I'm sure we all have a bunch of things that would be considered bad or even taboo by today's standards but I was sitting with someone that is one of the few people around anymore that I went to high school with and we were talking about kids vaping and how he said that was so "horrible.
Smoking
While I don't think it is a GOOD thing that kids are using nicotine I had to remind this friend about the hundreds of times we were sitting the parking lot of our own school smoking cigarettes in plain view of everyone with almost zero fear of getting caught. We didn't care if anyone saw us. Every now and then a kid would get busted but the teachers quickly saw the futility in this. My parents would have cared but other kids well, their parents would probably just get upset with them for having the school waste their time. Other kids that were seen as borderline problematic had an unofficial smoking area that all the staff were very aware of yet nobody did anything to try to shut it down. At one point they even put an ash tray out there for them but this just lead to more people going out there so they took that away.
I would stay a smoker for about 10 years off and on after high college, but rules started changing and it was becoming less and less "OK" to smoke in most places and one day I just decided to give it up.
I doubt that smoking is very popular with teens anymore because cigarettes are so expensive now even here in North Carolina which is considered tobacco country.
Public make-out sessions
Man was this common. I recall in high school and college just going at it in front of anyone. I think there was a point of pride or something or that you would enjoy the rumors about it happening at a party. I've had a lot of adult relationships and let's just say that it has been a long numbers of years since I did anything like that. I believe that to be a young man's game.
There was one time that me and a friend were out on the town in a town that was kind of new to both of us with our jobs and we managed to pick up a couple of women (we were in our late 20's and so were the women so take it easy) and well, "mine" decided that she wanted to lock lips in front of everyone and I just went with it. I remember being quite a bit ashamed about that later on and when we went home to our hotel my buddy said "dude, you were PDA (public display of affection) to the MAX! I remain embarrassed about that night to this day.
Minor vandalism
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I never engaged in anything truly destructive because my parents raised me right. I never used spray paint or something like that but I do recall using these stones that had a consistency like chalk to write things on the ground at playgrounds in the night. These weren't awful things like teaching little kids swear words but they were more creative and ominous than that. I think I stopped doing that when one day my mother, who was at the park with my younger siblings the day after I wrote something on the ground and she told me about it and how she doesn't think that any of us should go to that park anymore. I don't recall if I ever told her that it was me that wrote that.
I started to have a lot more respect for property once I was working in construction and later had my own construction company, because our sites are frequently targets for vandalism and even if it is chalk, it is time that has to be taken out of our day to fix that and well, that's not cool.
Maybe I just grew up.
Excessive drinking
I think like a lot of people I went a bit nuts with the booze between the ages of 17 and 23 or so. When you get a real job after college you cannot possibly make it if you are hungover or drunk all the time so that kind of sorted itself out, but until I was around my mid 30's I would still binge drink quite a lot on the weekends to the point where my Friday excess would ruin my Saturday and then I spent all day Sunday worrying about the fact that tomorrow was Monday.
I got tired of that pretty quickly towards the end of my 30's. I still drink more days than not but I don't think that a couple of bottles at the Elks after work, normally with a lot of the people that I work with, really constitutes a problem. I can't remember the last time I had a hangover and think back to my 20's and how that was basically how I felt almost every single day. Excessive drinking is a young man's game, that is for sure.
There are a bunch of other things like speeding just for the hell of it, doing dumb shit like drinking a beer while driving a car, and playing really loud music on my car stereo that you would never catch me doing these days but I just think it is funny when I encounter situations like I did the other day when my friend was basically having a "damn kids!" moment and I pointed out to him that we actually WERE those damn kids
Share if you have any similar things you quit doing please.