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
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Samir Mehta | April 7, 2024
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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?

Lori Lancaster | August 14, 2024
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Scott Hardie | August 20, 2024
Yes, yes, yes.

I thought retail fashion was moving away from clothes that only fit a small number of bodies in favor of broader inclusion? And I thought that jokes about "mom jeans" killed off the high-waisted look, but maybe it's been so long that they're back in style.

Canceling has definitely been hypocritical, and thrown out the baby with the bathwater in a few cases. When it bubbled up on liberal college campuses in the 2010s, I thought it was a mistake to start disinviting speakers just for being conservative. Besides inviting a conservative backlash, doesn't it send a message that 1) you're close-minded while attending an institution that's supposed to teach you new things, and 2) your opinions are so weak that they cannot withstand the expression of opposing views?

I blame Cher for the scourge of auto-tune. :-P

Samir Mehta | August 20, 2024
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Scott Hardie | August 29, 2024
I don't dislike hardwood floors. I'm just so very bored of seeing them everywhere, seemingly without exception. They've taken over housing, and now they're taking over hotel rooms and restaurants. I expect offices and retail stores to be next. I fully expect the hardwood-floor craze to subside at some point in the future, rendering these expensive remodelings to be a waste of money.

Speaking of expensive remodelings that are a waste of money, I'm surprised that we haven't mentioned how fast food restaurants all going for the gray, boxy, boring look. Other than the sign outside, a Subway now looks like a Taco Bell which also looks like a Starbucks, et cetera. There's a variety of causes driving this trend, but a big one is simple reusability: If the business goes under, the generic building shape allows it to house another business quickly. There won't be any "Used to be a Pizza Hut" syndrome any more. Setting aside the dispiriting idea that the building is designed for the business to fail (how must it feel to go to work in a space that's built from the ground up in anticipation of going under quickly?), as a consumer, it's just so dull seeing all of these identical-looking gray boxes everywhere, devoid of personality or distinctiveness or sense of fun. I can't help but believe that people in the future will look back and think, "Remember the 2020s when every business was a gray box? What were we thinking?"

Cancel culture feels arbitrary and unruly because it is. I don't have a problem with ceasing to support some artists who have shown themselves to be terrible humans—personally, I have no interest in seeing any of Johnny Depp's work ever again—and I also don't have a problem with enjoying an artist's work even after you discover them to be terrible humans—I had a blast at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert this summer despite some pretty gross allegations about their treatment of women. But there's a huge variety of objectionable behavior that some people will consider a red line that other people won't, and all kinds of reasons why some artists deserve forgiveness that people also won't agree about, and trying to flatten such a complex subject into a simple black-and-white code is a fool's errand. Also, cancel culture is not driven by a genuine societal need (do we need Louis CK not to work again in the same sense that we need Harvey Weinstein behind bars?); rather, it's driven by social-media slacktivism and virtue-signalling, which is clumsy and reactionary and way too invested in demanding that people take sides now rather than getting things right.

Scott Hardie | September 16, 2024
This trend has been going on for longer than the 2020s, but I'm equally confident that it will be remembered poorly someday: Funko Pops. At the risk of disparaging something that many people enjoy, I don't understand the appeal of them, other than the collecting-tokens-representing-pop-culture-that-you-like aspect. Funko Pops are ugly. Something about that particular combination of cubic head shape, soulless black eyes, and ultra-tiny mouths just turns me off, triggering a rejection response in me that's somewhat like the Uncanny Valley. I don't understand why so many people fill their homes with these misbegotten little things. But to each their own, and kudos to Funko for selling a Pop for any cultural subject that you could possibly want to collect; they are not afraid to go obscure.

Am I wrong?

Samir Mehta | September 17, 2024
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Scott Hardie | September 19, 2024
Yeah, I hear you. I have a tendency to go overboard trying to collect every last thing that I can in a set. I've spent embarrassing sums of money hunting down every last rare promotional card for certain favorite board games so that I can have a truly complete set to play; nobody but me would know or care that the off-the-store-shelf version was "incomplete" but I couldn't play it without thinking "what else?" I can play an open-world video game like Fallout for one month doing quests and then five additional months just collecting every last unique item somewhere in the game world. The only thing that kept me from getting into Disney pin trading was realizing that there were so very many pins in existence (55,248 as of now per the Pin Trading Database) that I'd bankrupt myself chasing them all if I let myself start. And so because of this habit, I've tried to be really careful about what I start buying and getting into, and I've gotten pretty good at telling myself to avoid traps like Funko Pops. I can see them for the money pit that they are.

Regarding the ugliness of the Pops, on further reflection, I think it's the empty black eyes that create this reaction in me. There's just something creepily morbid about them, like the way that coins used to be placed on the eyes of dead people, or how Coraline's Other Mother had buttons for eyes. Cartoon eyes, or realistic human eyes, or something in-between, would have been preferable to solid black discs.