Wack to the Future

Scott Hardie | April 5, 2024
Inspired by this list: What do you think we'll all be embarrassed about when we look back on the 2020s?

Steve West | April 5, 2024
Misuse and misunderstanding of the word "woke." Almost the entire Republican party. Gaslighting as a political tactic. The US leading the world in gun ownership, serial killers, and mass shootings and refusing to connect the dots. Attempts to re-write history. The necessary proliferation of defamation lawsuits. Rudy Giuliani - what in hell happened to you? Worst. President. Ever. The embarrassing saga of Mike Lindell - what a waste. The awareness that anything Donald Trump touches, dies. The continuation of systemic racism. Karens. The seeming acceptance of a large chunk of the population to be ruled by a dictator. Admiration of world dictators. Electing stupid people. MAGA lemmings. God, I'm so tired of this country's chosen "leadership".

Erik Bates | April 6, 2024
[hidden by request]

Samir Mehta | April 7, 2024
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | April 11, 2024
Excellent points, guys. I agree with pretty much all of it, particularly two things:

1) Erik, you mentioned the absurdity of the two-party system. I agree. It's long past time for us to catch up to other countries and have ranked-choice voting (if implemented carefully) or parliamentary-style proportional representation for electing members of Congress. I agree in principle with the "No Labels" movement, but I wish they'd focus their efforts on overhauling electoral laws instead of pointlessly adding a third candidate to the ballot, and I don't trust the people in charge of that group anyway.

2) Samir, you mentioned lack of empathy for out-group members. The older I get, the more I consider humanity's biggest weakness to be the mental bias that we evolved towards groups: Sorting people into groups, placing too much trust in members of our group, and not having enough empathy for people outside of our group. It's not just about xenophobia and racism and sexism and homophobia and other common dividers: We seem to have this ceaseless and compulsive habit of sorting people into groups and then treating them according to the perceived traits of the group, whether it's personality types, astrological signs, generations, handwriting types (seriously?), political affiliations, cat people vs. dog people, what kind of cheese you are, and endless more. There doesn't appear to be any way of sorting people that is so ridiculous that someone somewhere won't use it to group people and then make judgments about the members of each group, which really only benefits the people who have engineered such divisions for personal gain. All of this is the one thing that I'd change about humanity if I had a magic wand, but I don't, so all I can do is implore anyone reading this to abandon these arbitrary and artificial divisions and to ignore the evolutionary impulses behind them. The world would be such a better place without them.

Anyway, now that we've talked about the serious stuff, I will say that my impulse from the beginning of this was to go silly. :-) Sure, I care very much about all of the above, but I'm also not above calling out trashy fads in our culture right now.

There are so very many to choose from, but I'll narrow it down to some of the current fads in interior design that least appeal to me, in descending order of how confident I am that they will be considered passé within 10-20 years:

• Granite countertops. Due to the suffering of the workers who make them, this fad strikes me as doomed. They're also prone to cracking and chipping, so the ones currently installed will need replacement sooner or later, and homeowners not swayed by the ethical problems might find their high cost and inconvenient size/weight to be barriers to getting new ones as their popularity fades.

• Black and white color schemes. These are all of the rage, but to me, they look tacky and uninspired, and as linked to the 2020s as mustard yellow, rustic brown, and avocado green are to the 1970s. Kelly and I enjoy Queer Eye, and as much as we're sad to hear that the immensely likable interior designer Bobby Berk won't return the series in the future, his heavy use of this color scheme in every. single. episode. made his home makeovers boring and predictable toward the end of his run.

• Text art, also known as quote art. You know the kind. "Live laugh love" and "home is where the heart is" are popular examples. There are so many available. I sincerely do not understand how this particular fad caught on like wildfire; the only explanation that I can imagine is the rise of Cricut and Sizzix and other machines offering professional-grade home production to crafters who aren't skilled enough to do much beyond choose a font in Microsoft Word and send it to the printer. Do these decorations not look cheap and generic to everyone else or is it just me?

• Hardwood floors. This one has potential to last, because of course people have had wooden floors for millennia, but I'm referring to the way that they're currently ultra-common to the point of near totality. When Kelly and I house-hunted a few years ago, 99% of the hundreds of houses that we considered had hardwood floors, many of them having been installed just before the house went on the market. They're convenient to keep clean, sure, but doesn't their overwhelming ubiquity make them a little boring? Most of the houses and apartments where I've ever lived have had carpeting, and I miss its comforting feel against my feet. One only wants to buy so many rugs.

Does anyone have other trends, serious or otherwise, to nominate for us all to collectively abandon and regret in a few years?