Yesterday, I saw the new film adaptation of the Richard Yates book Revolutionary Road. I liked the movie, so I want to be careful not to give away too much of the plot.

Revolutionary Road is a very engagingly-told story of the Wheelers, a couple in 1955 who have what was then considered the ideal life, consisting of a cozy home in the suburbs, nice furniture and decor, two children, and a white-collar corporate job for the husband. The people that they associate with look up to them as examples of how married life should be. However, the Wheelers come to the realization that they are not happy where they are, and that they would like to leave this supposedly "ideal" life behind to explore a different lifestyle in Europe. The reactions of the other characters during the course of the film reveal, in my opinion, that 1950s people did not know how to deal with somebody challenging the societal expectations and assumptions of the day.

After watching this film, I found out that the book on which this was based was written in 1961. Culturally, there wasn't much of a difference between 1961 and 1955, so I am surprised that Yates was able to pick out and vividly portray the taboos, assumptions, and cultural limitations of the day, all of which would have generally been invisible to people living back then (as they were to most of the characters in the story). This leads me to conclude that very likely, every era has such cultural boundaries that are quite apparent to people looking back on that era decades later but that are not obvious to the people who live through those times. What might today's cultural boundaries and assumptions be? (I have some ideas, but I'd like to let other people jump in.)