Momentum vs Reason

In 1973, I owned a pair of men’s platform shoes. It wasn’t as if I was some Hollywood actor, trying to compensate for my height-challenged stature. I was 6’4” and skinny as a toothpick; the shoes added two inches to my height and toothpickedness. I also had long hair and spoke the slang vernacular of the day.

In my head, I was rebelling against my parents’ straight-laced generation which surely bore responsibility for all the ills of the world. What I was really doing was following the fickle fads of my own generation which couldn’t yet take credit for anything other than rebelling against the status quo.

It never occurred to us that we hadn’t done a damn thing with our lives to that point, and by the time we accomplished something meaningful, there would be a whole new generation to point their judgmental fingers at us. Life is funny that way.

Fads
The thing about fads is they depend entirely on social momentum — the emotion-based urge to fit in by hopping on the bandwagon and going with the flow regardless of whether or not that flow might be headed over a cliff. Fortunately for myself and most of my generation, those fads were short-lived, with only a few of them — like recreational chemicals — resulting in long-term consequences. We were lucky.

Since fads are emotion-driven rather than rational, and they depend entirely on voluntary compliance, they tend to have shorter and shorter lifespans as new fads come along to replace them much like that next generation came along to point out the shortsightedness of my generation.

Impermanence and Technology
Kids my age enjoyed two great advantages over modern-day fadsters. The first was impermanence. I’d look even more senile than I actually am if I wore those platform shoes today, but fortunately for me, they found their way into the dumpster after a few twisted ankles.

Fads with permanence — like tattoos, look cool in your twenties but are gonna send a whole other message when you’re in your seventies. I once heard an older comedienne describing the butterfly tattoo she’d gotten on her shoulder in the 1960’s. When she visited the beach with her family later in life, it scared the crap out of her grandkids because it had migrated down her wrinkled back and now looked like a demon.

Perhaps the primary driver behind the preponderance of fads, along with the logarithmic decrease in their lifespan is technology. Almost on a weekly basis, some numbskull thinks up a mindless activity and convinces other social media addicts to join them in their lack of sanity. After a few folks die or get maimed, some new numbskull broadcasts an equally inane idea and the cycle starts all over.

It doesn’t help that most of the social media followers are teens who have fully developed mirror neurons in their brains but less that adequate emotional brakes. One neuroscientist I recently read, said “That’s why your kid can be an A+ student at school in the morning and then go joyriding with friends in a stolen car at night”.

What’s the Answer?
Maybe there is no answer. Maybe following the crowd and doing stupid stuff is just nature’s way of pruning the genetic shrubbery. Maybe those of us who survived past our twenties just got lucky and dodged the bullet. I sure lost enough friends to drunken car wrecks, drug overdoses, and suicides along the way.

Then again, maybe the theologians are right and there’s more to life than just a cosmic crap shoot. Don’t ask me; I have more questions than answers. But I can assure you based on my experience; platform shoes are not viable footwear.

A meeting of great minds who think alike