Pandemic, Rudeness, Crypto Madness: We Are Above You, 2022

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New York

The rudeness pandemic, the current pandemic and all things gray. There is a lot to leave behind at the end of 2022 and uncertainty reigns across the world.

The health crisis gave birth to slow living, but it crushed many families forced to jostle to live. The rudeness increased. Cryptocurrencies have crashed. Pete Davidson’s romance with Kim Kardashian has been making headlines.

A list of what we have completed as we hope for better times in 2023:

The incivility has disappeared

The pandemic has unleashed a tsunami of overworked people, but the heightened incivility has spread far beyond their rowdy ranks.

Researcher Christine Porath narrowed it down to rudeness, disrespect, or insensitive behavior when she recently wrote about the subject in Harvard Business Review. The Georgetown University management professor found incidents of incivility on the rise, consistent with a steady rise dating back nearly 20 years.

This year, Porath wrote, frontline workers in health care, retail, transportation, hospitality and education have been hit especially hard. All were declared heroes when the pandemic hit. It didn’t take long for this to become a blow.

Noting that rudeness can escalate into physical aggression and other violence, Axios dubbed it the rudeness pandemic.

FILE – The FTX Arena on November 12, 2022 in Miami. The rapid collapse of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2022 shook the world of philanthropy, due to the donations and influence of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in the movement of the effective altruism.

The crypto craze

Will the implosion of FTX, the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, lead to wider chaos in a digital world that millions are already wary of?

Time will tell, as other otherwise healthy crypto companies are facing a liquidity crunch. And there are the philanthropic implications of FTX’s bankruptcy collapse here in the real world, as founder Sam Bankman-Fried has donated millions to many causes in an “effectively altruistic” way.

FTX’s bankruptcy filing followed a bruise for crypto companies throughout 2022, in part due to rising interest rates and a broader market downturn that caused many investors to rethink their thirst for risk. That includes mom-and-pop investors for the ride.

A woman places bubble wrap in front of a microphone to enhance the sound. The image illustrates the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, also known as ASMR.

ASMR, pipe down

Autonomous sensory meridian response. It started, innocently enough, with a tingling brain induced by whispering, tapping, brushing or scratching. Then, bam, it took off on social media like a very loud rocket on a mission to annoy.

Today we have millions of videos filled with people trying to calm themselves down by speaking in low voices, armed with whatever they can get their hands on in conjunction with their expensive, ultra-sensitive microphones.

Businesses sell beer and chocolate, paint, and home goods using ASMR. All the appeasement and commerce is deafening.

The gray color, which has become a big part of the 2022 palette.

Grey, the color

Gray walls, gray floors, gray furniture. Does gray pass? Here is the hope.

The color has spent much of 2022 as a supposedly neutral “it”. The problem was that we already felt gray inside.

Of course, gray has been around since the color itself, but it’s taken over as an alternative to beige and Tuscan brown. Gray dropped mid-year, but you don’t paint or change the sofa as quickly as trends fade. We’ve been stuck with gray, thanks to home TV shows and social media loops.

“How would you react if I told you that color is disappearing from the world? A graphic suggesting the color gray has become the dominant hue has been circulating on TikTok, and boy does it have people freaking out,” Loney Abrams wrote in Architectural Digest in October.

By this, she explained, the upset people she mentioned strongly support the idea that a lack of color “means tragedy.”

Abrams, a Brooklyn-based artist and pop culture curator, talks about Chip and Joanna Gaines’ fixers and Kim Kardashian’s Calabasas resort. And she quotes Tash Bradley, a trained color psychologist who works for British wallpaper and paint brand Lick.

Bradley, Abrams wrote, highlights the turmoil of pre-pandemic life as a villain leading up to The Great Gray Washing. Bradley, Lick’s director of interior design, sees no psychological benefit to gray.

FILE – Kim Kardashian, left, and Pete Davidson attend a gala on May 2, 2022 in New York City. The year has included plenty of news about Davidson’s love life.

The love life of Pete Davidson

Not the King of Staten Island himself, per se. Look deep into your hearts and decide for yourselves whether you love him or love him.

We’re talking about the vast amounts of air volume her love life sucked in almost hourly, especially in 2022, otherwise known as her Kim Kardashian era (which actually started in late 2021 for obsessives).

Davidson’s love list has baffled for years, dating back to his MTV “Guy Code” days in 2013 while still a teenager, leading to his Carly Aquilino phase.

There were stops along the way with Cazzie David (Larry Davidson’s daughter), Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale (briefly), Kaia Gerber (even more briefly) and others, including her latest: model Emily Ratajkowski .

The “SNL” and seemingly self-proclaimed “crack baby” alum is a paparazzi, social media, gossip magnet. It’s more like his love life.

movie madness

The film industry, to state the obvious, has produced decades of grossness spanning all genres, much of which is important and legitimate to show on camera.

However, there is one particular cinematic exclamation point that we could do without, or at the very least, with far less of: The dispensable vomit.

Implied vomiting with a curb rush, hand to mouth, or head turn would sometimes suffice, thank you. Who got the word out in Hollywood that moviegoers actually crave all the sickening details. The projectile-ness, the color combinations, the pieces.

Well, in some cases, the audience itself.

According to The Daily Beast, that remarkable clothing store scene in the 2011 hit “Bridesmaids” was something of a gender test. Would audiences accept all the spitting and other grand scatology of women in a marriage-themed film the way they do the brothers in producer Judd Apatow’s other comedies?

Apatow and director Paul Feig tested “Bridesmaids” extensively with audiences, and all was well.

Fast forward to the notables of 2022. There’s the satire “The Triangle of Sadness,” which one could hardly live without, but there’s also “Tr,” a much more serious film that wouldn’t make the pantheon of vomit with the only fleeting spurt of Lydia Tr. We ask, what’s the point of that? Meaning, the upchuck like aside.

Cate Blanchett’s Tr has far bigger issues, so let’s cut all the free puke.

FILE – Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the opening of the Tesla Berlin Brandenburg factory in Gruenheide, Germany, March 22, 2022.

The ultra scramble

Elon Musk put it this way in an email to his remaining employees:

“In the future, to build a revolutionary Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will have to be extremely hardcore. That will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will be a passing grade.”

Musk is Musk, but he exemplifies a moment: A need to keep moving, to work harder, to climb higher, to sweat longer. With the volatile economy, political chaos, extreme weather and wars, it’s no wonder a blanket of anxiety has kept the ultra-agitation alive.

As if all the talk of slow living and work-life balance doesn’t make sense, or more accurately, can’t exist for many.

“We’re striving to make ends meet, to ‘build our brand’, to make sure our startup doesn’t collapse, or to dream of the day when our side business takes off and we can walk into the office and give l ‘bird to everyone,’ wrote Benjamin. Luge on medium.

It stands to reason, he said, that “most of us are hustling because we literally have to do it to survive.”

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