When I start to feel nostalgic for the 1980s, I remember things like this.

I'm old and I remember people smoking on airplanes and in hospitals. An older nurse has told me she remembers staff smoking in the nurse's station, and another older nurse told me she used to follow the pediatrician she worked with around the hospital trying to catch his ashes in an ashtray while he rounded on sick children. My own parents used to make us ride in the car with the windows rolled up smoking like fiends.

Oh man, I remember the first time I was in a hospital to visit someone as a kid and going down to the cafeteria and seeing doctors and nurses down there smoking. It was weird to me even then.
- Patients these days vape in their hospital beds!
And any furniture you moved showed you the original color of the wall and how the smoke had yellowed everything

In my town, there are mostly electric vehicles nowadays. I was out walking along a larger road in my neighborhood when I noticed a bus and two cars passing each other, and it suddenly hit me that earlier in my life, that would have been a very noisy affair, but it wasn't. I also realized how much the world used to smell like gas. And does anyone else remember the rainbow colored gas puddles you used to see and smell in parking lots? I don't remember the last time I saw any of those.

Then I realized there is a world where my kids can grow up outside of noise pollution, cigarette smoke and car fumes, and it made me a little more hopeful about the future.

What town do you live in that has more electric cars than gas powered? Doesn’t sound believable; but if it is, then that’s fuckin’ sick.
- 93.9% of new cars sold in Norway are EVs, a further 5% are hybrids.
  I don't know what that translates to in terms of cars currently on the road though. But that's also stats for the whole country. You can imagine in a relatively affluent area where there are mostly new cars the vast majority of them are probably EVs.
- Scandinavia, like that guy guessed, is right
- I'd guess in Scandinavia
I remember those puddles. You're right I haven't seen them in years.
Are you from the future?
Remember playing in those fucking puddles? Swimming and them? Eating fish from them?
Well, the bigger ones.
Do people not maintain their cars cause ive only seen gasoline puddles out in the desert from folks rupturing their tanks while offroading. That should not be frequent enough for it to be normal.
- Old cars must have leaked more frequently without it breaking them, because I can remember oily puddles under parked cars quite a lot from my childhood (which was in the 90s).

My first job as a waiter had a smoking section. Was banned just a year later but imagine being forced to work in that condition.

The smoking section was coveted because smokers drank more, hence better tips.
- I don't think drinking slowed down one bit just because smoking was removed indoors.
I remember when I was a kid all the restaurants had ashtrays on the table. Even McDonalds and Burger King had little aluminum ashtrays on the tables. You could have your cheeseburgers with a side of secondhand smoke.

All my pals being 'caught' smoking cigs bc their parents had the sense of 'smell'.

My parents would ask me about smoking whenever I came back from my neighbor's house. I always thought it was a ridiculous question because I thought smoking was disgusting as a child. But, I guess the stank of the neighbor's house would stick to me after being there for a few hours, and they were making sure I wasn't puffing away. Good thing they didn't know the smell of weed 🫤

My flight was overbooked and the airline was giving 500$ to stay one more day. The only available seat on the next day flight was in the smoking section. It was one of the most uncomfortable flights I have ever had. I don’t know if the 500$ was worth all the second hand smoke I inhaled. The corridor was cloudy.

Ever get booked into a smoking hotel room? Just awful. Really hard to get to sleep.
- Life is tough when you have to trade a price discount for a cancer chance premium.

it made for really great sports photography though

You're fucking with me, that was all cigarettes? I was growing up just after it was getting banned and winding down so I wasn't really around for the worst of it.
- I mean cigars and pipes as well, but yeah
- fog machines and hazers exists. no need for dry ice
- so I'm watching WWE NXT right now, and it has the haze. I'm pretty sure it's from the pyrotechnics
  I don't notice at other professional wrestling events because they're either much larger venues, or the places that perform in smaller venues don't have WWE's pyrotechnics budget. even AEW has noticeably quieter pyro

Not old enough for this, but growing up I had a friend with parents who were heavy smokers. It made a weird relationship in my brain that cigarette smell is related to friends, so for years everytime I smelled a cigarette it would give me some weird nostalgia.

Eventually I tried 1 cigarette and it made me sick lol

My message to people thinking about trying smoking:
If you try a cigarette and you don't like it, it's a shitty experience. If you try a cigarette and do like it, that's much worse.
There's no upside.
- And, for friends who currently smoke, the best line of attack I've found is: "You really like giving awful companies like Philip Morris your hard-earned money?"
- My message to people thinking about trying smoking:
  my message:
  literally why, it's a waste of time, money, and it's socially unacceptable, literally do anything other than smoke.
Smoking is something you literally have to develop a taste for. I've never heard of anybody who got hooked off of one cigarette.

AIDS. So much AIDS. There's a famous photo from 2018 with the men in black representing the original members of the San Fransisco Gay Men's Choir lost to AIDS and men in white representing those who did not die to AIDS.

Fuck Reagan, and Fuck Trump for trying to make COVID that bad.

As a kid in the '80s, it was just the way some things smelled. Neither of my parents smoked by the time I was born, but lots of neighbors and others did. I later became a smoker and couldn't smell it anymore. When they finally banned smoking in Ohio, I quit and we learned what bars really smelled like (as I mentioned in a related thread: body odor, mold, and piss).

Edit 2: I worked at a fast food place in '95 or '96 and we had a smoking section, but also all the employees smoked in the tiny break area as well so it came from both sides. I would start smoking not long after this.

it's weird to think that there's bad and dangerous smells today that we don't even think about
- I had to go back into Tokyo the other day from where I live in the countryside. The air definitely has some kind of smell. We do burn a lot of trash for electricity in Japan, but I'm not sure what it actually is. The diesel exhaust here bothers me a lot for some reason even though I think I liked the smell of it as a kid in the US. Not sure what that's about.

51yo here, can confirm. Can also confirm smoking flights.

I smoke but smoking in an airplane sounds absolutely ridiculous. Can’t believe people tolerated that.

Cigarettes and lead fumes.

And people don't understand why there are so many MAGA folks.
- My entire generation is filled with people who have never read a book since high school. It used to baffle the hell out of me, and then I learned about how bad the lead saturation in our environment really was back then. Not to mention just how bad the bullying was. Seriously the GPA and graduation rates of my high school precipitously improved just one year after my graduation year. Between the "whole learning" fad in the 80s and lead, it's a miracle I can even spell my own name.

Not just cigarettes. Old, stale cigarette smoke smell that seeped into every piece of fabric and carpet, staining everything. I think its one of the reasons brown and grey shades were so popular.

Most restaurants would have smoking sections right next to the none smoking sections, as if the smoke knew the rules.

Most restaurants would have smoking sections right next to the none smoking sections, as if the smoke knew the rules.
"Smoking or non-smoking"
'Non-smoking please'
sits you right next to the smoking section *
'You could just tell me to go fuck myself.'
- Every Sunday morning growing up lol
- My favorite was when you answered non-smoking and they just took away the ashtray.

This is why I get nauseous when I am around smokers.

I remember living in a big city when the law was passed. The city hall hired cleaners to remove the smell. I can't confirm the whole building as it's absolutely massive but I do remember seeing the smallest areas being scrubbed. Out of every building in the area it turned out the absolute best. 1 mcdonalds ended up remodeling the whole place but the smell was still a little faint.

Lies. Some of it smelled like leaded car exhaust.

And now it smells like weed.

Most restaurants and airplanes, not so much. Which, even as a cannabis user, I appreciate.

And most people were nose blind to the smell.

I was in the 1990s, but I smoked by then. I could definitely notice in the 1980s if we sat too close to the smoking section. If there was a smoking section.

In the food court in the mall, the blue tables were non smoking and the gray were smoking. The thing is, they were all mixed in so essentially the whole food court was the smoking section. Don't get caught smoking at a blue table though, you'll get kicked out.

Back when cigarette smoke extended only as far as your personal space.
People even smoked on the dancing floors in clubs at least in my city. Grinding there, pint in one hand, a ciggie in another.
Back in my childhood "it wasn't me" was a legit excuse even when you completely smelled of cigarettes after having smoked some, because even non-smoker parents had a hard time telling with all the cigarette smell. Smelling clothes wouldn't mean anything. Fingers, perhaps, if someone had just smoked.

Now the world smells like watermelon cotton candy.

My town has a big billboard up that talks about how we can breathe easy because the town has banned smoking indoors.
The thing is, I've been here for over 10 years and that's been true the whole time I've been here. It's very odd.
- i'd be willing to bet they just put it up, and then it either still have the rights to it, because lazy way to spend money on "social progress" or something, or they lost the rights to it, and literally nobody has bought the rights for it since then, so the old ad is still just kicking around up there.

I was in Vegas recently and made the mistake of cutting through the casino as a shortcut, the 80s came roaring back to my nose holes... so gross!

I just had an involuntary flashback of a host at a restaurant asking if we would like smoking or non smoking. It didn't really matter since the whole place smelled like smoke...

Go to a German Bundesliga match if you want to relive this part of the past.

Also, way fewer murders per dude nowadays. Tubular.

Yeah I never noticed the smell of smoke until myn parents quit when I was a teenager. And then stopped noticing it again when I started smoking. And then started noticing it again when I stopped.

Same

my dad and my grandparents used to smoke so pretty much every time i used to go to their house the world smelled like smoke :(

The little gold colored metal ashtrays with the M imprinted on the bottom inside McDonalds.

Oh no. This topic is going to bring out all the people who can't tell the difference between "breath" and "breathe"!

Just go get your huge dictionary everyone had in their house the had really thin and easily torn pages.

The '80s? Is my memory fucked? There was no smoking in schools, libraries, cafeterias, doctor's offices, hospitals, courts, by the '80s. At least the later eighties. This dude is talking about like 50's and 60's maybe. When literally everyone smoked everywhere all the time. Nicotine must have seemed amazing if you conceal and deny its side effects. I probably would have smoked all the time too.

Yes. Your memory is fucked.
There was still smoking in bars in L.A. when I moved there in the 2000s. When I was in high school in the 90s, there was a smoking area for high schoolers until 1993 or so. Smoking wasn't entirely banned on domestic flights until 2000 (although it was mostly banned in 1990).
- I suppose. I looked at some bar graphs and plots and adult smoking was going down but did really start dropping off in the late nineties, so that tracks with your experience and memory.