My Trends

I was recently thinking about the fads and trends there have been during my lifetime.

Here is a list of some that I remember:

Color TV
Moonshot Mania
Antiwar Music of the 60s
Marijuana (60s & 70s)
Cocaine
Yard Darts, Clackers, slinkies, rock 'em sock 'em robots.
CDs replacing vinyl records
Hair: long, short, and then long again
Skirts: shorter and shorter, longer again, and now almost non-existent
Environmentalism and conservation: peaked in the 70s, died, re-emerged around 2005
Rubik's Cube
Politics: conservative, antiwar, fix the economy, conservative, anti-government, conservative, fix the economy, conservative, and fix the economy. In general, the politics of vilification
Cable TV
1993 country music
The rise and persistence of Rush Limbaugh (mid 90s to today)
Clinton Bashing (from the time right before he took office to today)
News Obsessions including: Jean Benett Ramsey, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Aruba girl disappearance, and dozens of others that have no real impact on our history.
The internet: 1990s when NPR started talking about it all the time, until about 2000 when most people were on it.
The rise of the SUV
The sad rise of the Minivan
Email, which peaked sometime around 2006
Online chat
Online dating
Text Messaging (a generational gap if there ever was one)
Video Games and the fixation with them
The rise of Reality TV and the subsequent decline of good writing and good programming
The rapid decline of public smoking
The decline of radio as a way to stay up with current music
Constantly released new music
Universality of cell phones
Decline of TV news
Decline of newspapers
HD TV
Widespread use of iPods

What do these trends mean? One thing is certain. Things are constantly changing. What was sleek and trendy one year, looks stupid 3 or 4 years later. What is useful explodes into use. Sometimes good things are left behind. People do not have the attention span to study things in depth as much any more. There are too many distractions.

Life goes on.