Our Changing Lifestyle: Trends and Fads

1 These days, lifestyles have a tendency to change so fast. It is more than just clothing and hairstyles that are in style one year and out of date the next; it's whole ways of living.

2 One year, people wear hats and blue jeans; they drink white wine and eat at Japanese restaurants; for exercise they run several miles a day. The next year, however, everything has changed: Women wear long skirts; people drink expensive water from France and eat at Italian restaurants; everyone seems to be exercising at health clubs.

3 Almost nothing in modern life gets away from the influence of fashion: Food, music, exercise, books, language, movies, furniture, and even names go in and out of fashion. The interests that people follow can change very quickly.

4 In the United States, even people can be "in" or "out." Americans enjoy following the lives of famous people: actors, sports heroes, well-known artists, politicians, and the like. But Americans also pay a lot of attention to people who have no special ability at all. In 1984, for example, an unknown elderly woman appeared in a TV advertisement in which she looked at a very small hamburger and complained loudly, "Where's the beef?" These three words made her famous. Suddenly she appeared in magazines and newspapers, and on TV shows. She was immediately popular. She was "in." However, this kind of fame does not last long. Such people are famous for a very short time, hence it is called a fad.

5 What causes a fad to come and go? Although some clothing designers influence fads in fashion because they want to make money, this desire for money doesn't explain fads in other cases, or in other areas such as language. For example, why have teenagers in the past decades used—at different times—the word awesome in conversation instead of simply saying wonderful? According to an expert in popular culture, people who follow fads are not foolish or vain; they simply want to be part of something new and creative.

6 Fads are not limited to a particular country like the United States or any country that has a strong economy. Fads can be found everywhere. However, in the United States, there is an additional reason for fads: Most Americans seem to feel that something is wrong if there isn't frequent change in their lives.

7 It's sometimes difficult to see the difference between a fad and a trend. A fad lasts a very short time and is not very important. A social trend, however, survives a long time and becomes part of modern culture. The use of the Internet, for example, is a trend; a fad, on the other hand, could be the use of certain types of online games.

8 Who knows what changes in lifestyle will happen next?