Things I'm Sick of Hearing

 Here's a simple list of things I'm sick of hearing people say, and why:

• "Kids today don't know how to use a rotary phone." ~ First of all, why is a rotary phone the go-to example of outdated technology?  Why not a touchtone phone, or a candlestick phone, or a telegraph, or a small note tied to a pigeon's leg?  It seems to me that most of the people referring to rotary phones are people who are just barely old enough to remember them anyway, and probably only used them while visiting their grandparents.  But I guess it's not unusual for old and middle-aged people to exaggerate their childhood experiences (like saying they walked miles to school every day), but this one is oddly specific.  Also, why would a young person ever NEED to know how to use a rotary phone?  Just in case all technology from the past sixty years suddenly disappears?  And then is magically replaced with the earlier versions?  And how hard is it to figure out a rotary phone anyway?  You just turn the dial.  The only real challenge is having to remember other people's phone numbers (or at least, remember where you wrote them down), which old people don't do anymore anyway.  If technology did suddenly and inexplicably regress, EVERYONE would be screwed.
• "You only enjoy that thing because of the reward center of your brain." ~ You usually hear this one from smug intellectual cynics, but it's not only wrong, but also a pointless observation.  I'm no brain surgeon, but even I know that the brain is way more complicated than just having one "happy" switch that turns on and off.  It's basically a modern form of phrenology, an oversimplification of one of the most complex systems to ever exist.  But even if it were as simple as "this one part of the brain either likes a thing or doesn't," it still wouldn't be an answer to WHY you like a thing.  Your brain has to learn what it likes and doesn't like.  Unless it's a direct action on that part of the brain, such as a drug response or some kind of electrode stimulation, your brain's reward center is responding to things that you like because you like them.  What makes you enjoy something?  There are lots of reasons.  Maybe you connect it to a happy childhood memory.  Maybe it fits your sense of personal branding.  Maybe it suggests something good is coming in the future.  Maybe it's a novelty.  Maybe you don't even need a reason.  My point is that saying you like a thing BECAUSE of the reward center is pointing to a piece of the process instead of the actual cause.  It would be like saying that rain is caused by water falling out of the sky.
• "The burden of proof is always on the person making the positive claim." ~ This is another one from the pseudo-intellectuals.  It basically assumes that whoever speaks first is automatically wrong unless they can prove otherwise.  Maybe this comes from courtrooms and the idea of innocent-until-proven-guilty, but it really doesn't make sense in a scientific or philosophical discussion.  For one thing, almost any statement can be reworded from negative to positive.  For example, if one person says "aliens exist," and another person says "no they don't," then the first person is making the positive claim, but if the first person says "earth is not unique for being inhabited," and the second person says "yes it is," then the second claim is positive, even though there is no significant difference in what is being said.  Then, they always give a ridiculous example to prove their point.  Someone might say something like, "if I claim there is a giant hamster about to eat the earth unless you stand on your head, but I can't prove it, then you should assume that there isn't one."  Well, the problem with these hypothetical claims isn't that they're positive, but the fact that they're outlandish.  If I were to claim that somewhere in the world right now, there is a bird sitting in a tree, but I didn't offer proof, it would be silly to assume a default position that there are no birds currently sitting in trees, because the claim is perfectly reasonable.
• "The older I get, the more I realize how smart my parents were." ~ This one is popular with the Baby Boomers.  I really don't like this one, because it assumes that all of our disagreements with our parents are based on either a youthful lack of understanding or a teenage rebellious phase, and that our parents (broadly speaking) had life all figured out and the rest of us will eventually catch up to them.  Look, I don't deny that there are some ways in which we become wiser as we get older, but if we're not getting wiser than the previous generations, then how the hell is humanity ever supposed to advance?  I'm reminded of the old adage, "It is a poor student who cannot surpass the teacher."  Your parents were, at best, trying to give you the tools to do better than them, or at worst, stupid, and it's perfectly okay for you to say so.
• "The male loneliness epidemic." ~ This is some kind of a hybrid thought between people who are so luddite that they think young people have no social lives anymore because of technology (despite most of today's technology being used for social interaction), and men who have this delusional worldview that a cabal of radical feminist overlords are forcing males to stop acting like "normal" men by fucking a hundred different women every night.  Somehow, these two ridiculous ideas have merged together into a kind of technocracy that oppresses men and makes them sad in horrible and unspecific ways.  It's bullshit.  Maybe in some ways, technology has made us more distant in some ways at the same time as making us more connected in others, but what the fuck does being male have to do with it?
• "The President's Day Month-Long Sales Event!" ~ I have to hear this bullshit on every radio station a hundred times a day for the entire month of February, and I'm sick of it.  First, how can a day be a month long?  Second, stop calling a sale an "event."  They keep those balloon arches and wavy arm inflatable tube men up year round, and although I can't be bothered to check, I'm pretty sure the car (or whatever is for sale) prices are the same in February as they are the rest of the year.  And third, what the fuck does any of this have to do with President's Day?  Why does that day get to define February?  Why not Valentine's Day or Groundhog Day or Mardi Gras or Black History Month or the Super Bowl?  How does George Washington's Birthday negate all the other events going on in that month, and what the fuck does any of it have to do with buying a car???
• "Read that again." ~ I'm so tired of posts on social media that make some kind of a point very clearly (sometimes a good point, sometimes bad, sometimes original, sometimes not), but then at the end, it says, "read that again," implying that I wasn't really taking the awesome point into my mind as I should have been.  Just let the point stand on its own.  Granted, there are some situations where a point needs to be repeated for emphasis or clarity, but not EVERY point.  Also, if you want to reiterate a point, how about just repeating it yourself, the way a person would normally talk?  Again, you shouldn't overuse it, but on those occasions where it seems appropriate, saying something a second time is more in line with what readers are used to hearing in normal conversation.  And while I'm on the subject, not every point needs to be literally underlined or highlighted in yellow or typed in all caps or boldface or have arrows pointing at it from all sides with the word 'THIS."  It's the text equivalent of grabbing someone by the caller and shouting in their face for a mundane conversation.  Oh, and it's not just social media either.  New age and self-help books tend to go hog wild on placing italics everywhere, as if every other sentence in the entire book was the most important statement you'll read in your entire life.
• "So-and-so predicted the future." ~ I've heard this about George Carlin, The Simpsons, Idiocracy, and every other social commentary or parody artist for the past thirty years.  No, they didn't "predict the future."  They were talking about the present, and nothing changed.  Will Rogers was making fun of politicians believing in trickle-down economics back in the early 1900s.  The problems and stupidity of today are not new things.
• "It's like astrology, but for boys." ~ This is just plain stupid.  It's always when someone is making fun of some nerdy dorky thing, and for some reason, decides not only to compare it to astrology (which would only make sense if the nerdy thing was some sort of fortune-telling, which it usually isn't), but to then gender-specify it in such a way that it assumes that all dorky things are guy things EXCEPT for astrology, which is suddenly a girls' thing.  When the fuck did that happen?  I have no recollection of astrology ever being a girls' thing.  A hippy thing, sure.  A simpleton thing, naturally.  A 1970s thing, absolutely.  But a girls' thing?  Now you're just making shit up.
• "Vinyl is making a comeback." ~ Every few years, somebody thinks it's funny to point out that people are suddenly buying vinyl records again.  Vinyl never went away!  It just shifted from being the "only" way to listen to music to being the "classy" way to listen to music, and that was a long time ago.  Nobody is abandoning their streaming music apps to switch to vinyl.  It's just the same niche interest that it's been since CDs became the standard media thirty years ago.  (And by the way, vinyl was not replaced by eight-tracks or cassettes.  Eight-tracks were a way to listen to music in cars and for playing commercials and jingles on the radio, and cassettes replaced eight-tracks in cars, and were played alongside vinyl in the home.  The CD replaced the cassette, and the MP3 replaced everything except vinyl.)
• "The wisdom of a child." ~ This is usually when someone wants to make a profound point and quotes the simple wisdom of a child who doesn't overcomplicate things.  Of course, it's all bullshit, because the "wisdom" that these children share is almost always just them repeating something an adult said, and that adult was probably oversimplifying a concept so that a simple child could understand it.
• "The most important election of our time." ~ I hear this phrase used by newscasters all the time, and it tends to lose its meaning if you say it for EVERY election.  They even say it for midterms!  I get that they're trying to hype up the stories they're covering for dramatic effect and ratings, but really, elections should be routine.  How can every election be the "most important?"  Oh, but they have that cop-out phrase "of our time," leaving it deliberately vague as to what exactly "our time" refers to.  This year?  This decade?  This century?  This exact microsecond?  I guess you can't really call them out for being wrong if you don't know what exactly they're even saying.  It's usually followed by the even more abstract "struggle for the soul of our nation," which is another phrase I'm sick of hearing, because it's meaningless bullshit designed to over-hype some otherwise boring election coverage.
• "You know what's a weird-sounding word?" ~ When people say this, you can expect that they're about to take some particular word and start repeating it over and over again, usually with exaggerated pronunciation and maybe even a silly voice, in order to illustrate just how strange the word sounds.  Well no shit, EVERY word sounds weird if you're going to stand there saying it over and over again in a silly voice!
• "I had the weirdest dream." ~ All dream are weird.  That's what dreams are.  You're asleep and you're seeing things that aren't there, so what could you possibly be dreaming about that wouldn't be weird?  And I'm sure you're excited to tell us all about your dream, but trust me, nobody but you finds it interesting.
• "The future is now." ~ It's just a way overused phrase, especially in advertising.  It's supposed to imply that something previously thought to be futuristic is now available, but most of the time, it's just a lazy way to overhype some newish product.  Half the time, the "new" thing is just a repackaged version of an old thing, so you might as well say that the future is the past.
• "Violence delegitimizes a protest." ~ If your goal is to be perceived by a bunch of ex-hippie bourgeois liberals as the "good guy," then yes, you should always protest non-violently, an probably sell some merch with leftist slogans and take lots of selfies and leave the rally quickly before it becomes unfashionable.  But if you actually want to get results, then why the fuck would you not use every possible resource at your disposal?  Yes, that includes violence.
• "Men get body issues too."  ~ It seems like every year or so, someone points this out like it's a revelation.  The idea is that women are worried about being overweight, but men never have that problem, but did you know that men can also be worried about not being muscular enough?  Okay, first of all, no duh.  All sorts of people have insecurities about their body types.  Everyone knows that.  Second, why do we assume that the ONLY thing men could feel insecurity about is wanting to be more muscular?  Considering how much money is spent each year by male consumers on hair restoration and plastic surgery and weight loss programs and even hair dye to cover up the graying parts, did it really never occur to anyone that men might be insecure about these things as well?  And why do we assume that women are only concerned about weight?  People can be insecure about their height, their skin, their hair, their nose, their teeth, or whatever else.  And while we're at it, what about non-physical insecurities, like lack of education, lack of musical talent, financial troubles, clumsiness, social awkwardness...  The list goes on!
• "I dated women, and now I understand men."  ~ Still on the topic of men/women.  These are basically clickbait for men who want to hear an attractive bisexual woman telling them basically, "you were right... it wasn't your fault... she was a total bitch... she didn't appreciate you enough..."  First of all, you don't "understand" men, because every person's situation is different.  One major difference with your experience is that you were in a homosexual relationship, which is not the same thing as being in a heterosexual relationship, and doesn't grant you instant insight into the people-who-date-women experience.  Second, while you may get some partial insight into other people's feelings about relationships from your own experiences, you can get that from ANY type of relationship.  For example, someone raised by a physically abusive mother might have some partial insight into someone with an emotionally abusive boyfriend.  It doesn't have to be date-women-to-understand-dating-women.  Third, stop giving blanket validation to all men!  Okay, maybe for some of the guys watching, the woman WAS the problem, but for other guys, maybe it was the MAN who was the problem, or maybe they were BOTH the problem, or maybe neither one of them was the problem, but they just weren't a good fit for each other.  Usually, these types of female advocates for men tend to make general and old-fashioned assumptions about how men and women relate to each other, like women being indirect.  "I was watching the football game, and she mentioned that the trash can looks pretty full.  The next day, she made me sleep on the couch and told me I should know what I did wrong.  Eventually, I found out she wanted me to take out the garbage.  Why couldn't she just tell me that???"  Bro, that's not a relationship!  That's a sit-com episode!
• "Farmers get up at the crack of dawn."  ~ They always say this like it's some amazing feat that the rest of us could never manage.  As if the rest of us only know a life of sleeping until noon.  Unless you work night shift or something, almost everyone is up well before the sun rises, including farmers.  Even unemployed and retired people, tend to wake up automatically as soon as the sun rises, as we have been doing for thousands of years.  The only exception is young people, who have a tendency to sleep later, but even then, they usually have to force themselves up for work or school.  So why, out of all the people getting ready for work before sunrise, and during the shorter days of the year, even driving to work in the dark, to we single out farmers for being the "early risers?"

More to follow!