How different was the world before today?
Before the Interstate Highway System existed, driving from New York to Los Angeles wasn't a vacation — it was an expedition. Unpaved stretches, unreliable fuel stops, and zero climate control turned a cross-country drive into a multi-week ordeal that most Americans today would find almost unrecognizable.
Before the internet, before smartphones, before open-plan offices and Slack notifications, the American workday ran on typewriters, carbon copies, and a lot more face-to-face conversation. A look at what a typical office worker's day actually looked like in 1975 reveals just how profoundly — and quietly — the nature of work has been reinvented.
Walk into any American supermarket today and you're navigating roughly 40,000 products. In 1960, that number was closer to 4,000. But the transformation of the weekly grocery run goes far deeper than shelf count — it touches on what we eat, where it comes from, how much we pay, and what we've come to expect.