Adults Are Sharing The Serious Topics They Wish Others Would Pay Attention To And We Should All Be Taking Notes
As a society, we have come a long way in handling serious issues. In the past several decades, individuals and groups have worked hard to spread awareness and destigmatize topics once considered "taboo." While we have made great progress, many important subjects remain on the back burner...
Thankfully, this seems to be changing, and people are becoming more open and honest about the issues that matter to them. So, when Reddit user u/Ilove_gaming456 asked, "What is a thing that isn't taken seriously but it actually should?", people did not hold back. Without further ado, here are 15 of the most enlightening responses:
1."Constant pain in your body."
"It needs to be taken seriously to avoid more complications in the future. You never know when there could be an underlying condition with those pains."
"Yes!!! Every doctor I saw, and even I, dismissed my painful periods as 'normal' or 'something I’d grow out of.' Never correlated it with the sciatica and sluggish digestion I had the rest of the month (since the onset of puberty). By the time I was 32, it was Deep Infiltrating Endometriosis II. I lost my gallbladder, had to have bone lesions ablated, and I’m very lucky I didn’t lose a section of my bowels. The specialist said the dye study on my bladder lit up like the night sky from tears where my bowels had been attached by endo lesions and then torn away.
So yeah, constant or cyclical pain isn’t normal. Listen to your body! If the doctor isn’t listening, then ask around for referrals. A friend of a friend put me in touch with my specialist. Don’t give up."
2."Basic food safety."
"A lot of people fall prey to the logical fallacy of, 'well, I've done (insert super unsafe thing here) a bunch, and I've never gotten sick, what's the big deal?', failing to realize that it's not that a bad thing is super likely, so much that if it DOES happen, it can be catastrophic.
I'm living proof. I went almost three decades of being cavalier about a lot of food safety things, and as the kids say, I f*cked around and found out. One bad bout of food poisoning is all it took to cause digestive tract damage that I'll have to live with for the rest of my life, and it can be debilitating during even a moderate flareup.
Don't tempt fate, y'all. Cook your food to a safe temperature, keep things cold that need to be cold, wash your hands, and be careful about cross-contamination. You might be fine if you don't, or you might also regret it for the rest of your life."
3."Practicing safe sex."
"This needs more upvotes. STIs are on the rise, and someone attacked me online because I said that people should not be using emergency contraception as their primary form of contraception in casual sexual encounters and that people need to use condoms. There's been an increase in congenital syphilis in recent years, which we once thought was eradicated due to penicillin. It doesn't get much worse than babies dying because people can't put a condom on."
4."Dental hygiene."
"100%. I cannot find a dentist within an hour of me that accepts my insurance. The free clinic has a three-month wait. If my cracked tooth gets infected, I will have to go to the hospital to get it pulled instead of having the cavity filled before it got this bad when I mentioned it over a year ago. I can’t sleep at night because of the pain."
5."Living alone."
"As a single person who is asexual, I'm mandated by Western society to live alone.
But humans are social, and I crave a family atmosphere in the house. It's so lonely without others around just doing their mundane, cheerful life stuff.
People strongly feel this is some sort of trap. I've been accused of being a closet gay, a predator, or just a weirdo. Is it that unusual to want a housemate or two as a grown woman? Isn't it much more unnatural to live alone, speaking to no one for days?
I've lived independently for 11 years. I just want some company and someone to share my cooking with. I want to noodle about doing house stuff, have mundane conversations about the patio plants, and live in domestic bliss."
6."Over-exercising."
"People take it as a badge of honor when individuals are in the gym 3 hours a day, but there can be some detrimental effects. Depending on the intensity of your exercise, along with other factors such as diet and sleep/recovery, you can develop rhabdomyolysis, which can be deadly."
7."Plastic waste."
"I really try to limit the amount of plastic that I use and discard, but even then, it's a lot. Sure, bring your reusable shopping bag to the grocery store, but what's that worth when absolutely everything is encased in mostly non-recyclable plastic, often for no identifiable reason? We are leaving a toxic time bomb for every generation that comes after us."
8."Lack of driver education and skill."
"I’ve only been driving for 20 years, and during that time, the average competency of drivers on the road has gotten so, so much worse. Of course, in the US, we have minimal public transport outside of major cities, and workers have to keep working, so anyone with a pulse can get a driver's license."
9."Gambling addiction is becoming a pandemic among youths."
"Gambling's a very quiet addiction compared to the ones involving substance use. You'll know if someone smokes, is drunk, is on meth, or any other drug. There's also a physical limit on drug use, as opposed to gambling thousands of dollars on repeated actions such as a blackjack hand, roll in craps, slot machine spin, or outcome of a sporting event (not just the final, but in-game actions).
You don't know they're gambling unless you watch someone during sporting events and lotteries. And it's gotten so bad that we've had professional athletes suspended, and at least two banned, for gambling, even though this isn't the days of the Black Sox when gamblers could pay athletes more than what they got for playing, honestly."
10."How air quality affects our health."
"Yeah, this one will become more relevant as the years go on. My area had a warning for bad air quality yesterday. Though it only reached an AQI [air quality index] of about 60, I had to work outside all day in it, and then this morning, I had a bunch of chest congestion. I wish I had worn an N95."
11."Making homes wheelchair friendly."
"I work in accessibility consulting and residential properties consistently perform the worst for accessibility and adaptability. With an aging population and more people with disabilities having better outcomes to live independently, this is one of the biggest issues that isn't being talked about.
One problem is that developers might not know what accessibility is or that the standards they use are inadequate. Here in Canada, lending and financing programs for builders are using accessibility standards from 2012 (and sometimes even from the 2000s). There is a 2023 version of the standards. Instead, they choose to use the one from 12 years ago — think about how different the world was back then.
As a result, brand-new buildings slated for completion in 2024 or 2025 have no or inadequate accessibility provisions.
The residential developer clients don't want to improve. Every recommendation I make gets pushback because "your suggestion surpasses what the 2012 standards say we need and is therefore unnecessary." So housing continues to be built without wheelchair-accessible or adaptable provisions. (Remember: there is a difference between accessible and adaptable. Adaptable means "easy to renovate" if the need arises.)
With 1 in 4 Canadians self-identifying as having some sort of disability and an upcoming older adults' population boom, this is going to bite us in the ass, for sure.
Yet, nobody seems to care."
12."General ear/hearing health."
"People go to insanely loud concerts with no protection or with 'musicians earplugs' that only reduce the volume by around 15dB.
At a 110dB concert, those earplugs bring it down to 95dB, which is still above what you should be exposed to for more than a couple of hours per week.
I promise you can still enjoy the concert with NRR 33 earplugs that bring the volume down to a safe level for the whole show. They might reduce the audio quality, but a concert isn't the place to go for that, and you'll still be able to hear all of those details at home in a couple of years."
13."Sun exposure. Cover up and wear sunscreen."
"Glad someone mentioned this. I learned when I had melanoma that all it takes is one bad sunburn to significantly increase your risk of skin cancer for the rest of your life. I’m fair-skinned, so I always wore sunscreen or avoided the sun as an adult, but a couple of mistakes as a kid nearly cost me my life. Now, all I’ve got to show for it is tens of thousands of dollars of debt and a scar that covers half my face. 0/10 Would not recommend."
14."The current state of education."
"I realize that, yeah, it's a big topic, but it feels like it's brushed off so quickly as like, 'welp, what can you do?'"
"One of my siblings is a teacher. I can confirm that the current state of education is shit, especially in America. Unless you are rich and well-connected, you're likely forced to send a kid to a sub-par public school with underpaid, under-appreciated teachers who are trying to teach with limited resources.
At the same time, cuts to education happen pretty much every year, which is why the cost of tuition in colleges and universities always seems to go up. A handful of companies have basically formed a cartel to ensure the price of textbooks is always obscenely high."
15."Climate change."
"We learned quickly during COVID that even when nearly the entire world halted a majority of travel...it barely made a blip on the emissions data. We are in serious trouble...and buying LED bulbs for your house won't fix it. I have a Co2 monitor I carry with me, and even outside, it has been registering over 430 ppm."
Do you agree with these Redditors' opinions? What are some important issues that you think aren't discussed enough? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
