Want to Increase Your Sex Appeal in One Easy Step?
Stop being the type of person who says things like “the world is a literal dumpster fire.”
Here’s some shit I wish we’d all collectively stop doing: Inserting phrases like “society is going to hell in a handbasket” or “the world is a dumpster fire” or “the earth is literally dying” into everyday conversation like they are absolute truths that nobody can deny. The habit of using these sentiments to justify absolutely everything has gotten completely out of hand. And I can’t figure out why because entertaining this type of doomsday-adjacent attitude is most certainly making everyone want to fuck you less. It’s so boring, so unoriginal and yet, so ubiquitous.
In the past week alone, I’ve heard this special brand of negativity arise in a conversation with my mother, a Substack about how annoying Halloween is for parents, an article about how mental health merch is dumb—and those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head. It’s a sentiment that makes its way into group chats, social media posts, articles from news outlets that are supposed to be legitimate sources of information. I am exhausted by it. I cannot be the only one.
My main annoyance with these phrases and the people who insist on using them is that they often act like they’re the first ones to have ever felt this way about the world and time in which they exist. But “go to hell in a handbasket” was first documented in the mid-17th century and can be found in printed text back in 1682, which was before the introduction of the guillotine, as Grammarist so kindly points out. And you know that humans had to be using this sentiment in reference to the guillotine, a time when people were literally losing their heads. So yea, not new.
The term “dumpster fire”? Also not new. That became a thing beginning in 2003. The same year “In da Club” by 50 Cent topped the Billboard charts, the third installment of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was dominating the box office and the pre-Tom Brady Buccaneers won the Super Bowl—all tragedies worthy of being described as dumpster fires.
Regardless of when these terms initially made their way into the society’s common vernacular, people have been using these terms to describe their experiences since time immemorial. Do you think those who lived through the World Wars and the Holocaust and the cholera times and the Arab Spring and the Nepal earthquake and the Japanese tsunami were immune from handbasket-esque levels of hell? Throughout history, people have endured wars, genocides, pandemics, political turmoil and natural disasters of epic proportions. YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL, JONATHAN!
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