To think that social standards have slipped because people don’t feel shame anymore?

[ForBreezySloth]

It feels like over the last couple of decades, a lot of social standards have gone downhill - not just in how people behave in public but in how they present themselves, how they speak to others and even basic manners.

It used to be that certain things were considered embarrassing and that kept people in check. Now, it’s almost like there’s a pride in being shameless. Noisy phone calls in public, wearing pyjamas to the shops, blasting personal drama online - there’s no sense of “maybe I shouldn’t do this.”

I’m not saying people should live in fear of judgement but has the pendulum swung too far? Has losing a sense of shame made society worse?

I can’t relate or say I’ve noticed this, no. The only times I can recall hearing people talking loudly in public on speaker phone tends to be people from other countries and so probably more of a cultural thing than ‘lack of shame’.
I think for the most part that people are good. Could this be rose tinted glasses? Pretty much every generation has similar to say about the generation below them.

Yes. Pride is definitely lacking across the board.
In work I have noticed a huge difference in the last decade, there is a fine line between casual and sloppy.

Moral panic trumps! If you find yourself complaining about the next generation its because you've just realised your generation is becoming less relevant. I blame ITV and E numbers.

Oh.

I agree ^

YANBU OP.

Yes, exactly. I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s not about wanting everyone to be repressed or robotic, just that some basic courtesy seems to have slipped. It does feel like a swing away from the ‘stiff upper lip’ days but maybe we’ve overcorrected a bit?

I think a large problem is that people dont take responsibility for themselves anymore. Their problems are always 'someone else's fault'. Obviously in some cases that will be true but in the majority people need to take accountability for their own actions and the outcomes they bring. Im talking about myself here to, i am quite capable of being all 'woe is me' if i let myself!

Yeah I’ve noticed just even normal politeness has slid. You can lay that at societies feet but ultimately it’s on each individual to decide to be better. Even if society is a bloody dump I don’t think I’d change my behaviour, be a bit warier perhaps but politeness and civility are usually ingrained throughout childhood. My 5yr old automatically says thank you in shops, restaurants etc. Not a perfect child by any means but you usually know how to behave because someone bothered to teach you. We need to stop pathologising every little thing as being the fault of “society”. We are society.

Yeah you might be right that some of it is cultural/generational perception. I’m not saying people today are worse, just that what used to be considered embarrassing behaviour now seems more… normalised. Maybe it’s not always about shame but just how the boundaries of public behaviour have shifted, and I guess I’m wondering if we’ve lost something useful in that shift.

Yes I agree and I think I remember the point at which it turned; The Millenium or just after.

I'd just turned 30 and I'd lived a good and free-spirited life and considered myself worldly but I just remember feeling slightly uncomfortable with each passing year as more and more things seemed to become, if not acceptable, then not banned or forbidden.

I remember in 2001 (I think), the new Renault Megan being advertised with that song - "I see you baby, shaking that ass." I remember thinking that "ass" would never have been allowed on TV before the watershed.

I also remember the antics of the housemates in Big Brother during the first few years - does anyone remember Kanga (I think it was?) pleasuring herself on the lawn with a wine bottle? That was a first.

Then we had the rise of the rap music videos with near naked women and expletives used as punctuation... and then we had the explosion of pole dancing and lap dancing clubs - I remember driving past a gym and being able to watch women in bikinis upside down on poles. I think it was an age of excess, culminating in the financial crash where most people lost their shirt ... except the bankers who were bailed out as a reward for bad behaviour. Being good and decent didnt seem to count for much any longer.

I definitely think that TV/film/music has a huge impact on people.

Perhaps but modern culture and what is socially acceptable is constantly shifting. What would society have said in the early 1900s about you walking around in trousers?
Now I’m thinking about it, I think society evolves more than we realise!

There are a lot of improvements with life today, I wouldn't want to have grown up in the world that my mother did; manners are for shit when there's no equality.

Maybe a bit of shame is a good thing though if it encourages people to pick up after their dog or take their rubbish home or refrain from cutting their toenails on the train. I drove up the A9 today, they’ve not long cut the grass and there is miles of shredded plastic rubbish.

Littering is such lazy, selfish behaviour. I think you should feel shame/ guilt.

Sure, let's go back to the shaming of yester year. More homosexuals must be beaten up, lose their jobs and be jailed just for loving someone of the same sex! Any female teenager or grown woman who dares to have sex before marriage must be packed off to a mother and baby home to have their child forcibly removed after birth. After all, her parents and employers will be too ashamed to have her back! Any man who is ashamed of his wife can have her forcibly committed to an asylum for daring to disagree with him! Corsets must of course make a comeback because it is shameful for a waist to not be so small that you pass out if you try to take more than a few steps!

If seeing pyjamas in tesco are the price we have to pay for the progress we have made, I'll take it.

The bleeping lime bikes and people just pushing through the gates at train stations. Jumping fares used to be the reserve of kids and scallies but if you watch at my local station, which is a nice area, it's about 1 in 3 people don't pay. No attempt to hide it either. I saw someone the other day walk up and ask to be let through and kind of shitty that they wouldn't allow it.

It's the lack of consequences rather than strictly lack of shame I think. This is also evident in the way people shoplift now, no more is it a sly crime carried out by people too scared to get into real crime, now it's a blatant and comes with explicit or implied violence.

It's just the standards we've imported, boundary erosion and having to accept whats not acceptable in our culture and not expecting people to fit in with our values manners and our society.
And since the three years of lockdowns everything has gone to hell tenfold and even some of the civilised people started behaving like animals.

I think you’ve captured the shift really well. That sense of gradually feeling more and more out of step with what’s considered ‘normal’ now really resonates. I agree that media, especially reality TV and music culture in the early 2000s, played a big part. It was like the rise of ‘anything goes’ and if you pushed back, you were seen as uptight or outdated. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with freedom, but like you said, when being decent stopped seeming to matter… that’s when things really started to shift.

Shame is a bad thing. How many people spend years dealing with it in all kinds of therapy etc?

i can’t really relate to your example, i am
an adult who owns my actions. I don’t just do things then feel immediate shame

But that doesn’t really make sense. If you’re saying that our society is crumbling due to immigration then how can lockdown, when people physically couldn’t come here, possibly be related?

But a lot of what you talk about was perfectly acceptable int he 80’s and 90’s.

But people didn’t wear pyjamas to Tesco and abuse everyone.

Yeah maybe it is less about decline and more about evolution, even if it feels uncomfortable in the moment. It’s easy to see changes as slipping standards but you’re right - trousers for women would’ve once been scandalous and now we wouldn’t think twice. Maybe what we lose in formality we gain in freedom… though I still think we need a bit of shared decency to keep things liveable for everyone.

They're just racist

I think shame about some things actually helps hold societies together. Not about things like menstrual blood or kids’ behaviour, for example, but about spitting, or bringing fetishes outside, or not picking up your dog’s poo. Those are things which people should be ashamed of doing, but it’s as if we now don’t have to think at all about how our behaviour affects other people. As an example, the past few summers where we live we’ve been plagued by people playing music really loud, at concert level, with huge rigs, so that it’s clearly audible even inside and there’s no point trying to listen to anything else. That never used to happen, it was only ever a small speaker, never at ridiculous levels, never all night long. It’s not life threatening but it’s miserable for everyone else, and when people ask them to turn it down they seem to do it more, deliberately (I have actually seen one group set up right near one particular house on purpose to upset them because they asked them not to play the music so loud). It’s a small rural community but nobody seems to have any way of persuading this group to respect other people’s right to “quiet enjoyment” or whatever the phrase is, and there’s no social sanction either like there might have been once upon a time.

I think we live in a society now of very much ‘Every man for himself’

Even under Thatcher it wasn’t like this. People were still polite and considerate in public.

Because with every generation we move more towards an “anything goes” mindset.

We are now at a point where we celebrate adult men in animal fetish gear interacting with children at Pride marches. Pride being the opposite of shame, of course.