Annoying modern trends...

[plain old dave]

My nominees:

Clothes.

Skinny everything.
"Retro." (1970s-80s LOOKING)
Flip flops.
Uggs.
For the ladies, tights as trousers.

Cars.
Tachometers and floor shift in EVERYTHING.
Any color you want, as long as it's white, black or some shade of gray.

Other.
Smartphones.

Black, matte colored and plastic guns.

Rapid shooting being good shooting.

Zombie culture.

Everything on TV being cops, doctors, lawyers or some fool 'reality' thing.

 

[Hambone87]

Selfies

 

[plain old dave]

I hate threadhogging, but there seems to be no way to edit.

Men with undershave haircuts and long beards. Announcement: If you don't know how to do basic household tasks, change a tire, or as an addition field dress game.... SHAVE.

What has been called the "professional Veteran." This cat wears tactical clothes, has a longer beard, generally teaches some sort of defensive class, and talks incessantly about being an "operator." IMO a very subtle variant of stolen valor.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

The best way to get het up about modern trends is to take notice of them. They're like unwanted callers knocking on your door, ignore them & they'll go away.

 

[ChrisB]

Cell Phones. I used to keep mine turned off most of the time, but circumstances have forced me to keep it on and with me all the time. It is an electronic ball and chain.

 

[scotrace]

Too many people.

 

[LizzieMaine]

People who whip out a cell phone and start thumbing away at it *while they're talking to you.*

People whose intellectual structure is framed entirely by dog-whistle words they picked up on Reddit.

People who use Twitter as a substitute for thoughtful engagement.

People who expect to find thoughtful engagement on Twitter.

People who would rather whine on the Internet about what's wrong in their town than actually get out into the streets and do something about it.

People who "talk a good war," but expect Those Other People to actually fight them.

People who justify waste and excess by saying it's necessary to keep the economy moving.

People who would buy a gilded dog turd if Amazon sold it.

People who write "think pieces" on Medium about why it's important to hang the toilet paper over the top of the roll and how people who do it the other way are doing it wrong.

People who use any variation of the suffix "-tard" to describe people who disagree with them.

People who learned everything they know about management from going to seminars, and have no sense at all of how to deal with people as human beings.

People who go from their heated house to their heated garage to their heated car without putting a coat on, and then whine like babies when they get to their destination and have to walk twenty feet in the cold before going inside.

 

[GHT]

People who whip out a cell phone and start thumbing away at it *while they're talking to you.*

That's happened to me a few times. I simply shut up, leave them to their phone.

People whose intellectual structure is framed entirely by dog-whistle words they picked up on Reddit.

They are probably the same people who write the word 'So' at the beginning of every sentence.

People who would buy a gilded dog turd if Amazon sold it.

Ain't that the truth.

People who write "think pieces" on Medium about why it's important to hang the toilet paper over the top of the roll and how people who do it the other way are doing it wrong.

Don't you just love those who tell you how to live your life? Why did you vote for..........? Why haven't you had any babies yet? Why do you drive that gas-guzzler?

People who learned everything they know about management from going to seminars, and have no sense at all of how to deal with people as human beings.

Ah, that's proof of the old adage: "Those that can, do. Those that can't teach.

 

[ChrisB]

Telemarketers. My land line phone is now quite useless, with the answering machine being cluttered with 20 or more messages a day. This in spite of being registered on the do not call list.

 

[AmateisGal]

Being busy. As in, let's sign up the kids for 15,000 different activities so that they have to be somewhere every night, and then both parents are stretched thin running them all around town, and the kids themselves are exhausted from going seven different ways on one day.

Bachelorette parties. A weird one, I know, but bear with me. My friend's daughter is getting married and the trend now is to do the bachelorette party in Las Vegas or New Orleans or some other big city. Gone are the days of the girls going out for a few drinks at the local bar.

Everyone being offended by anything and everything.

 

[ChrisB]

Everyone being offended by anything and everything.

Yeah, those people really offend me!

Seriously though, there does seem to be a type that goes out of their way to find something to be offended by.

 

[Fading Fast]

Being busy. As in, let's sign up the kids for 15,000 different activities so that they have to be somewhere every night, and then both parents are stretched thin running them all around town, and the kids themselves are exhausted from going seven different ways on one day.

No kids here, but at 52, most of my friends are parents of kids at the age for those activities and they almost all have their kids scheduled for everything - it almost seems like it just happens as everyone does it. I don't comment - seriously, I don't say a thing - as it's their lives and choices, but it is very, very different from when I grew up and most of the kids in my neighborhood had none or maybe one scheduled extracurricular activity a season. My parents told me flat out that they were not my chauffeurs so if an activity required a ride I was out of it. In general I didn't care, but when little league moved from the fields close to my house to ones that I couldn't get to without a ride, I was disappointed (but knew not to bring it up).

...Bachelorette parties. A weird one, I know, but bear with me. My friend's daughter is getting married and the trend now is to do the bachelorette party in Las Vegas or New Orleans or some other big city. Gone are the days of the girls going out for a few drinks at the local bar.
...

The same thing happened with bachelor parties about a decade and a half ago. They went from being a night of drinking at the local honky-tonk with, maybe, a stupid, late-night stop off at a topless bar (truly one of life's most uncomfortable and sleazy forms of entertainment ever) to these mega-events of travel and multiple nights. When did everyone get rich enough to do this?

...Everyone being offended by anything and everything.

The good side of our culture is its aggressive push against bullying, racism, sexism and other obnoxious or worse ills that once had been generally accepted - kudos, all good stuff. An unpleasant side effect of that has been (1) the cult of victimhood where being perceived as a victim of some slight grants one instant status which encourages people to be offended and, (2), the loss of ability by some to just ignore something they don't like.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The converse, and equally annoying modern trend, is those people who dismiss any critique of society by anyone other than their own socioracial group as "PC whining."

 

[AmateisGal]

No kids here, but at 52, most of my friends are parents of kids at the age for those activities and they almost all have their kids scheduled for everything - it almost seems like it just happens as everyone does it. I don't comment - seriously, I don't say a thing - as it's their lives and choices, but it is very, very different from when I grew up and most of the kids in my neighborhood had none or maybe one scheduled extracurricular activity a season. My parents told me flat out that they were not my chauffeurs so if an activity required a ride I was out of it. In general I didn't care, but when little league moved from the fields close to my house to ones that I couldn't get to without a ride, I was disappointed (but knew not to bring it up).

The same thing happened with bachelor parties about a decade and a half ago. They went from being a night of drinking at the local honky-tonk with, maybe, a stupid, late-night stop off at a topless bar (truly one of life's most uncomfortable and sleazy forms of entertainment ever) to these mega-events of travel and multiple nights. When did everyone get rich enough to do this?

The good side of our culture is its aggressive push against bullying, racism, sexism and other obnoxious or worse ills that once had been generally accepted - kudos, all good stuff. An unpleasant side effect of that has been (1) the cult of victimhood where being perceived as a victim of some slight grants one instant status and, (2), the loss of ability by some to just ignore something they don't like.

My stepson was involved in football (not school-sponsored) for awhile, but luckily, practices were held close to our house so he could just ride his bike. My daughter tried softball one year, but other than that, has no desire to be involved in outside activities. She is happiest being at home, reading and writing. I am bowled over at how some of these parents do it. I think the unfortunate result is that these kids are so burned out by the time they graduate high school that they don't do anything in college for a few year, if at all. Or maybe they're so used to it that they don't know what life is like without being busy! I find that sad, but then again, I'm happiest doing a few things a month and spending the rest of my time reading, writing, and watching classic movies.

And I have *no* idea when people got rich enough to do extravagant bachelor/bachelorette parties - unless they're putting it all on a credit card which is, I suspect, what many of them do.

RE: the push against bullying, et.al, I totally agree. And you're spot on when you name the side effects. I keep hoping our culture will collectively start being more realistic and not so hypersensitive, but at the rate we're going, my hopes are not high.

 

[AmateisGal]

The converse, and equally annoying modern trend, is those people who dismiss any critique of society by anyone other than their own socioracial group as "PC whining."

Exactly. I've also seen a lot of backlash against the backlash - i.e. those being called "special snowflakes" are now defending the label.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Snowflake" is one of those Reddit dogwhistles I was referring to earlier. When I hear someone slinging it around I know exactly what I'm dealing with.

 

[AmateisGal]

"Snowflake" is one of those Reddit dogwhistles I was referring to earlier. When I hear someone slinging it around I know exactly what I'm dealing with.

It's morphed from Reddit and now is pretty much everywhere. I see it a lot on Twitter.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Twitter, the Devil's Island for those too dumb to cut it on Reddit, but who are afraid they might get beat up on 4Chan.

 

[Fading Fast]

Maybe it's social media, but words like "snowflake" which, applied thoughtfully and judiciously, can powerfully and accurately describe a person too precious for words can also be thoughtlessly slung around like a wrecking ball used to shut down discussion and opposition.

I live in an apartment building where a mother thought it was okay to let her two children practice piano for, sometimes, 8 hours a day (and then the mother would play at night for hours) because they "needed to". Neither are prodigies nor is the mother a professional musician. The building offered to help her buy a wireless headset for the piano, but she wanted her and her children to experience the music "filling the room." She expressed no - none whatsoever - concern that she was driving the four surrounding apartments (and one even further away) nuts. Well that got shut down - thankfully. And now she and her children play using the headset (but with no financial help from the building to buy it).

Conversely, several parents wanted a basement space put aside for kids to store their scooters (almost every kid in NYC has one today). That seemed very reasonable to me even though there were some costs involved and I don't have children (and to the building, it was approved), but of course, some resisted and used the "snowflake" word.

There is some truth to both views of the word - it does apply to some very self-centered and entitled people and it is also overused and used in a bullying way to shut down conversation. Again, I think it is social media which puts everything out there so everything becomes overdone, used in every which way and that, eventually, destroys any real meaning to words because, like our politics, it all just becomes one nonstop battle.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Snowflake," very specifically, originated about ten years ago as a buzzword among the -- ah, I'll put this gently -- internet white nationalist/neo-fascist crowd, to describe young African-American, GLBTQ, or female persons who expressed public views opposite to their own xenophobic racism, sexism, and homophobia. Although they got the inspiration for the word from its use in "Fight Club," they gave it an edge and a meaning not present in that original usage. When Tyler Durden spoke the line in the movie, he was speaking to frustrated, disaffected white men who felt their social privilege wasn't being respected -- not to any generation of "whiny millenials." In effect, the people who use the word today were the very ones being *condemned* by it in its original source material, but they're evidently too thick to recognize that.

Either the people using it don't know where it came from and don't know precisely what it means to those who originated it or they do know where it came from and are using it in exactly the sense intended as a signal to those of similar mind. Either way, when it comes out of someone's mouth I tend to adjust my view of them accordingly downward. I'm not "offended" by it, I think it's either the mark of a fool whose ideas are as shallow as his language, or a stinking Nazi. I'm not going to waste any further time on them trying to figure out which.