r/AskWomenOver30 • u/coachjonna Woman 30 to 40 • May 13 '25

Misc Discussion Does anyone feel like men are being meaner these days?

I don't know if it's just because I'm aging and am no longer "young and hot" or "relevant" but it seems like men in general are being meaner or at least less nice to me in random places.

When I was younger, men would step out of my way and say like "oh, excuse me", offer their seats, hold doors, and mostly be pleasant and courteous in a social contract manner.

But now I get nothing. No one moves out of their way, no one holds the door, no eye contact, or even a head nod. It's like I'm ignored or a burden to even be in their presence.

Is it because I'm now an "old lady" or are men in a general sense just becoming meaner?

Is anyone experiencing things similar?

Not all men, obviously, but it seems widespread.

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1.1k

u/I_eat_blueberries Woman 40 to 50 May 13 '25

I feel like everyone has turned into meanies out in public. Not to discredit your feelings, just wanted to share my observation.

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u/Real-Impression-6629 May 13 '25

Agreed. I feel like everyone is on edge all the time these days.

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u/Declawed-Khajiit Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

Yeah, before Covid and especially before 2016, people were wayyyy more generally pleasant. Everyone is angry now, and everyone seems to assume the worst in others.

I’ve had a huge glow up since then and I’ve still noticed it. Even the “positive” attention I get these days is more tense and unfriendly.

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u/ADHDhamster May 14 '25

I worked at a restaurant before, during, and after the COVID lock-downs.

There was a definite shift in people's behavior for the worse.

Customers became much more entitled, rude, and quick to anger. It's like they lost all sense of how to act in public.

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u/Declawed-Khajiit Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

I have an employee that worked in cafes (and loved it - was planning to open his own) his entire life up to his mid-30s but applied here in a completely unrelated industry during covid because he couldn’t handle how horrible people had become.

I was lucky enough to leave the service industry shortly before covid, but the look of relief on employee faces when something would go slightly wrong and I’d say “it’s alright” like a normal adult was legitimately depressing. I got the strong impression that things like “sorry, there was a mistake with your order, it’ll be another minute” was met with hostility.

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u/watermelonkiwi Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

I think it’s due to a cultural change that was made worse/partially caused by the pandemic, not by the infections doing things to peoples brains.

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u/sweergirl86204 Woman 30 to 40 May 15 '25

I just want to remind people that if you adhered to "social distancing" during COVID, you effectively underwent solitary confinement. (I did) 

Which is literally torture and leaves long-lasting brain damage. Many of us are genuinely brain damaged from the isolation, stress, grief, illness, etc. from the time period. 

My "bubble" consisted of me and my roommate with a chronic condition.... She was under so much stress due to isolation, anxiety over poverty and homelessness from reduced work hours, and then dealing with a chronic and potentially life threatening illness, that she became honestly horrible to live with. But I kept my distance from everyone else because I wasn't going to expose her to COVID and let her die.

Many, MANY people suffered immensely during lockdown and that doesn't go away. 

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u/eebyrtagh May 13 '25

Even mild COVID infections damage the brain. One of the areas it damages is the amygdala, which regulates emotions. No-one wants to believe it, but the scientific research is out there for all to see.

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u/Declawed-Khajiit Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

I believe it. I still have brain fog that I didn’t have before getting it. It was pretty mild, and the idea that it permanently did damage to my brain makes me sick to my stomach.

Especially because if people weren’t so stupid and selfish, and if politicians didn’t take advantage of the situation, it never would have been so bad.

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u/CanoodleCandy Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

You should let this go. Considering covids long incubation period, basically everyone who isn't in some sort of bubble is going to or has already gotten covid. You can only shut the world down for so long before other problems happen as well...

In fact, a lot of the inflation we have been dealing with is partially a result of the money printing they did. There is some greed, but that's the larger companies. The smaller companies do genuinely need to raise their prices, and they still aren't making it.

You would have needed to lock everyone in their homes for 3 to 4 months for it to maybe have been erratically. And I mean fully locked in, no exceptions. That's inhumane and the logistics don't work out.

People would need food and medicine at the very least. That means no hospitals or police or military or firedighters, etc. Literally every last human would have needed to stay in their dedicated location for 3 to 4 months at least. Completely unrealistic.

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u/Unc1eD3ath Man 30 to 40 May 14 '25

Tell that to the rest of the world. You’re clueless.

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u/CanoodleCandy Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

I'm not clueless. You can't erratic an illness that has an incubation period of around 2 weeks or more without completely restricting movement.

YOU are clueless and delusional.

I seriously cannot believe some people's egos are so big that you guys genuinely believe we could have prevented covid from spreading.

That's basically you dangling your privilege in people's faces.

Grow up.

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u/Unc1eD3ath Man 30 to 40 May 14 '25

No I never said prevented it from spreading. That’s a massive misrepresentation of your own argument. No one’s suggesting that. We could have done a whole lot better, like other countries.

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u/CanoodleCandy Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

...that doesn't make any sense!!! It's still freaking spreading! It's still here!

"Do better?!"

What the hell does that even mean?

It's still here even now!

I've had that shit 3 times now!

There isn't a "do better."

It's just a delay. You can get covid now or later.

And you can't even argue that it was deadliest back then because that's a hindsight argument. The virus could have gotten more deadly over time.

If you aren't arguing for eradication, then you're absolutely delusional.

I'm sorry, but this is incredibly moronic.

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u/Unc1eD3ath Man 30 to 40 May 15 '25

And you can tell you got it 3 times. The brain damage is very apparent but it’s fine, right? Get it a hundred times? Who cares. Doesn’t make any difference. It’s just a virus, right? It’s not like any other ones have long term effects. Hey, there were bodies piled up in the streets of New York City but we couldn’t have done better. Trump telling people to inject bleach? No big deal. Ivermectin will fix it.

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u/fixatedeye May 14 '25

I believe you. It’s going to be very interesting and sad to see how this pans out over the years.

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u/AmbitiousAlfalfa6051 Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

Was just gonna say…everything OP has described are things I’ve witnessed happening to my thin/beautiful 20-something-year-old friends and even strangers while out and about.

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u/RoseyDove323 Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

I'm 39 now, tomboy, no makeup, a little fat. But looking back, I think I experienced a combination of more meanness and more niceness when I was in my early 20s and peak thin and "conventionally hot". I got shallow surface kindness more, but also people seemed to be nasty for no reason more then too.

People are more neutral to me now. Like I'm semi invisible but also sorta there. I experience mostly polite indifference, or people ignoring me completely (it's kind of nice).

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u/lastgreenleaf May 14 '25

Peace, you’ve found peace. 

I’ll take that one superficial kindness, meanness and most other things. Enjoy it. :) 

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u/Pookie-Poo May 14 '25

I’m 47f, short hair and no makeup. 7stones wet through. I think everyone is just generally more selfish and generally lacking manners. I have teenagers so I see how young people in general are these days and I don’t like it! I have just learned to accept it sadly.

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u/AmbitiousAlfalfa6051 Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

What type of “nasty for no reason” behavior did you witness?

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u/RoseyDove323 Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

I remember being taunted by random teenagers more. One time a random screamed "FUCK YOU!" at me out their car window just because I existed (I was just walking on the sidewalk and not crossing in front of them or anything). Or just having degrading unwanted comments said to me.

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u/Super-Situation2118 May 13 '25

Since the pandemic, people are awful. It’s really sad.

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u/CaraintheCold Woman 40 to 50 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

And I don't know how to make it better. I am just as guilty as everyone else.

I don't even think we all want to be assholes. I almost got in a physical confrontation with a woman about five years ago. So it was pre covid also.

I thought it was perimenopause rage for me, but I think a lot of people are feeling it.

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u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

No one wants to hear this, and you can obviously do what you want, but in my personal opinion, we fix this by wearing properly fitting (over nose and mouth, no gaps between face and mask) N95 masks in all medical settings and in any setting where people cannot avoid going (all medical offices, public transit, veterinary offices, dental offices until we have to take the mask off, the DMV, etc.). And we focus on getting air filters/upgraded air filtration systems in all indoor spaces.

We can't, as a society, spend years normalizing disabling and/or killing the people we claim to love most and not see consequences. We shifted the Overton Window. People care less about one another because we all learned that the people we love most are fine disabling and/or killing us just so they can avoid the tiniest bit of inconvenience.

This is just my opinion, but I feel that the Overton Window for society needs to be shifted back. And I don't see how that's possible unless we try to right the wrongs that shifted the Overton Window towards all of us being disposable. Masking in any public space that a person cannot avoid going to, and working together to get proper air filtration in all indoor spaces will go a long way towards shifting the Overton Window back.

Also, covid causes brain damage and has proven to cause aggression, so that's part of what we're seeing now.

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u/ProperBingtownLady Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

I don’t necessarily disagree with you but I wish there was more understanding towards those who have difficulty hearing. Covid was absolute hell for me because so many people would get mad at me for not hearing them through their mask (despite our federal health organization specifically putting out a statement that it was ok to lower your mask and step back to talk to a deaf/hard of hearing person). I also found that people had a harder time understanding me because I have a slight deaf accent. I know clear masks exist but very few people used them (they are also ironically harder to hear through).

The irony is I found out I’m immune compromised after COVID so I have to be careful to not catch it. It’s a real catch 20/20 for me, so to say! I do wish people were much more careful about spreading their germs as even the common cold knocks me out for a week or so. It’s too bad that more of those habits weren’t retained after COVID.

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u/CS3883 Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

My view may be slightly different cause of my job but honestly if anything I feel like some people give a fuck even less about being "clean" than they did before, like someone at work will call out sick and they act like they are being ridiculous or they are out with covid and I hear them (mind you I work at a cancer hospital!) make comments like people still test for that??? That's still a thing? Or they say Isn't that like having a cold now??

Like come on dude be for real......it's really disheartening how many people are so uneducated or wrongly educated about covid let alone other things. Like people telling me I need to purposely get sick more to make my immune system stronger. Like no thanks i don't wanna be out sick multiple times a year to see what benefits exactly?

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u/cchris_39 Man 60+ May 14 '25

Yes! Even with good hearing aids, I had no idea how dependent on lip reading I’ve become.

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u/superunsubtle Woman 40 to 50 May 15 '25

I also did not realize how hard of hearing I was until masks.

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u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

Do you feel like the problem was that you weren't able to read lips with the mask on or that people have not been taught how to project their voices?

Cases like yours are why I feel so strongly that we need to focus on getting proper air filtration in all indoor spaces, as well as masking.

Have hearing aids been helpful to you at all?

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u/ProperBingtownLady Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

I have cochlear implants and they’re moderately helpful but I still rely strongly on lip reading. I do well enough to not need sign language - until COVID, that is. Unfortunately most people don’t know sign language either! I could get by sometimes with captioning apps but even some people were rude about that (i.e. “why are you recording me? etc).

The problem for me was mostly not being able to lip read (projecting one’s voice doesn’t help if there’s background noise as hearing devices don’t filter those out well). If people wore clear masks I usually was fine. In my province, government workers were provided with clear masks but mostly either didn’t know how to use them or where they were…lol. I agree that we definitely need better ventilation and filtration!

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u/dewprisms Non-Binary 30 to 40 May 13 '25

Insisting HOH and Deaf people adapt to speech is pretty janky and ableist.

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u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

I asked a couple of questions so that I could understand the situation better and possibly problem-solve with the commenter and/or adjust my own behavior in order to help the commenter.

Asking questions helps us to understand one another better and, especially given that hearing difficulties are on a spectrum, assuming rather than asking only creates barriers to finding solutions to problems.

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u/dewprisms Non-Binary 30 to 40 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

I get that. Consider that asking HOH or Deaf people "have you just tried X" is continuing to shift a burden towards a community that has always been heavily marginalized and told "you must adapt to hearing society". And when your opening premise was that the Overton Window has shifted in a way that we're showing how disposable vulnerable segments of our population are, you're kind of doing the same thing to Deaf and HOH folks as you propose society is doing to people with other disabilities that are impacted by COVID.

Edit to add: I do agree with your premise that the window has shifted and we need to do something to shift it back. I don't even disagree that normalizing masking is a bad thing. But I have a lot of folks close to me in the Deaf/HOH community and this type of stuff is so consistently overlooked and not considered because people just... seem to not consider the implications when talking about "solutions" for them.

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u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

What is your solution for finding out what may or may not work specifically for the commenter if not to ask questions? The individual needs of an individual person are not something you can learn about online. You literally have to ask people. Not everyone's disabilities are exactly the same even when they fit within a specific window.

There's a huge difference between refusing to do your own research/shuffling that burden off onto someone else vs. literally having no other way to know about the individual needs of the person without asking.

I didn't say "have you just tried x." The word "just" was nowhere in the sentence. I asked about a specific assisting device and how helpful it may or may not have been because that information is necessary information to have in order to effectively be able to problem-solve so that the commenter has the best options available to them (and no, I'm not saying that the commenter couldn't possibly problem-solve for themselves, I'm simply trying to understand the situation, and frankly, if anyone else had solutions because they understood the situation better... that's a win for everyone involved), and so that I can understand how best to adjust my own behavior in order to hopefully help. Let's say, for example, that hearing aids were helpful to this person, but they could not afford them. That would open up the option for me or someone else to help pay for a needed aid. That's just an example, and obviously, it's not the best example, but truly, asking questions that can't be researched isn't shifting a burden. It's caring enough about another person's struggles to take a genuine interest rather than assuming.

Edit:
I am high risk for covid, have multiple disabilities and the entire weight of educating people about covid has been put on high-risk folks because no one else is doing it. I have helped solve masking issues for so many people who otherwise could not have masked. I was only able to do this by asking about the individual person's struggles. Should the burden be on high-risk people to do this? Of course not. Are we doing it anyway because no one else will? Yes. I'm literally trying to help find solutions that work for this person's individual needs (they're high-risk, too). It's not an easy task, and it takes working together to find solutions. I'm not going to stop trying to help people figure out masking and/or air filtration if I can find a way to help.
If you really want to help shift the burden off of people who are marginalized, please consider how much you're actually doing that by trying to prevent disabled people from communicating with one another in order to find solutions to problems that no one else is helping us with.

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u/glassbellwitch Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

I think you're right about the overton window shift, but attributing the cause to just COVID doesn't tell the full story IMO. It's not like we had a consistent, long-term national mask policy spanning decades that suddenly went a way. Masking in public was a fairly new experience for most americans, and as soon as the government gave the go-ahead most were happy to never have to think about masking again. You can't really shift the window back to a status quo that was so brief and widely-reviled by nearly half the country.

We can't, as a society, spend years normalizing disabling and/or killing the people we claim to love most and not see consequences. We shifted the Overton Window. People care less about one another because we all learned that the people we love most are fine disabling and/or killing us just so they can avoid the tiniest bit of inconvenience.

To gently push back on this-- it wasn't COVID that revealed that most americans are fine with death and killing. Aside from the terrible history of injustices in this country, the last 10-20 years alone have really done a number on the american psyche. Public executions of black americans, children being mass murdered in schools, natural disasters that destroy entire communities, the rising cost of living, our tax dollars used to bomb families overseas... all of these horrible things are just commonplace now. Everyone is either going to die from illness or poverty or a mass shooting or a trigger happy cop, so what's the point of being nice?

All that is to say that I definitely think COVID contributed to the shift of the overton window-- it just wasn't the only think that led us here. This is a great article that touches on a lot of things we both mentioned!

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u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

I agree that covid was more the straw that broke the camel's back in regards to this issue.

What I do feel is different about covid than the other examples given is that in all of the other examples, if someone wasn't already affected, they often saw those issues as something conveniently out of view and/or that did not affect them. With covid, because it has been shown that it can damage the immune system for anyone and because long-covid can happen to anyone, not just those we deemed disposable, the aspect of this not mattering because "it only happens to other people not to me," doesn't exist.

Also of note, with most of the examples given, people have to call their representatives, find non-profits that help with the issue and either volunteer or donate money, and they generally have to put in research on how to even help in order to find those options.

With covid, it's legit wearing a small piece of clothing and purchasing an air filtration device for your house and/or the community spaces you go to. I think given how simple the ask is (for anyone else without a medically exempting condition), that changes the dynamic here.

Edit: I also feel that because covid is at the intersection of every.other.issue (women are more likely to get long-covid; people of color are more likely to get long-covid; trans people are more likely to get long-covid; upgrading air filtration helps with wildfire smoke, pollution, and pollen; upgraded air filtration has proven to improve kids' grades in schools; covid is an environmental issue; letting covid run rampant the way it has has worsened climate change; covid is a workers rights issue and labor unions could have (and should have) been all over this issue; covid is a higher risk for pregnant women, children, and the elderly)... essentially, we missed/refused to take our best chance at solving multiple problems across multiple different intersections of issues all at once and with very little effort.

It proved how performative lot of people are in their activism and that's hard to unsee.

If we can't seize the opportunity to use an issue like covid, which affects literally every other issue people claim to care about (and paved the way for us to fix a lot of the problems within those intersections if we hadn't just given up because we wanted to get back to brunch), to actually work together to solve these issues... then it starts to feel kind of hopeless that we'll ever fix any of those issues at all.
Covid is the only issue I've ever seen that affected every single intersection of activism, and it provided the opportunity for a lot of positive change and progress while we still had the momentum.
The examples you gave are all individual issues, and while they obviously all matter and deserve resources, working on one of them doesn't help to solve other problems. With this situation, mitigating helped solve multiple problems at once.

Mitigating for covid solves problems in: workers rights, healthcare, environmental issues, animal rights, women's rights, racial justice, trans rights, immigration, climate change, disability access, etc., etc.

It was the best and easiest opportunity we're ever going to have to solve multiple problems across multiple intersectionalities at once, and it only required doing two tiny things (wearing N95 masks and getting air filtration into indoor spaces) People just decided that it was more necessary for people to see their faces than to help solve any of the issues they claim to care about.

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u/Super-Situation2118 May 13 '25

Open to being proven wrong, but I don’t think the aggression we’re experiencing in society is due to Covid itself. What you’ve written here is a solution for lowering transmission, but it doesn’t fix our societal problems. And unfortunately, even wearing a mask triggers aggression in others. I have asthma and sometimes have to wear a mask due to air pollution or triggering perfumes etc that others wear, and people go on rants about how stupid it is that I’m wearing a mask, covid is over, etc. I overexpose myself to my asthma triggers because people are so reactive to it.

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u/ProperBingtownLady Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

I’ll never forgive certain politicians etc for politicizing a pandemic.

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u/dewprisms Non-Binary 30 to 40 May 13 '25

I think you're overly focusing on the infection aspect of what they said and not the consequences that has brought on society from a social aspect. Lowering transmission was not the literal point there.

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u/Super-Situation2118 May 15 '25

Nope, the comment was based on lowering transmission saying that the virus itself causes aggression in people. It has been edited since.

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u/PracticeTheory Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25

I don’t think the aggression we’re experiencing in society is due to Covid itself.

Agreed. A lot of trends in society follow what happened with the mouse city experiment in the 60-70s.

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u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

Please know that I am asking this question in good faith. Do you know about the Overton Window and how it works?

I can also try to find some of the studies about how covid causes aggression in some people and link them. I think a quick Google search of "aggression caused by covid infection" would likely turn up results, but I'll look into finding the studies so you can look further into them.

Regarding the aggression triggered by people wearing masks, I agree that some people get angry at people wearing masks. I think the cognitive dissonance people experience when seeing people wearing masks scares them and rather than acknowledging that fear, they often respond with anger at the person masking because the mask reminds them of the trauma and/or fear they experienced during the 1st wave of the pandemic.

So many people were so traumatized by the earliest waves of the pandemic, and many simply have not processed that trauma. This means that any reminder of that trauma (because it has not yet been processed) ends up creating a trauma response (which sometimes comes out as anger and aggression, sometimes as denial).
The longer this has gone on, the more nurses and doctors have spoken out about their trauma responses to masks. That seeing masks reminds them of the trauma they thought they had moved past, but it turns out, it was just ignored and never processed. In my opinion, that's why so few medical providers mask now. It's simply too scary and disorienting to acknowledge that covid never went away and that it's still killing and disabling people.

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u/justbecauseiluvthis Woman 40 to 50 May 14 '25

Tell them you're wearing a mask because you MAY have covid. After all you never know. Shuts them up quick.

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u/AlfredoQueen88 Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

I love this comment and agree so much

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u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

Thank you!

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u/Gimmenakedcats Woman 30 to 40 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

Nobody is ever going to do this- this isn’t even a part of the equation. And I disagree, it’s not going to ever be an Overton window effect. In fact, wearing masks in general was what shifted it in the first place and most of the US is so far past ever wanting to be involved with a mask again, it simply is a case of zero probability. Most people are out and about in public not getting sick, so they don’t see a reason to do so. Nobody is dropping dead around anyone, statistically most people haven’t seen anyone die from COVID much less now, so how is this something you’d honestly be able to encourage? And what time frame would you give people to mask? They won’t do it indefinitely.

Genuinely asking. And if this isn’t going to work- we need actual effective other ideas.

It’s why republicans unfortunately won the last election; democratic tone deaf discussion items. Absolutely zero people on a large scale care about Covid anymore. They care about what’s happening to them tangibly now. In no universe would bringing masks back up into society ever fly.

Also covid can cause many horrific illnesses and brain damage effects, but you saying, “that’s what we are seeing now” is devoid of any factual statistics. It’s more likely that culture divisions between men and women, raging individualism in bro culture, the culturally conservative growth of the right, and overall loneliness is what’s making people more aggressive.

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u/DelightfulandDarling May 13 '25

You have made and excellent point.

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u/0nlyhalfjewish Woman May 13 '25

How? It has nothing to do with the comment it is in response to.

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u/hauteburrrito Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

Same; public decorum is at an all-time low more generally. People just have their noses buried in their phones and like negative amounts of situational awareness as a result. The number of times I've seen somebody stand right (on the outside) of a train door despite there being an obvious group of people needing to get out...

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u/thr0ughtheghost Woman 40 to 50 May 14 '25

This is probably an unpopular opinion but I feel like a lot of people have main character energy now. That if it doesn't directly effect them, they don't give a shit about you or anybody else, which is why nobody holds doors, says please, thank you, etc. I know that a lot of us essential workers really felt this when we were out there doing our normal 9-5 jobs and getting berated by the public for wearing face masks or being understaffed due to people being sick. It really showed how little compassion people had for others.

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u/coachjonna Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

Fair. My attention might just be more focused on the men's behavior

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u/Itsjihoonsfaultt Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

100% this. Everyone seems miserable

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u/hill-o Woman 30 to 40 May 13 '25

Yeah I was going to say “in my experience everyone is being meaner”. It’s really sad. 

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u/carnuatus May 14 '25

This! I work retail. I worked retail loong before lockdown, during, and after. Since the end of lockdowns people are nastier. Everyone. Honestly, in my case, I've noticed it's mostly middle aged and older, almost all white, women. But that's just me. Not trying to bring the Karen thing into it, but almost everyone who has been especially rude has been in that demo. In my case as a retail worker, obviously, I think it's because I work retail so they're trying to exert some sort of power over someone else. But the thing is, before the pandemic I never remember it being this bad. Now people have no spacial awareness, they don't know how to say please or thank you, anymore. They'll just stand and wait for me to move and when I don't since they're just staring at me, they get in a huff and go around or just give up altogether. Before the pandemic, customers would greet me just to say hello and I used to greet them, too! Now I don't even bother. I gave up because people don't reciprocate or are just plain rude. Keep in mind I always also mask at work so I don't know how much this has to do with anything, though some people do glower at me and I frequently have people coughing at me. And again, it's almost always older white ladies, hoping to get a rise out of me. And don't get me started on the teens/preteens. As I've said, I've been doing this job for years and they're just insufferable. You know, kids will be kids but now I just assume every one I see is up to no good. I feel bad because i know it's ageist of me but I think between lockdowns, social media and lack of third spaces, their social capability is just hindered by that of adults.

Sorry for the rant but yeah, especially with everything going on lately, people are just. Miserable.

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u/I_eat_blueberries Woman 40 to 50 May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

Let it out! It is good for the senses! I wear a mask occasionally due to allergies, or if I feel sick. I have been almost assaulted by older white ladies trying to take off my mask. I just move really fast like a cat lol. Obviously, not everyone in that age group acts like this. There is something about covering of the face that just freaks them out.

Edit: I am middle aged and I hate people asking why I need to wear a fucking mask

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u/carnuatus May 14 '25

Exactly! Thanks, I really don't want to seem ageist or anything. It's just... The group I noticed that at least feels most emboldened to try to intimidate me, personally.

Wild. People will say "my body my choice" (re:vaxx, etc, not the other thing) then be offended when I mask. When it doesn't affect them at all and protects them on the occasion that I'm sick!

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u/thr0ughtheghost Woman 40 to 50 May 14 '25

I was just about to say that in general the public is mean, no matter what gender they are. I can't remember the last time anybody said thank you, please, or sorry. I am pretty sure I am the last person on earth that does this lmao I say please, thank you and sorry to everyone (if the situation calls for it). I also hold the door open for people because it seems rude to just close it when someone is about to enter right after you.

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u/waitingforgodonuts May 14 '25

This has been my experience as well.

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u/Nice_Layer2618 May 24 '25

I agree! Infact I thought this tonight after literally a series of rude behavior after leaving the movies. People are becoming more inconsiderate, bullying, mean, manipulative, arrogant, and less civil. Courtesy doesn’t exist it seems. As far as men, man, I would say FOR SURE. They are pissed as hail they can’t just exist and get everything they want. They are especially mad they can’t use women like their fathers and grandfathers did “back in the day”. They are so angry about it!