What on earth has happened to common sense?

[MaidenMotherCrone]

It's late, I'm tired and unwell and need to be up at 4am for work and feeling extremely crabby as I cannot sleep. Please forgive my shortness but....

What the hell happened to bloody common sense? Is it being bred out of us with each passing generation? Are people losing the ability to think for themselves?

Every other thread I click on leaves me thinking 'seriously'! These people are responsible for children ffs. I won't name the threads as that would be mean but is it just me?

Me as well!

Maybe its because it is out in the open now / it has lost its stigma? Online you can say anything and it will never cone back on you, because no one knows who you are. Wait until people start being shamed in real life for the questions they ask online and suddenly everyone will stop and only talk about “acceptable” things.

Blimey that was quick. Shaming mentioned only two replies in.

Oh, I opened the thread wondering if it would be about the train company getting fined because a grown man decided to open a window and stick his head out on a moving train!

It’s not about shaming.

It’s threads such as

My arm fell off, should I go to a&e now or in the morning.

Or

My neighbour has done a shit on my front lawn, should I say something?

@Bloodybridget my goodness that’s outrageous!

There was a fool of a young woman not so long ago who did the same thing.

There shouldn’t even have to be a sign! It’s ruddy common sense not to stick your head out of a train window!

1. I doubt it is more or less common now than previously. Every generation has probably said this about younger generations since ancient Greece at least.
2. Common sense knowledge is often wrong.

YANBU. I love MN but I think it breeds overthinking and anxiety about the most mundane of occurances. Some posts I really struggle to have sympathy for, it's just like, it's normal to open your front door? It's normal for human beings to look at other human beings?

Yes, I am an oldie. so I obviously think that many things I read on here are ludicrous!. My favourite modern term now, is snowflakey people who have no sense.and are just products of modern life as it is now.

I am always getting told off for stating my antiquated views on life, but hey ho, I don't have any problems with that.

I think a good proportion of the population don't have common sense and this has always been the case.

I don't think it's getting worse.

I know a woman in her 60's who has only ever turned left when she's driving (if she needs to go right she takes three left turns) because she doesn't like crossing traffic.

That's one example but I know plenty of older generations who don't have common sense....it's not some new 'millennial' thing.

Oh I know plenty of dippy people my age.

I'm still up and still crabby.

@MaidenMotherCrone still up? Haven’t you overlaid? You said in your 1st post you had to be up at 4:00am

To be honest, people asking questions are the least annoying in my opinion.

It's the ones that have no common sense, but are so convinced they are right, they dont bother asking. They concern me more.

Just like the man sticking his head out of the train. When I heard that my first response was 'why would you need a sign saying dont do that'

In Maldon in Essex there used to be a lovely boating lake.

One night a drunken fool decided to go swimming in the middle of the night and he drowned.

So they shut it all off and made it a nature reserve!

Years of people enjoying the lake and swimming in it sensible during the day and one moron has to spoil it for everyone.

Common sense is common 😂 your completely right OP.

I think that the number of people lacking common sense hasn’t changed over the last 60 years, but the response to their ignorance has. It used to be seen as their problem, along with the consequences. Now either someone else is to blame, or the problem has to be fixed to protect the dim. No responsibility from the subject is expected.

Absolutely we’ve created a nation of neurotics.

The company being fined because an idiot stuck his head out a window is ludicrous. They had a sign just not sufficiently prominently displayed. One rather suspects he’d have ignored the sign anyway.

We hire a lot of graduates at my company and generally take the highest performers. These people are fresh out of uni and obviously clever as they have good degrees, but goodness me, some of them don't have an ounce of common sense between them! It astounds me sometimes that someone can have high intelligence (or is it good memory?) but no sound judgement for practical matters.

Totally agree. Some of the threads on here have me with my mouth dropped in amazement. It's like you can't run your life without the opinion of what to do from a bunch of strangers on the internet.

It's the ones who say 'should I have said something?' that get me. Bloody yes, say something!!!

I think a lack of common sense goes along with a lack of common decency, everything is a bit skewed at the moment on that front. There are a lot of people devoid of knowledge of all things 'ethical'. Is it down to some parents avoiding conflict with their children when a straight yes or no is what's needed? Are they too busy satisfying the needs of their children and then when those children are adults they're throwing stones at ambulance workers. Because they can.

It hasn't changed.

I read the same comments in the autobiography of a WAAF office in the 1940s, I forget the exact quote but it was something like: "The girls coming to us had very little idea what to do about anything. It was very disheartening to have to instruct them in the smallest thing."

I think it just looks worse as one gets older, because as you go through life you learn common sense.

@BustedDreams I was still up as I hadn't been to sleep at all so technically I hadn't overslept.

I don’t think people have any less common sense - it’s just people didn’t used to be able to post on the internet about the daft things they thought. Every generation likes to think like this about the generation that comes after them, it’s just how the world turns.

Years of people enjoying the lake and swimming in it sensible during the day and one moron has to spoil it for everyone.

But there’s always been drownings in lakes. I think the problem here wasn’t the drunken idiot per se, but the thought process behind the decision to close the lake. Driven by fear of litegation no doubt.

Common sense eloped with morals, never to be seen again.

" Is it being bred out of us with each passing generation? Are people losing the ability to think for themselves?"

Yes. And yes.
More and more third parties are being made responsible for a person's stupidity, which made it acceptable to generally expect that it's the job of others to prevent oneself from being harmed.
Which, in turn, makes people think less and less for themselves.

It started in the USA and swapped over the Atlantic into the UK and now makes its way towards mainland Europe.