I’ve been reading a lot of history about the American Revolution, and one consistent feature in all the high-minded declarations is a reverence for earlier generations and a strong hope for future ones. Most of the discontent was reserved for the present leaders, which is to say that they were mostly mad at themselves and their peers.
It’s an unfortunate byproduct of our postmodernism that we now seem to view our preceding generation as to blame for all of societies ills and look to succeeding generations with, if not contempt, at least pity. The Gen-Xers I know have taken square aim at the Boomers, and Millennials like myself can’t seem to stop ourselves from pointing out that Gen X kids all had their brains rocked by lead from antiquated gasoline.
At the same time, I have more than once mumbled that “Gen Z is soft” to another Millennial, and wondered aloud if the Pandemic had forever broken their collective will to contribute to society. It’s all nonsense, of course. My cerebellum is probably full of microplastics and my organs have been poisoned by the artificial ingredients put in my cereal during the peak of food science.
Monterey Car Week has become a weird cauldron of all generations, as enthusiasts of every age crowd into the same small peninsula to gawk at cars. After last year’s brief mayhem, there was a growing sense that this was going to be the year Car Week exploded, and everyone already decided who’d they’d blame: the Broccoli Heads.
What Is A Broccoli Head?
I barely use TikTok and am generally unaware of what is fashionable for younger people. I’m generally unaware of what’s fashionable for people my age, if I’m being totally honest. This is not a bad thing. I shouldn’t know why so many young men have the same haircut. It’s none of my business.
You can see it in the photo above, and there’s a good description from a salon here:
The broccoli head haircut, also known as the “bird’s nest” or simply “the perm,” is characterized by voluminous, tightly curled hair on top of the head, often with shorter sides. The name comes from its resemblance to the top of a broccoli floret. This style has gained immense popularity among young men and boys, particularly through social media platforms like TikTok.
As far as looks go, this seems fine. My generation’s equivalent was either frosted tips or a sort of ramen noodle pompadour so who am I to judge, really?
The broccoli head haircut may not be the preference of every young man, but it’s seemingly the choice of any kid with a camera within 200 miles of Car Week. They were everywhere last year and they’ve only multiplied in the last 12 months. If your business involves making the machines that give people perms, I’m assuming you’re a trillionaire by now.
Also, I asked around, and calling someone a Broccoli Head doesn’t seem offensive or pejorative, though if you say it with a sort of Robert Pattinson-in-The-Odyssey hard b then it maybe could be. Just assume I’m saying it with a soft b.
Fear Of A Permed Planet
This is the year it was all going to explode. Those were the rumors. That was the vibe. An old man in a Packard was going to crash into a kid with a Sony A6400 trying to grab a photo of a Koenigsegg and someone was going to beat someone else to a pulp.
I think the sense of what was about to happen is best captured by Instagram commenter Angeles Death Highway:
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There was a decent amount of intergenerational drama on display in this very fake AI video, which was then followed by this video about influencers. Resident Kate Novoa, who runs the blog Big Sur Kate, shared this post on Facebook, which was widely shared:
I think going into the week there was also a general fatigue on the part of locals that was entirely reasonable given there was a large wildfire in the days leading up to the event. The popularity of Car Week seems to have brought about as many people as the area supports, and it can be a strain on resources, even if it brings in money to the local economy, so I’m sympathetic to the residents.
The singling out of the kids taking photos of hypercars and supercars, though, does feel a little ageist. On A blog post from Big Sur Kate about the week, there was this predictable reaction:
I’m a boomer for sure. One of my first jobs was in a machine job rebuilding the heads and seating valves on small block Chevy engines. I can recite the cc’s, bore and stroke on just about every engine that came out of Detroit from 1958-1970. I love – LOVE – muscle cars. But I deeply despise what this event draws to our communities. These are not car buffs. Most are charlatans with ego’s attached to a $40,000 paint job.
90% of the car owners I spoke with wouldn’t know a carburetor from an incubator.
There is no one right way to enjoy cars, and if kids with cameras want to take photos of cars I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I met a bunch of these kids and they seemed enthusiastic about cars in a way that’s absolutely necessary if car culture is going to exist.
Leave The Broccoli Heads Alone
I am old enough to remember the wave of panic (or glee) attached to Millennials and our supposed lack of appreciation of cars. Here’s a typical column from USA Today in 2013 about how “Millennials reject car culture” that included this gem:
With online shopping, they have less need for cars to take them to malls. Smartphones take them to virtual hangouts with friends. Driving to the movies? Not in the age of Netflix. And when they’ve got to get somewhere, they avoid the hassle, cost — and pollution — of owning cars by relying increasingly on bicycles, public transportation and such hourly car rental services as Zipcar. Or they walk.
Maybe the worst was Elizabeth Rosenthal’s essay in the New York Times Sunday Review that implied it was the end of car culture (three years before America bought a record number of cars, btw):
The United States, with its broad expanses and suburban ideals, had long been one of the world’s prime car cultures. It is the birthplace of the Model T; the home of Detroit; the place where Wilson Pickett immortalized “Mustang Sally” and the Beach Boys, “Little Deuce Coupe.”
But America’s love affair with its vehicles seems to be cooling.
Guess what? We all got older, had kids, and bought cars. It was fine. We maybe bought more efficient cars than our parents, we may drive less because we can work online, but that’s a net good for society. What all these articles got wrong was that commuting does not equal enthusiasm. More people living in cities and not being forced to drive doesn’t mean they like cars less. If anything, not having to drive makes you like cars more as they seem like less of a burden.
I remember thinking my car culture looked too weird for older people to understand. It was blogs not magazines, Gran Turismo not Knight Rider, and R32 Nissan GT-Rs not Tri-5 Chevys.
Gen Z car culture does feel a little different for me, too. I’m a little less interested in hypercars. I use Instagram, though I think my Instagram algo probably delivers a different result (I’m guessing they get fewer Widow’s Bay memes and old Volvos).
You know what we do have in common, other than a predilection for older BMWs? We love gawking at cars. The least jaded people at Car Week were the BHP (Broccoli Head Patrol) and, also, maybe the least problematic. A common complaint is that everything has gotten too expensive and, while there are definitely kids there who have money, most of the young people I spoke with were staying an hour or more away. It was my generation, and older generations, buying all the expensive hotel rooms and driving the prices up for everyone.
By virtue of being in media, I also had passes to almost every event, which means I was constantly driving from Laguna Seca to The Lodge to downtown Carmel and back to Monterey. Most of the kids I saw found a corner to sit on and stayed there, which means if anyone was clogging up roads it was me.
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My biggest sense that the kids are all right came early in the trip. A big goal of mine was to grab footage of kids staring at our cars and, also, of driving by real, actual supercars. We connected with Gabby Downing who, despite not having a curly perm, is young and qualifies as an influencer. She wanted to film on 17-Mile Drive and I had a sense of exactly where I wanted to take her to film that would accomplish both our goals.
There’s a little outcropping just north of the golf course and it’s usually crowded with DSLR-toting young people as well as expensive exotics. Pulling in with our Autozam we passed an admittedly stunning yellow Pagani Huayra.
The kids, much to my delight, were excited to see the Autozam and, while not all of them knew exactly what it was, many of them did. Even those who didn’t grasp the joke-inside-a-joke of the car immediately appreciated it. Everyone there was respectful, calm, and willing to share space with our car. When we needed to film they gladly moved, which is not something I can say of everyone at Car Week.
Our friends at XPEL did a great job capturing the spirit in this reel:
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From the start of the week to the finish, nearly every encounter I had with a Gen Z/broccoli head/whatever was pleasant, whereas I saw more people closer to my age drive or act foolishly. I certainly saw way more older people act indifferent to the amazing cars on hand. Other than a little bit of jaywalking to catch a car, the average person under 25 seemed no more disrespectful of the rules than anyone else.
What the kids had, more than anyone, was enthusiasm. If you care about car culture, if you want there to be a future for car culture, then you have to accept that enthusiasm for cars is going to look a little different. The people are going to look a little different. They certainly look different from me.
I probably lack enough hair to be a broccoli head, though maybe I could pull off being a Broccolini Head.
Top photo: Griffin Riley
Yeah, well, I had a mullet so I got no room to talk.
Appreciate the message of this piece. I am dense, but it felt like the serious tone juxtaposed against the topic of broccoli cuts was also funnier the longer I read it
One of the big positives I’ve noticed nowadays in the car enthusiast space is that the reduction in enthusiast numbers has made people much more inclusive of all enthusiasts. There is a lot less of Ford only, Dodge only, 70s muscle car only etc etc and more of just appreciating people’s love of cars.
I never noticed this as it was happening, but you’re right. If someone in a new Supra pulls up next to someone in a new Nissan Z they’re much more likely to say “nice car” to each other instead of “your car sucks, should of bought one of these” like they would have 30 years ago.
This is probably a by-product of the older boomers aging out, and the virtuous circle of growth, where less assholishness begets more enthusiasm from the targets, and their friends.
Jeremy Clarkson may not be a sharp dresser, but the kids love his haircut.
In the 2nd pic down (3rd if you count the topshot. Or should I say 2th and 3st?) what is Jason thinking? Caption contest time!
“That sushi isn’t sitting well”
How do they know I’m not wearing any pants!?
STOP TAKING PICTURES!!!
“Don’t make a meme out of me!”
Dude, I’m so high I just saw a Cauliflower, no, an oak tree, no, a Broccoli take a picture of me.
Here’s how old I am: Broccoli Heads? I thought they were Said Heads. Anyway, if a young person thought I had a cool car I would only say thank you.
Fantastic deep cut. I used to have a Said Head sticker on my Mustang b/c it’s the same year as the (backup) one he used to clinch the Trans-Am championship.
I have a hard rule of not chasing down and bugging any well-known people I might bump into while traveling, but I always regretted not saying “hi” to Boris Said the one time I had the opportunity.
I am going reiterate a comment shared by others. People are people and will self sort using fashion, lifestyle, economic position and other things as metrics. I’ve been through and observed a dozen of these trends over the decades. Anyone over 30 can’t be trusted and WTH are those kids listening to wearing, eating, taking, saying, watching, and listening to. Peel back the attitude and bs and one can learn from older and younger generations. As to the cars, they’ve become astonishingly expensive. Tech has moved in to offer alternatives but as older generations have found, cars are fun and can be hacked and enjoyed. I think that the overall size of the car hobby group might be smaller in the past, but has adopted other motorized alternative to play with including bikes, quads, drones, RC, as well as traditional. Just my 30 cent take.
The first wheeled things after cars most kids enjoy is riding in shopping trolleys.
I’d assert it’s actually the baby carriage.
Could be?
Are they still in use?
I see some pretty large kids still riding in the basket, clearly enjoying the ride!
Enjoy it while you still fit, kids!
I can’t recall ever being in a carriage myself
I have vague and hazy memory’s of mall parking lot hooliganism involving shopping carts alcohol and racing of some sort.
On the subject of baby carriages, I see them in this area all the time, ranging from the humble dirt cheap Wally mart versions to the $1k bougie rides.
When I was that age, we never lived anywhere with sidewalks.
Maybe a factor?
Yep
The hair has evolved as a survival mechanism against ever-increasing truck hood heights, and poor sightlines. They’d have been long runover by their drunk uncles’ Ram2500 if not for the extra height it affords them.
The 90’s hightop would have the same effect.
It’s a revamp of the jazz hair in the 50s, also notably embraced by some specific gangsters, to this day in some places.
Having hired and employed thousands of people over a period of thirty five years I can tell you that….people are people and dividing and categorizing them subjectively by birth years is both unscientific and stupid.
Remember Mullets?
Not understanding “the youth” is basically an indication that you have stopped changing, but the world hasn’t. Your bubble is stuck in time and you are watching everyone else’s move forward.
“Not understanding “the youth” is basically an indication that you have stopped changing, but the world hasn’t.”
Not necessarily. As you get older, you can continue to change, but the circle of people you move with tends to be older. I’m in my 50s, and if I wanted to hang with the youths, I doubt they’d have me, unless they were being polite, and then it wouldn’t be authentic. Because I can’t spend my time with the youth, it makes it difficult to keep up on their trends and attitudes toward things. And that’s fine. I still can evolve my attitudes and beliefs, even without understanding why they behave the way they do. I have more and different experiences, but that doesn’t mean I’m stagnant.
Also, I’d rock a broccoli head, but no hair, so I can’t.
Yeah, I just get my ass in a knot over the whole “generations” line of bullshit. There are no “generations”..it’s just a long continuation of being a human being and reacting to your circumstances.
I also get pissed when people call something a “barrier”…like “The 200mph barrier”. It’s not a fucking barrier folks…
ok, back to my meds….
Agreed. We’re all just people making our way the best we can.
It’s an artificial barrier.
I’m part of some social dynamics that include people from around twenty to dead.
The younger folks often have lighter entertainment, but every individual is different.
I think you two have different meanings of “understanding”. I interpreted Vanillasludge’s “if you don’t understand” to mean “if you think they’re nonsensical”, whereas I think you took it to mean “if you can’t fully grasp their thought process”.
I can’t 100% understand what people like about genres of music that I don’t listen to, but I can understand that they have their reasons and that it makes sense to them. It seems that this is also how you feel about “the youth”, which I think counts as understanding them well enough.
Yeah, I think you’re right. I sort of realized that some time later.
You wanna kill the Broccoli Head trend? Show the kids pictures of men from the late 70s and early 80s, the last time a man perm was popular. That alone will have them shaving their heads.
Ah yes, the “poodle cut”.
Also, there were shags, mullets, the Farrah Fawcett look for all genders and I forget what else. Luckily, I don’t remember a lot of what I wore back in high school.
What I don’t get about the broc cut is that most everybody I knew had straight hair growing up so idk how they all have curly hair now
I was the only curly haired blonde guy in my entire high school. If I ever brushed or combed it when dry I looked like a Q-tip. I’ve had to live with this style of haircut my entire life or keep my hair cut short, so it’s odd to see people intentionally wanting to look like this. At the same time this haircut is invisible to me, I simply don’t even notice or think anything about it.
> it’s odd to see people intentionally wanting to look like this
As a fellow poodle head, I sympathize with this sentiment.
Humidity is higher!
“that implied it was the end of car culture (three years before America bought a record number of cars, btw)”
Just because someone buys a car does not make them a car enthusiast or part of “car culture” any more than I am a toaster enthusiast because I recently bought a toaster.
Obviously, that’s because you bought a boring toaster… 🙂
I also daresay that many of the people who bring supercars to these events and the broccoli heads who video them are not car enthusiasts either.
They’re show-offs and wealth enthusiasts.
2 of my coolest days were when I was unexpectedly overflown by a B2 bomber and then 5 years later a B1 bomber. I like planes a lot but I wouldn’t consider myself an enthusiast, more like enthusiast-adjacent. I also drove 2 hours round trip while I was in college because I heard that there was going to be a pre-production Z8 at an autocross I couldn’t participate in due to a very worn out wheel bearing I couldn’t afford to replace at the time. Sometimes it’s simply fun to see something you otherwise never would have. At the same time I also agree with you, I hate “car enthusiasts” that care only about how much it cost and how it’s supposed to make them look, not what’s special about it.
Which is why I refer to them as Wealth Enthusiasts.
It’s not about the object itself – it’s about publicly displaying an object they own and getting attention from that.
Why assume other people’s intentions?
Fairly easy to tell by the way they hold their phone on a stick.
This is part of why I became less active in the Koenigsegg spotting community, a community some might say I was the godfather of.
When I first started the Koenigsegg Registry, the company was not very widely known, and my focus was on finding and identifying the cars by VIN. Because to me the cars were the stars. Who owned them wasn’t important, in fact I went to pains to keep ownership details out of our data. Mostly to respect the owners’ privacy, but also because the cars were always going to outlive the stewardship of those who owned them at any given time.
Then Instagram bloomed into this whole thing, and suddenly owners could gain a ton of noteriety by splashing their new car all over their feed. Suddenly having the Koenigsegg seemed less important than the Koenigsegg itself. The types of people that were buying the cars changed from a knowledgeable enthusiast looking for something different and a little off the wall, to (in many cases) a younger guy who really wanted you to know he’d specc’ed his with gold leaf trim, months before it was even due to be completed.
It probably doesn’t help that I never really warmed to Instagram’s user interface, but the whole feel of Koenigsegg enthusiasm changed in a very short time, and I had no interest in following a bunch of IG fame seekers just to find out where the latest cars were.
To your point, it felt like wealth display was now the point, rather than a genuine interest in what Christian was doing and how special it was to do this at a rate of a dozen or so cars a year. The appreciation came from a place from which I wasn’t familiar.
FACTS, but people call you a gatekeeper.
IDGAF about your lease. 🙂
Yeah, but if you reflect a bit you will probably admit you’re a toast enthusiast. You did buy a toaster, right?
If he was a true toaster enthusiast, the toaster would be doing the reflecting for him.
Get polishing! I wanna be able to see myself in that toaster!
If I ever buy a toaster by Smeg, I might become an enthusiast myself. Check them out. https://www.smeg.com/binaries/content/gallery/smeg/categories/toaster_smeg_web_tsf02rdeu_2.jpg
I want to buy a cast-iron toaster of sorts,the ones you get now are too light and flimsy. I want sufficient pressure and good heat retention.
You maybe want a waffle iron? Or a panini press?
I have a good waffle iron actually,its a (goes to check in the kitchen)- Wilfa WDWA-516.I have never considered the need for a panini press. Will they be good for toast as well?
Heck if I know. I probably took your cast iron comment too literally, pictured crushing toast between two slabs of hot metal.
That is probably not a bad idea though.
Dualit is the answer. Every part is user-replaceable and feels like it: https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/dualit-new-generation-classic-2-slice-toaster/?catalogId=79&sku=2529451
I like the titanium models from behind the iron curtain, because racecar!
I’m actually a Gluten-Free* English Muffin enthusiast.
*because I’m allergic to Roundup. Which was also the name of a 2-door, six passenger 1958 Edsel wagon, of which only 963 were built.
I’ll always be here for enthusiasm.
Glad you did not say a vacuum cleaner enthusiast. God I went down that rabbit hole before and wound up buying the now ex-fiancé a 700 dollar vacuum hah
Ok, but have you considered joining the toaster enthusiast community? There’s no reason to not be enthusiastic and interested in it. Maybe get a nice restored vintage Sunbeam and see where that leads you?
I searched for years for a vintage Sunbeam, and eventually came across one in a thrift store. I re-wired and cleaned it and it worked flawlessly. what an awesome machine.
Tell us about the toaster dammit..
It’s a nice chrome Krups two slicer – and like many other things, I guess I’ve had it longer than I thought…
like this baby? https://www.kitchn.no/kjokken/kjokkenapparater/toastjern-og-bordgrill/krups-fdk-iconic-toastjern-850w-stal/
Ooooh – Mine is not Iconic
I like broccoli, but prefer broccolini actually. 🙂
How about broccoli rabe?
Delicious!
Wasn’t Broccolini an ill-fated Italian dictator?
“Millennials like myself can’t seem to stop ourselves from pointing out that Gen X kids all had their brains rocked by lead from antiquated gasoline.”
That’s ok. Most my fellow Gen Xers consider Millennials “Boomers 2.0”. Loud, self centered, and exhausting. Boomers without the money. 😉
Having interviewed, hired, and worked with lots of people the observation I made is 80% of people that graduated college between 2005 and 2015 are noticeably worse at so many things, but the 20% that isn’t like this outperform the best people from any other generation.
I think the main difference is a significant drop in being interested in how things work, which makes all sorts of troubleshooting or optimizing down the line very hard, but the ones that are interested seem to have a much deeper understanding than normal. I chalk this up to that being right around the time that the internet and wikipedia made it trivially easy to get a quick answer to almost any question removing the need to dive deep, but if you choose to dive deep there’s enormously more information available than what I had just 5 years earlier.
That is a great observation.
Not wrong about the internet stuff, but also I’d add that the systems they (er… we) were brought up in heavily rewarded speed and correct answers. We were the biggest standardized test generation. Winning the game wasn’t about deep thought or working hard, it was about getting a ton of surface level questions correct as fast as possible.
There is definitely something there. There are also always people that aren’t like bulk of their peers.
I wonder if it’s not part of people being pushed into technical careers that would have been better suited in other places.
I know an 80 year old nuclear / mechanical PE who used to tell me all the time how academia can’t create good engineers anymore. Some of the smaller state schools could but it was hit and miss and just dependent on the person. But he refused to hire from big schools especially anything remotely elite or ivy league. For him it was the the mid 80s when things changed. I wouldnt be surprised if the people before him had certain ideas along the same lines.
He put the people that actually had a clue at maybe 2%.
I think there are always some people that know what’s going on and always a lot more that don’t but will look right at you and claim they are experts.
That might be getting worse. Imposter’s syndrome is happening more and more across technical field. Might be a correlation.
I kind of agree and disagree on the ivy league thing… I’d say we’re 0/15 on MIT graduates, but 5/5 with Cornell graduates, and they are easily our best people. A degree makes no bearing in hiring someone, but I subconsciously trust a person with no degree or one from a crappy school more than a prestigious one. We do actively try to recruit people from Cornell though.
I’m the same with trusting no degree or random school and anything non business or liberal arts. Academia is loosing the business case for their services. With costs increases and getting less and less.
My friend that has a growing PE firm only hires kids with no degree with high aptitude. Trains them up and pays for them to do online classes. Sometimes gets in arguments with the professors who can’t pass the PE exam on behalf of the kids. He is thinking about going in with some other guys to create some private college to bypass academia all together.
Some places said that people that grew up without any three dimensional experience looked good on paper, but couldn’t grasp spatial concepts.
I tend to think it can still be acquired by experience.
The firms having trouble think almost anything real world helps develop those skills, but claim they have struggled to train that.
Issues like grasping blueprints and maps were mentioned, placing two things in the same space on plans.
The govts background support of technical and engineering dropped off after a certain point.
Apprenticeships got hit hard and academia tried to take over. That was a huge mistake. They should have been told to stay in their lane. It seems like apprenticeships are coming back with some government support.
Some people learn engineering because they want to be engineers, others have an interesting problem to solve and learn what they need to solve it. Both are valid. I was in the second group. One thing I discovered is that sometimes the difficulty is in defining a goal into discrete problems that engineers trained in depth know how to solve.
And then there are Scientists.
As long as they realize engineering is more then math and the program isn’t real life I think we will be ok. Some of the best engineers I’ve met spent time in the trades looking and doing. Off label uses always is my favorite things. That has overlap in most fields. Sometimes the most simple and cheap solution.
Exactly.
The thing I miss about using a research library is discovering that the next shelf over actually covers what I’m looking for but I didn’t know it existed. Notes written on cards in the card catalog were a godsend too. Once a Dewey decimal number on a card led me to a different approach that was much better.
As with any endeavor that technology makes easier, some people put less effort into achieving the same results, and a smaller group put the same effort into accomplishing much more than was previously possible.
Both approaches are fine, either you can gather vastly more food, or you can use the spare time to invent shoes. Or you can be a lazy bastard and invent wine.
Whatever.
Yep. My nieces are in this category. They have smartphones and do not understand that they’re for more than instagramming your restaurant meal.
The other issue is that hardly anyone is teaching information vetting anymore, which is a problem because information has never been less reliable.
My niece, who is 25, not 12, was talking enthusiastically about coexisting with mermaids a few years ago. I asked her what the hell she was on about, and it turns out she’d watched a “documentary” on the Discovery channel claiming that mermaids are real.
Had absolutely no clue that sometimes the media lies about shit. It was only half her fault because Discovery spent decades building a rep as a credible source of information about the natural world and then exploited it with the mermaid bullshit, but it showed that she has no ability to discern truth from obvious lies.
And then we wonder why a sizeable portion of the population still believes Obama let 9/11 happen on his watch and that Hillary Clinton raped and ate babies in the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn’t have a basement.
The gen z’s are interesting. Many of them are choosing to work with their hands and learn technical skills. Along with running away from technology. I see them having a lot in common with the silent generation. They are alright and will be fine. They want things that last they are sick of consumables. The gen z are already scared of the gen alphas. As long as we keep them on ebikes outside and modifying ebikes they should be fine too. Some of these kids have crazy 3d modeling skills and are printing things that has everyone looking.
As far as I can work out broccoli head is what was bro possibly a subset. I know my daughter, nieces and their friends say things like “he is just a broccoli head” or “oh no the broccoli heads are coming”. Seems very much the same reaction bros were given for their duration. Similarly they seem to travel in packs. Also seems to be lot of “bro, brah, brother” when they talk. Sometimes thats all you hear from them.
This resurgence of early 2000s style is also something. Some of them are walking around like boy bands used to. It’s all cyclical. They brought back those stupid glasses oval glasses and are all wearing but I guess they are less stupid then the strange bro glasses called pit vipers or something ignorant. They also have rebranded the tramp stamp as cake topper. So apparently those are back in. As is cruising, line dancing, mullets. But I don’t think the broccoli heads are involved in that. It’s like the greatest hits from the 4 generations before them.
Time your reproduction just right and the old clothes from your teen years will be back in style just in time for your kid(s) to wear them.
My sister is experiencing that with her daughters. She loves it? Also says it feels weird. They look at pictures of her and in her teens and 20s and want want she is wearing. They dig in her closet and boxes looking for old clothes. She is also buying the same clothes as them. Weird but not unique situation it seems.
Are you Abe Simpson?
“We all got older, had kids, and bought cars. It was fine.”
Some of us millennials bought too many cars and motorcycles!
I believe there’s an old saying regarding this.
“An Autopian writer buys neither too many vehicles nor too few vehicles. An Autopian writer buys precisely the correct amount of vehicles.”
You can calculate this by adding up the total available parking spots, add 3, then subtract 1 for every spouse / spawn.
I thought the max number of vehicles for an Autopian is half your age plus 7. So I think Mercedes has broken that rule.
I used to be with it! But then they changed what it was. And now what I’m with, isn’t it anymore. And what’s it is weird and scary to me.
It’ll happen to you.
I was saying “Boo-urns”…
While they’re mercifully fading, I do have a fair amount of lingering memories of my own life during those tumultuous adolescent and post-adolescent times and remember the pressure to look a certain way. It sucked.
That said, I still can’t help but chuckle when I see three young dudes wearing the same outfit AND the same haircut. I don’t remember wanting to be anyone’s daily doppelganger, but that’s just me.
A quiet revolution riding on the back of everyone having access to everything all the time seems to be the distilling of tastes, options and styles into fewer and fewer categories / options. Every new or flipped home has gray luxury plank vinyl flooring. Every car is grayscale. Every young man’s head is a broccoli.
Such is life.
It’s strange, but from what I’ve witnessed there is a consumer class. That just sort of consumes and follows trends. I guess the whole keeping up with the joneses idiom. My youngest sister told me about what she called “the uniform” close to 20 years ago. At that time it consisted of jeans and a North face fleece with ugg boots. Not long after the jeans were switched for leggings or those yoga pants. That must have gone on for close to a decade. It was one of those things once you were told about it you couldn’t stop noticing.
Their water containers also turned into a trend. And this consumer class is afraid of colors. It’s what they call “beige mom” everything washed out or German rainbow.
The houses in think people are scared to do things or don’t know how. Artists friends have told me there are so many people afraid of color now. They think they will get sick of color. You can get sick of the German rainbow too.
Beigecore has definitely been identified as a home interior design trend.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-beige-kids-decor-controversy-rocking-the-design-world
https://time.com/6247338/tiktok-beige-aesthetic-videos/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-beige-took-over-american-homes
Like everything else, it’ll pass and be superseded by another trend.
I just hope we don’t return to avocado bathrooms and appliances.
I like color, but please try again.
Avocado and orange are a bit much. But when we bought our house earlier this year, we made sure the walls weren’t boring, because life is too short for beige.
Our local “interior designer” Karen told my wife “Taupe is totes in” apparently color of the year or something. I gave up listening to their nonsense just as bad as the fashion people. She told me mauve was in last year.
But it seems like it’s always in with those psychopaths.
The moms that were spray painting their kids bright toys with muted colors because they didn’t fit their “beige mom aesthetics ” was a low point im not sure we have crawled out of yet.
My wife is an Architect and suffers a core dump anytime she gets advice from the Interior Design crowd on decors or design. Always takes a while to talk her down from committing murder or worse.
Oh yeah, they are worse if you have to deal with them professionally or remotely professionally for sure. I’ve gotten involved with them on projects in the past sometimes they even claim to be architects. I’ve seen actual architects go off on them. You normally have to show everyone why they are very wrong. They will just sit there and go well it would look better. They always want some trend they saw in a magazine that will look bad and get worse looking vs something functional and timeless. I don’t really understand why they are even a thing. Anytime they get involved it’s going to look terrible and cost way too much.
> The moms that were spray painting their kids bright toys with muted colors because they didn’t fit their “beige mom aesthetics ”
For real?
Yep, many of child development specialist and phycologist gasped and needed a drink.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjETtyE0pyo
Good think I’m 2/3 of the way into a drink myself.
A manic beige mom is young Karen who hasn’t unleashed the full Karen powers , God help us all. I feel bad for the kids development stunted because the toys “aesthetic” was off.
Thanks for this, Matt!
As a Certified Old(tm), I’ve seen a few changes. I’m also a vintage motorcycle enthusiast, and there is often concern over getting young people into the hobby. But what gets people excited seems to be the vehicles that were prevalent in their youth, so what motivates one generation might not do anything for another (as we have seen).
However, there can also be some generational overlap. I was at a massive event for vintage motorcycles recently and struck up a conversation with a 15-year-old who visited our club tent. He was learning how to ride off-road, and when I asked if he planned to get his license he replied with an enthusiastic “Yes!”. He can’t wait to get a street-legal bike and said he would probably go for something older that would be easier and less expensive to work on.
I don’t know if he qualified as a broccoli-head because he had his helmet sitting on top of his cranium like a crown, but there is some enthusiasm among the yutes even if it doesn’t look like what people might expect. 🙂
Older folks’ reactionary eye-rolling or finger-wagging gatekeeper bullshit towards younger generations is a very effective way to snuff any spark of interest the younger set may have had. And then of course The Olds pee and moan about how The Youts aren’t interested in The Cool Stuff We Care About.
Thanks for being cool to that kid 🙂
Much appreciated – I was happy to do it. He seemed like a good kid 🙂
Yeah, the gatekeepery is the worst. I don’t see a lot of that from the vintage motorcycle folks, which is nice: someone may focus on mid-1960s Triumphs but could be equally excited to see a nice Suzuki GS1100 or a Honda monkey bike.
So who is gonna watch the “Turd Fest 250” from DC today?
Not it, though I have to somehow get to work tomorrow through the detritus of it.
I don’t like the broccoli head look but I also never notice it on other people. This is entirely because since I was about 13 years old my only two options in life were to either cut the hair short or have a blond broccoli head afro that in my opinion looked stupid on me. Now that hair loss has set in I guess if I grow it out I’ll have a crusty the clown haircut, so short hair for life it is.
Hey HEY!! 😀
1. The kids are all right. They always are tbh. I think the post-modern shift you observe is because we recognize how modernism has sold the future for the now repeatedly. These kids are materially harmed by the (social)media landscape we’ve sentenced them to, but they’ll figure it out.
2. I need a breakdown of the differences between broccoli head and meet me at McDonald’s cuts.
Car culture will always survive, it’s a variant of tool autism. What it looks like will simply change. I’m sure boomers thought millennials gave up on cars because none of us care about stupidly over-valued tri-5s. Our tri-5 is the EK hatch.
Permed hair seems to be a fad that makes recurring appearances every few generations. That style has a moment every 30 years or so it seems although it may have repeated more frequently in prior decades. Who remembers the permullet from the 80s? Embarrassing stuff that.
I would have thought people had more options now and wouldn’t want to expend the effort it takes to get one but the young generations will always look for something to be different than the last few. And we always and forever will not think about how we are the same as the generations that came before, regardless of how much we are repeating.
I remember how both Mike and Greg Brady went from having “normal” hair to full on perm. I don’t think Mike was even wearing a suit to work at point, though he was still driving his Barracuda (I think) convertible.
I permed my extremely curly hair straight back in the 70’s, once, never again. Also jumped on the platform shoe bandwagon. Imagine if you will a defensive tackle sized guy tottering down the street on 2 1/2” platforms wearing a black leather bomber jacket, flared dress pants and a purple shirt. Also during the punk era on a drunken Friday night a couple of us dyed our hair. I ended up looking like a German Shepherd, Airedale cross. Parents were highly amused.
Glen, is that you? JK, but I think I knew very similar people back then. Great story!
Also did a shaved head $100 bet in HS. It was a ‘thing’ back then. Parents were less amused.
Think Richard Moll from Night Court.
I’d pay to see pictures of that. Sounds like a stylish person who gave no shits.
Stylish… then yes, now…. Now so much. Saturday night fever with really long hair, think Robert Plant or Button Cummings. Effectively rocker hair.
They’re younger and this stuff is new to them, so they’re going to be less jaded.
When I went in 2000, I stayed in San Jose at a Motel 6 kind of place as it was the closest I could afford at the time.
Didn’t know “broccoli head” was an official urban slang term, I’ve just been calling them that since I noticed it as a trend.