crazy. It's getting out of hand.

[00:15:02]Okay? And I fall for these sometimes. I try not to, but the the amount of crazy inventions that are in my house is not normal.

[00:15:14]>> With so many things suddenly affordable, not just because of synthetics being priced lower, but because there was an upswing in income versus cost of living.

[00:15:24]The plan was simply to buy a new replacement. If everything from your sofa to the dishwasher was seeing massive changes every decade or two, why would it matter if it lasted longer than that? It's basically the premise of fast fashion today. The height of this appeared in the late 1950s. The Scott Paper Company came up with a cellulosebased fabric not woven but pressed together which not only became part of disposable kitchen items like plates and napkins but was turned into paper clothing. Throwaway dresses meant to be worn two or three times and tossed. By that point they had added in polyester for some strength. So these clothing items were pretty permanent as far as trash goes. But just think about the problems we would have if that trend had continued. If clothing was meant to be worn a couple of times and then tossed. The same thing happened to houses with ripping out or painting over old woodwork. Large, heavy trim wasn't modern, nor was it considered of value because of that. It was still everywhere in older homes and still readily available as quality lumber. Why would it need to be saved? And it's not that it was done with ill intent or even assuming the future will solve the problem. They just could not imagine a world where we wouldn't keep improving on the material world at the same speed or higher. Obviously, a big part of why we didn't is because we started to focus on digital advancement instead. But in the middle of going from handwork to digital, we have this very odd era where everything else was intentionally forgotten and wiped away, completely devalued, when that older system was no longer needed and was considered antiquated, essentially holding us back.

[00:17:18]So, we reformatted the entire society and our relationship with stuff to match with the idea that if we just kept consuming new things, it would put money towards making things better. If we just kept learning, we'd have time and methods to use it. But it all makes sense. But yeah, I mean I wonder if there was a machine that would make everything the bestest version if we even if we haven't discovered it yet cuz there must be something that's like better than everything, you know, hinged on us continuing the trajectory.

[00:17:57]This is also why that era is considered by so many to be the best. It's where optimism for so many peaked. Obviously, all of this is aimed at the standard American middle-class family. So, that's who benefited the most and had the grandest dreams. I mean, the Jetsons weren't crazy rich. So, middle class parents or even those that aspired to it brought their children up in the 1950s and60s with that promise of the future and expectations of growth at a rate that they had personally experienced.

[00:18:31]Instead, we took a hard left turn in the 1970s economically. Manufacturing changed and company focus was on profit margins instead of competing for the next great invention to earn the money.

[00:18:44]We never reduced the hours of a standard work week again. And every bit of paid time for health or vacation as well as general workplace rights have been hard fought. Why exactly everything didn't pan out is a massive mess of things. But the important thing here is that it didn't. We literally set ourselves up for that future. We filled our free time with approved hobbies, our cabinets with new appliances, our homes with new technologies because we didn't want to be left behind in the past. And after more than 75 years of that causing more problems than it solved, we're still stuck with the 1950s mindset and moral judgment that was never intended for this type of society. We can't get that version of the future back. But I do at least think it's a good example of why we shouldn't forget how things used to be done. The direction we've gone isn't always linear. And there's some good stuff we might want to bring back.

[00:19:41]Whether it's using natural fibers or not judging ourselves for being unproductive, we need to stop valuing things by 1950s standards that were created for a utopian world that never existed. Exited by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and monthsl long vacation as the rule.

[00:20:04]>> How long were there were work work weeks back then?

[00:20:06]>> A lot of this new free time will be spent at home.

[00:20:10]>> We can't get that version of the future back. Yeah, I knew that was going to happen.

[00:20:17]>> I have a croissant in the oven.

[00:20:19]>> Yum.

[00:20:21]I like croissants.

[00:20:23]>> I know. Don't burn.

[00:20:31]>> I love her house.

[00:20:33]>> This one not actually sponsored by Wild Grain, but still sponsored by Wild Grain in the fact that I'm going to eat a croissant.

[00:20:39]All right.

[00:20:42]That were created for a utopian world that never existed.

[00:20:50]Croissant time.

[00:20:53]That was a good video. That was very interesting. I really really like I really really liked it. I like history in in general, but we haven't really dived into this type of history before and how humanity became what it is today. So, I found that quite fascinating. Um, thank you guys for joining me for this video. I really hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Please leave a like, subscribe if you haven't yet, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye. Peace.