Having Seen Enough Fads Come and Go, Our Generation Knows How This Ends

Fads have existed in popular culture for thousands of years, but something about the American experience turned them into a national pastime. The country has always had an appetite for novelty, and the combination of mass production, widespread advertising, and a culture that genuinely believes the next great thing is just around the corner created the perfect conditions for crazes to take hold. Think back across your own decades. The hula hoop in 1958. Mood rings in the 1970s. Parachute pants in the 1980s. Each one arrived with the breathless energy of a genuine revolution and departed without so much as a goodbye. According to historians at History.com, the advent of the internet has spread fads faster than ever before — but it has also shortened their lifespans considerably. The very speed that makes a trend go viral today is the same force that burns it out before the next season arrives. What your generation carries that younger people simply don't is a mental catalog of endings. You've seen the last CB radio gathering dust in a garage sale box. You remember when Rollerblades were the future of personal transportation. That catalog isn't nostalgia — it's data.

In 1975, a marketing executive named Gary Dahl sold 1.5 million ordinary rocks — packaged in a cardboard box with air holes and a care manual — for $3.95 each. He made roughly $15 million in six months. The pet rock is the textbook example of the fad lifecycle in its purest form: a clever hook, a wave of media coverage, mass adoption driven by social pressure, and then near-total collapse once the novelty wore off. The Industrial Revolution set the stage for all of this. As Greg Daugherty wrote for History.com, the era "didn't just transform production. It helped create a market for fads." Cheaper goods, mass-circulation magazines, and new communication technologies meant that a craze could spread from coast to coast in weeks rather than years. The playbook that produced the pet rock is the same one behind fidget spinners, NFTs, and whatever wellness gadget is being promoted this month. Explosive buzz, a window of social pressure where everyone seems to have one, then a rapid retreat once the next shiny thing arrives. The script is older than television, and it has never needed a rewrite.

Before social media influencers, there were infomercials. The Veg-O-Matic debuted in 1963 and became one of the first products to turn television into a direct sales machine, with Ron Popeil's breathless demonstrations creating a sense of urgency that felt genuinely new at the time. It wasn't. Mail-order catalogs had been manufacturing desire and scarcity since the 1880s, and carnival barkers had the pitch perfected long before that. The Home Shopping Network launched in 1982 and refined the formula further — countdown clocks, limited quantities, hosts performing barely contained excitement over cubic zirconia jewelry. Every element was engineered to make the viewer feel that hesitation was a mistake. That same architecture is exactly what powers TikTok trend cycles today, just delivered at a faster speed and through a smaller screen. What's changed isn't the psychology — it's the delivery mechanism. The fear of missing out that once required a television set and a toll-free number now fits in a pants pocket and pings you at midnight. Recognizing the machinery behind the excitement is the first step to not getting swept up in it, and your generation has had decades of practice at exactly that.

Here's the counterintuitive part: not every trend that gets mocked as a fad actually fades. The microwave oven was dismissed as a kitchen novelty when it was introduced to consumers in the late 1960s — too expensive, too strange, too much like a gimmick. Today, roughly 90 percent of American homes have one. Jogging was widely considered a passing health craze in the early 1970s, something that serious people would eventually abandon. Instead, it spawned an entire industry and reshaped American ideas about fitness. Dance marathons of the 1930s are remembered as a Depression-era oddity, but they also reflected something real — a need for community, endurance, and distraction during hard times. The 1920s flapper culture looked like pure rebellion and novelty, but it was tangled up with genuine shifts in women's voting rights and workforce participation. The style faded; the underlying changes did not. The skill isn't dismissing every new thing as a fad. It's learning to distinguish between the ones riding pure hype and the ones attached to something that actually changes how people live. Your generation has enough examples of both to make that call with considerably more confidence than someone who's only been watching for a decade.

Walk through any kitchen appliance aisle and you'll find air fryers stacked three deep, each one promising to change the way you cook forever. Social media is full of 75 Hard challenges, cold plunge tubs, and whatever superfood is being credited this week with reversing every ailment known to medicine. The packaging is new. The pattern is not. The Thighmaster sold 10 million units in its first two years on the market in the early 1990s. The George Foreman Grill moved 100 million units worldwide. Olestra-based snack foods were going to revolutionize the potato chip. Each one arrived with genuine momentum and the cultural weight of celebrity endorsement — and each one eventually found its way to a garage sale table. As April White noted in Smithsonian Magazine, "The United States invented the teenager in the mid-20th century — and then teenagers reinvented the nation, repeatedly." Every new generation believes its moment is genuinely different, that this time the craze is real. And sometimes it is. But the odds, as your experience confirms, favor the garage sale.

When the Segway launched in 2001, it arrived wrapped in extraordinary hype. Early previews suggested it would replace the automobile and reshape cities. Early adopters paid up to $5,000 for the privilege of owning one. Within a decade, the Segway had become shorthand for misplaced confidence — a fixture of mall security patrols and tourist rentals, not the transportation revolution its promoters promised. Betamax players, LaserDisc systems, HD DVD, Google Glass — the list of expensive early adoptions that didn't pan out is long enough to fill a textbook. In each case, waiting six months to a year would have either saved the buyer a significant amount of money or revealed that the product was going to disappear before a replacement was even needed. The wait-and-see instinct that your generation developed — partly from experience, partly from having been burned before — is a genuine financial strategy, not just caution. Prices on real innovations drop as production scales up. Products that were always more hype than substance simply vanish. Either way, patience pays. The person who waited two years to buy a flat-screen television paid a fraction of what early adopters spent for a better product. That math repeats across nearly every product category.

There's a version of generational skepticism that gets mistaken for being out of touch. Someone who's seen enough fads arrive and depart doesn't rush to buy the latest kitchen gadget or download the newest social media app, and younger observers sometimes read that as resistance to change. What it actually is — is pattern recognition that took decades to build. Younger generations are living through their first or second major technology cycle. They haven't yet watched a format they invested in become obsolete, or seen a diet revolution quietly vanish from the grocery store shelves. That experience changes how you evaluate claims. It doesn't make you immune to new things — it makes you better at asking the right questions before committing. The Smithsonian has documented how each generation reshapes culture through its own enthusiasms — and how those enthusiasms look different in hindsight than they did in the moment. What your generation brings to that story is the hindsight itself, earned in real time. The ability to watch something arrive with enormous fanfare and quietly ask, "But will it still be here in ten years?" — that's not a limitation. That's one of the most useful things a person can carry.