And that major repair? Water pump that dad changed in like 30 minutes. Or engine rebuild he did with friends and some beers or did for the lady down the street for the cost of parts. Do people even help eachother fix eachother's cars anymore? We used to be a society helping. Now it's go to a mechanics shop that normally starts with the process of them seeing if they can scam you.

The fetishization of basic progress is wild. We EXTPECT our society to progress. People went from horses (where they literally had to shovel shit) to cars. 2026 'now we have seatbelts' is some bullshit progress metric for an entire ass society and isn't the 2026 hyped/sold/expected. That you have to reach to pulling up that example (versus my 'shoveling horse shit to having jet airplane looking 1950s/60s cars) shows things kinda suck. In exchange you can't fix the car and have to take it in. You can't just help out the single mom down the street and check out her problem for her. Tires are so expensive they have to go on the credit card and be a planned expense (my parents with hardly any money didn't have to live off credits cards to cover incidentals).

'Guys, things can't be bad, we have these amazing things called seatbelts now (invented in 1959)'.

Well anything can sound dumb, when you simplify it to something dumb. We have multiple airbags, anti-lock braking, seatbelt pretensioner, collision avoidance, crumple zones, fuel pump automatic shut off, backup cameras, rollover testing, ... Vehicles do an amazing amount of things to keep their occupants alive in a crash.