To think people are more selfish than ever before?

[LosAmigos]

I went to the theatre this evening. The show was wonderful, but people made me mad. There was a woman with two teenage girls behind me and the woman and one of the girls were frequently talking.

Woman sat next to me, constantly rustling a bag of sweets throughout. She also couldn't seem to sit still in her seat. After she had finished the Haribo, she pulled a bag of something crunchy out.

Also, while I am having a rant, there's not a public transport journey I take where someone isn't talking with their phone on speakerphone or they're playing music/media out loud without headphones.

Because the cinema sells them. Public transport generally don’t. I worked in a cinema for years. We sold hot dogs. The expectation was that people who bought them would eat them, not stick them in a tub and save them for when they get home. Same with the nachos. They stink and are messy (cleaned plenty of them off the floor in the cinema) but they’re sold for customers to eat.

I had a bag ruined (thankfully not an expensive one) because someone had left a hot food tray containing barbecue sauce under my seat.

@WildFlowerBees I agree. I use public transport often, until recently I always offered a seat to anyone who appeared frail, elderly or with mobility issues. Now, even the priority seats are taken by people who in many cases are absolutely able to find a seat elsewhere, or even to stand! I’m knocking on a bit now, and have a (hopefully temporary) mobility issue, so don’t stand too well.

It was a no brainer to my generation, and even my children’s generation. I think we were foolish to expect the same courtesy might apply now we’re getting old.

We went to the cinema recently and someone was vaping throughout the film. A lady near us who was with her teenage daughter asked them to stop and got a barrage of abuse and they then continued to purposely turn around and vape over her, as well as receiving phone calls and putting their torch on their phone. I went to look for an attendant as they were getting increasingly intimidating and aggressive but there wasn't a single person there and it's a large cinema. Me and Dh walked back to the ladies car with her because the youths had threatened her saying 'we'll see you outside'. It was a depressing experience.

Rudeness has always been about.

But, I actually think there's been a real wave of insular and inward thinking over the past decade - Brexit, covid, the popularisation of right wing "autonomy" based sentiment. I also think we can't underestimate the social impact of now teenagers and covid isolation. A lot of them will have missed out on essential social fine tuning at a really important time in their development.

We were always taught to show kindness to others, give up your seat for someone older/less mobile. Hold the door open for the next person etc. It feels as though there's been a big shift in parenting, a generation that wants to be different and in doing so have provided us with some very unkind people.

However there are still some really lovely folk in the world. I hope I'm one of them! 😬

I assumed that the bad behaviour in public places was a pathetic attempt at ‘sticking it to the man’. Being rebellious by putting your feet up on the train seat or playing your music loudly on the train instead of wearing earphones. Yeah, that’ll show the establishment, eh? How depressing if that’s what rebellion now looks like!

I told a woman on a train to London, in the quiet coach, to stop swearing (she was having a long conversation on speaker and the air was blue with the worst words. After fifteen minutes I could stand no more of it). She was outraged. OUTRAGED. Luckily for me a couple of blokes sitting nearby backed me up, but she told the person on the other end of the conversation that I was ‘a psycho’. How I laughed!

Years ago (like prob 20 years ago) I was sitting on a packed tube. Lots of people standing. I noticed a heavily pregnant woman and made eye contact with her and got up to offer her my seat. Almost out of nowhere and before I'd properly moved out of the way a man barged across and sat in it. I was completely taken by surprise, and am very shy, so I didn't say anything.

There's no better visual representation of people's growing selfishness in recent years than the increasing amount of dog dirt on the pavements. We seemed to have a decade or more where you just didn't see it. Now it's everywhere.

Dog shit was everywhere when I was a kid, it wasn’t an offence not to pick it up then, and it was white!!!

It’s definitely now focussed around the individual rather than basic societal manners. How many threads explain away shitty behaviour as ‘oh, maybe they’re SEN’ when it’s just very likely they’re an arsehole with no special needs. Or kids are taught that their feelings are paramount because to put them in perspective or say they’re not as bad as X or Y is ‘minimising’ or ‘not understanding how it affects them’.

I had an experience on the tube a few years back with teenagers swearing in front of small children. I asked them to stop, politely.

They squared up to me and invited me off the tube. This was ridiculous and I told them so. In the end they backed down and said I was picking on them. Pathetic.

It is to do with upbringing- really. These kids were never given boundaries and their default is aggression. That is on their parents because most people I meet day to day are polite, still.

It's a mixture of people being selfish and having no manners. It was not always like this.

Even walking down a pavement people in groups "bully" a single person or a couple into submissive behaviour - it's a "get out of my way or I'll bash in to you" mentality.

People with dogs think their dogs are more important than another pedestrian walking towards them too!

No one says "excuse me" when they invade your space by walking right in front of your face. They just do it.

Yes it was everywhere when I was a kid too.

My point was we just went through a golden period where we hardly saw it anywhere. There were a good few years where the majority of dog owners picked up the mess. We now seem to be going the other way. I saw white dogshit for the first time in decades last year.

It's not just here either, I have family who moved to the Netherlands post-Brexit and it's something they've noticed over there recently too.

I have voted Yabu as people have always been like this. People like to imply that young people are more selfish and unaware of social rules, but when I got off the train once with a buggy and the gap between the train and the platform was too big, the kids in their late teens or early twenties were offering help while the older people walked by or glared at me. I'm 41 and was quite (wrongfully) shocked that it was like that. If I've been sold or someone has attempted to be sell me something that is second hand that turns out to be a pile of shit it is always an older person too, however I do think that rudeness and a lack of courtesy affects all generations. It annoys me that people blame younger people when age has nothing to do with it.

If it boils down to a lack of discipline in homes and schools as pp have said then it has been going on a very long time.

I have been saying this for a while now and the place it's most visible is on the roads. I don't know if it's because many people stopped driving during quarantines so they're out of practice, or whether people got too used to driving on empty roads, or whether people's collective patience is just shorter now.

Whatever the reason, not a day goes by where I don't see selfish, arsehole-ish or downright dangerous driving. 90% of people seem to have forgotten that you should indicate when exiting a roundabout! So many people driving aggressively, tailgating, not indicating, cutting across me from the wrong lane without a signal before or apology after. Three times I've nearly been T-boned on a roundabout because someone has sped along and not even paused at the give way to notice that I was already driving round

I'm not making any generalisations here but my experience, certainly recently, has been that the most entitled, rude behaviour I've seen has come from people my parents' age (60+) - and indeed my own parents, who singlehandedly perpetuate the "entitled Boomer" stereotype at every opportunity.

Whereas I recently got on a busy train with my walking stick and the only person who offered me a seat was a man of about 25. Last week I was in a shop, a group of young guys came into the same aisle and one was swearing a lot. His mate saw me, elbowed him and told him to stop swearing. I recently bought a chair from Dunelm and was struggling to get it out of the trolley and into my car when a young woman (20ish?) ran over to help me.

Obviously my study uses a small sample and is full of confirmation bias, though

Honestly, I think it's a British thing and I don't know why people are like that.

I get very headmistressy around people like this. I have in the past turned to people in the theatre and said, 'Shut up, I'm here to hear the actors speaking, not you.'

On trains, I just move to a different carriage.

I'm glad you posted that. My heart sinks when I come on to these threads and it is just a lot of people churning out the typical young person stereotype without engaging their critical thinking skills and asking themselves if that stereotype is actually true. I expect many of them are bots anyway.

I've seen young people behave like prats and be rude too, but it seems that generation gets the flack for all sorts of problems (and they forget the parents who raised them, and then who raised their parents!). I'm not saying different generations don't have differences, but they all have strengths and weaknesses and I think selfishness is evident in all generations.

I agree that people "appear " ruder and less considerate, but in my opinion it's just that society changes and I am showing my age by letting it get to me. Do I believe it was better before, yes, obviously 😆, was it necessarily, the majority of this newer generation clearly doesn't think so!
I think that there are downsides to this very self centred society, which I personally can for see, but there were equally downsides to how things were done say 50 odd years ago. Different downsides to different people.

Sort of agree with @amusedbush - young people have always been a bit selfish and arseholey in their nature, but usually grow out of it and cringe a bit looking back at their teenage behaviour. When I see a group of teens who think theyre gods gift because they’re vaping on a street corner and can’t be arsed to move for anyone else I try to remind myself I was once a bit like that 😬 but not any more I hope.

I think it's got worse. Increasingly on public transport people play music or FaceTime at full volume. But if we don't stand up to it (and I appreciate there are times it doesn't feel right or safe to do so) it will continue. I was on a bus recently and a woman in front of me was FaceTiming her friend at full volume on her phone. I'd just finished a long shift and it was right in my face. And I was so tired I'd had enough. So I asked her whether she had any headphones. She said no. Then she angrily shouted at me that she had paid for her ticket so she was entitled to do it! I told her we'd all paid and no-one else wanted to listen to it so turn it off. She stormed upstairs. And everyone else downstairs on the bus cheered. Several people said thanks to me.

People are thoughtless but they don't like being pulled up on it. And if you don't do anything then they get to do what they like and other peoples lives are made miserable.

We were half way through a meal in a restaurant when a child of about 8 at the next table started to watch a film on an iPad without headphones. The staff said nothing even though several people were looking over in disbelief. I called the manager over and told him that if they didn't ask them to turn the sound off we would be leaving immediately and not paying our bill for the food and drinks we'd had so far. Immediately the people behind us said the same. They asked them to stop. But they wouldn't have done if no-one said anything.

I'm pretty meek and mild but I've honestly had enough of putting up with other people's shitty behaviour.

Society constantly shifts between favouring the needs of the collective over the needs of the individual and back again. Wars usually mean we have to put the collective needs ahead of the individuals'. Fast economic growth favours the individual.

It's all about consumption, our rights, what we "want" at the moment. It drives consumerism. Things like the NHS were set up to support the collective. We all pay, we all have access to health when we need it. everyone treats it with respect. And not everyone gets everything they want all the time. (Whereas if you pay, you can)
If everyone thinks they should be treated for everything and anything and complains if they don't get it - the system crumbles.

Same with public transport - it has to work for everyone. That means we all pay, we can all use it, we all stick by the rules so it's comfortable. But if people treat it like their own private carriage it won't work for all. And if they stop paying because it doesn't suit them - it becomes unsustainable.
The "I've paid for my theatre ticket so I should be allowed to do what I want" only works if you've paid enough to have the place to yourself.

(And I'm more likely to experience twattish behaviour from older rather than younger people. The twenty somethings I encounter are really doing their absolute best to navigate quite a shitty world.)