People are social beings, so whatever we say about the absolute independence of our judgments, it cannot be 100% true. After all, we are always influenced by other people, events in the outside world and, of course, various trends.
As they say, big trends are seen from a distance - and what once looked cool and stylish, after a few decades, may seem silly and ridiculous. For example, now I can't look at some '00s photos of myself wearing a mullet without a facepalm. But I was on trend at the time! Damn it, it turns out that there are and have been so many stupid, ridiculous and just dangerous trends in the world that netizens now recall and reasonably criticize.
More info: Reddit
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foot binding. that practice in china where they break and bind young girls' feet to make them more feminine
Some of the trends that you will see in this collection were associated with people's religious beliefs, while some, many decades or even centuries ago, were supposed to emphasize social status. Well, some just appeared literally out of the blue, because some celebrities acted in one way or another, and then numerous followers picked up the idea. But what exactly unites all these trends is that probably none of the people who followed them at that moment thought they were acting really stupid.
Saggy below the butt pants. Sure, sag your pants a few inches if you think you got steez, but Jesus Christ, if your belt is below 100% of your butt crack, you’re an idiot
🎶Pants on the ground, pants on the ground. Lookin like a fool wit yo pants on the ground🎶
Overusing terms like gaslighting, bipolar, or narcissist to where they've lost meaning. Someone disagreeing with you isn't gaslighting, having a change of mood isn't bipolar, and your ex may have been a d**k but that doesn't necessarily mean they're a narcissist. As someone who's autistic I also don't like the similar trend of people self diagnosing. There's nothing wrong with looking up symptoms for mental disorders, learning difficulties, etc if you go to your doctor. But lot's of people don't, they simply decide they have all these problems.
Bullying is another one… bullying is the relentless, cruel torture of someone for doing nothing other than existing. Now if you disagree with someone, or call them out on their s****y behavior, you’re called a bully.
"History knows many ridiculous traditions. More precisely, those that today we consider ridiculous, many years ago, were considered completely logical and appropriate," says Valery Bolgan, a historian and journalist, editor-in-chief of the Intent news agency from Ukraine, to whom Bored Panda reached out for a comment. "No, many 'challenges' and flash mobs of our time or of the last decades intend to show their own absurdity - but this is already the specificity of the postmodern nature of modern culture."
"By the way, another trend that runs through the millennia of human history is the tendency to idealize the past and believe that it used to be better in the 'good old days'. After all, one of the first records about what a decline in morals had taken place and how young people were inferior to previous generations applies, if I'm not mistaken, by the second millennium BC. So, it's okay - ten to twenty years will pass, and we will remember with nostalgia, for example, 'good old TikTok'. It is likely that this will happen," Valery states.
Gallon Smashing 'prank' where a person would purposely drop gallons of milk in a grocery store while making it look like an accident, leaving a huge mess for some poor supermarket employee to clean up.
there's some good ones here but the licking stuff at the grocery store and putting it back is a top contender
People on social media posting inappropriate pictures of themselves at solemn sites to try and seem edgy. (IE: Auschwitz, the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, Ground Zero in NYC, Pearl Harbor site, Vietnam War Memorial, Tsitsernakaberd Memorial complex, Srebrenica Genocide Memorial, etc)
Also when they pose with the casket at funerals. Just tasteless and wrong.
In any case, compared to many of the traditions that people followed centuries ago, modern trends - even dangerous ones - often look like innocent child's play. After all, for example, when medieval townspeople deliberately slayed cats, considering them accomplices of witches - and then there was no one to exterminate the rats that carried the plague - these delusions really cost the lives of millions of people. Now just compare this, maybe, with the recent TikTok trend of people stealing toilets and stuff from schools. As they say, everything is relative...
The fire challenge where these kids were pouring acetone on themselves then lighting themselves on fire. Apparently it was supposed to be a short burning sensation, but as you’d expect there were kids who got seriously injured from the burns, and a mom who recorded her son doing the challenge even got arrested after being reported to social services.
I would say pulling pranks on random people in public.
I am secretly waiting for the video of a prankster going to sleep permanently.
Good and truly harmless pranks exist, but they are very, very rare. Most pranks bank on laughing at others people's suffering. I saw real celebrities sit in wax figure museums pretending to be wax figures. That was funny. I saw a prank pretending that people had accidentally ordered a real horse instead of a pretty figurine, but in the end the people were surprised with the really pretty figurine and a day on a horse farm. That was funny too. I saw a prank were they surprised a person thinking they were testing restaurants being served with their favourite childhood dinner. That was lovely. But most pranks are just cruel. The good pranks aim to make the pranked person happy in the end. But most only make people miserable so others can laugh at them.
In any case, there are trends without which the history of humanity would be much better, and hardly anyone will argue with this. And now we're definitely looking forward to you adding some comments with modern or ancient habits and traditions you also considering to be absolutely weird or ridiculous. After all, we might have missed something in this selection, so let's help each other to refresh our memory in the comments...
I don't know if anyone has posted this already, but I recall a while ago there was something called the "knockout challenge" or "knockout game". It basically involved a bunch of teenagers and even adults walking or running up to someone, usually on the streets, and hitting them as hard as they could in the face with a closed fist, hoping to knock them out.
I just looked this up and, apparently, this kind of "game" dates back to the 1990's.
I hope this isn't a thing anymore.
For me, I’ll never be able to process the fad in the Victorian era of *EATING EGYPTIAN MUMMIES*
Never will that s**t not send me right back to pure disbelief, horror and confusion.
[Taking women's lives] for “witchcraft”
I'd like to add: putting them in institutions for what was diagnosed as emotional problems, women, especially ones who enjoyed sex, they were given hysterectomies because it was thought they had a wandering uterus. That's right, their uterus would wander. And it caused them problems, so it had to be removed. And they were put in insane asylums.
If you think Tiktok trends are stupid or dangerous, people of the past were even worse.
When people thought radium was good for you, there was a huge trend to put it in EVERYTHING. Face creams. Water crocks. Toothpaste. Hair products. Makeup. Chocolate. Toys. Nightlights. Watches. Spas. Impotence treatments. SUPPOSITORIES. Yes, people were sticking radioactive stuff up their a*s in the name of health.
People would even paint their TEETH with it for the glow. It blows my f*****g mind as a chemist.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12732/9-ways-people-used-radium-we-understood-risks
Burning people who followed a different religion than the current ruling class. I'm looking at you Catholic England and your burning of the heathen Protestants for daring to publish the Bible in English.
And by burning, I do mean alive. I can't think of many worse things.
The one where people were trying to jump away from moving trains last second
I think I saw a clip, a few years ago now, where some guy was taking a selfie of himself and an approaching train. It did not end well.
Probably the trend of exiling cats out of European towns during the back plague.
Wouldn't the cats help prevent or at least tone down the black plague? I thought it was caused by rats.
mukbang videos.
(especially in South Korea) a video, especially one that is live-streamed, that features a person eating a large quantity of food and addressing the audience: I had never heard of it, so googled. For your delight and edification....
I was going to go with ripping out thousands of people's still-beating hearts as a sacrifice to the sun god, but it seems that people are interpreting this as worst *social media* trend ever.
X-Ray parties: People would get together X-Ray themselves and each other exposing themselves to huge amount of radiation.
The Tape Worm Diet. People would give themselves a tapeworm to lose weight, then drink kerosene to kill the tape worm.
Both around 1900.
And then there's the former leader of the U.S. asking his top immunologists to investigate whether people infected with COVID-19 could potentially be cured by washing out their insides with bleach or disinfectant. This was in 2020.
Lick weird stuff during COVID challenge. Let’s try and get sick. Please people have you heard of hepatitis? Typhus? Salmonella?
Ragebait.
Not only is it garbage quality content, it's done on purpose and people that interact and share only make it more popular.
According to slang.net: "Rage bait is similar to clickbait but focuses on eliciting user anger to increase clicks, traffic, revenue, etc. (part of rage farming)."
Happy Slapping.
Was a trend in the UK back in 2005 where you would slap a random person, hard, and video it. It usually turned into a fight if the person that got slapped reacted. I’m pretty sure it lead to a few deaths.
That Tiktok trend several months ago where people stole toilets and stuff from schools.
Stealing a toilet from the bathroom of a school where it only gets a cursory cleaning every so often has got to be the nastiest of all nasty things to steal.
Yup. Someone drew in like highlighter or something else semi-permanent but easy to wash out on a toilet seat… it took a week and a half to get cleaned off
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someone stole a sink at my old school. A F*****G SINK
Oh yeah, someone stole one of the water fountains at our school
some kid in my school tried to steal a toilet. A f*****g toilet!!! He didnt manage to steal it(how do you steal a toilet???) but he did manage to break the toilet and that stall was "out of order" for a really long time.
The teachers had to give soap to students when they left to use the bathroom, and if they didn’t return the soap they would be punished. This was after the seventh grade boys destroyed 3 toilets and the eighth grade boys smeared a toilet paper/ ketchup mix all over the bathroom
A devious lick (also known as a diabolical lick, dastardly lick, or nefarious lick] amongst other names) was a viral TikTok challenge in which North American middle school and high school students posted videos of themselves stealing, vandalizing, or showing off one or more items they stole in their school, typically from a bathroom (or, in some cases, merely pretending to have done so). The trend has resulted in the arrests of many students as well as various warnings being issued by police departments. The trend originated on September 1, 2021, after TikTok user jugg4elias posted a video showing a box of disposable masks they claimed to have stolen from school, with the caption "A month into school... devious lick". Similar videos with the term "devious lick" soon flooded the platform, with students stealing items from bathrooms, such as soap and paper towel dispensers, toilet paper roll shields, urinals, sinks, mirrors, and floor and ceiling tiles.
Bum fighting. (Really? Am I the only one who remembers this?)
Using exaggerated, unnecessary terminology in day to day life
Identity politics/social grouping
Vocal fry.
vocal fry is a way of speaking where you drop your voice to its lowest natural register, causing your vocal folds to shorten and creating creaky sounds when you talk. if you've heard any of the Kardashians speak, or Britney Spears' singing "baby voice", that's a pretty good example. it's usually observed/found more annoying in women, but lots of people do it and it isn't necessarily bad for your voice. here's a helpful video if you want to learn more (skip to 3:45): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JTslqcXsFd4&feature=youtu.be
Note: this post originally had 35 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Taint tanning. Also, a tucker carlson favorite, testicle tanning. For MANLINESS.
I think we should just let those a$$holes continue with that.
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How is it the editors allow posts highlighting religious persecution, but won't let me say bum, tit or bugger?
Am I the only one that thinks it's funny when stupid people die doing stupid things?
I think the exact same thing. It's called natural selection and sometimes you just have to laugh at the unmatched level of stupidity.
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I feel so lucky that at least I don’t know any of these ones that were popular on tiktok. F**k tiktok
On of my most hated trends is the complete misrepresentation of the European middle ages in popular culture, political debates and schools. It reached a point where dealing with the false information is nigh impossible, because every time you tell someone about it, they bombard you with their other misconceptions, believing they are right and it is necessary to basically write a book in every comment, because of the amount of self supporting misconceptions. I am not even talking about people with a lack of education, but I am talking about academics, intellectuals and people who really earned their PhD.
Whilst the TikTok trends rumble on and cause harm to the terminally stupid it’s useful to remember that the Darwin Awards are always looking for winners. Sometimes we have to let nature take its course and rid our species of the swimmers in the shallow DNA puddle. It’ll make us stronger ok?
I'd like to add the trend of going to war to commit genocide against people who worship the same God as you. Protestants killing Catholics killing Jews killing Shiites killing Sunnis killing etc.
so glad I do not live in a part of the world where these things are done.
Taint tanning. Also, a tucker carlson favorite, testicle tanning. For MANLINESS.
I think we should just let those a$$holes continue with that.
Load More Replies... How is it the editors allow posts highlighting religious persecution, but won't let me say bum, tit or bugger?
Am I the only one that thinks it's funny when stupid people die doing stupid things?
I think the exact same thing. It's called natural selection and sometimes you just have to laugh at the unmatched level of stupidity.
Load More Replies... I feel so lucky that at least I don’t know any of these ones that were popular on tiktok. F**k tiktok
On of my most hated trends is the complete misrepresentation of the European middle ages in popular culture, political debates and schools. It reached a point where dealing with the false information is nigh impossible, because every time you tell someone about it, they bombard you with their other misconceptions, believing they are right and it is necessary to basically write a book in every comment, because of the amount of self supporting misconceptions. I am not even talking about people with a lack of education, but I am talking about academics, intellectuals and people who really earned their PhD.
Whilst the TikTok trends rumble on and cause harm to the terminally stupid it’s useful to remember that the Darwin Awards are always looking for winners. Sometimes we have to let nature take its course and rid our species of the swimmers in the shallow DNA puddle. It’ll make us stronger ok?
I'd like to add the trend of going to war to commit genocide against people who worship the same God as you. Protestants killing Catholics killing Jews killing Shiites killing Sunnis killing etc.
so glad I do not live in a part of the world where these things are done.
