9 traditions that should be abandoned for a long time

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

They pull us into the past and support dangerous stereotypes.

1. Get affixed at work

Birthday, wedding, promotion? It is imperative to cover the clearing for colleagues. Going on vacation? Stop it! Home from vacation? Especially. Decided to quit? It's a sin not to have a farewell feast. Otherwise, everyone will be offended and will discuss behind their backs what a miser and a bad person you are.

A similar situation, by the way, is observed with obligatory extortions for birthdays, weddings, birth of children and gender holidays: often a person is simply confronted with the fact that he needs to hand over money. And if he has the courage to refuse, they may even survive from work.

However, any informal relationship between colleagues should be voluntary. I would like to chip in for an envelope or celebrate a birthday at work - great. I don't want to - it's also completely normal. Otherwise it looks like tyranny.

2. Make food a cult

It so happened that it is customary for us to arrange magnificent feasts for every even the slightest significant holiday. A celebration is not a celebration if there is no homemade jellied meat, five different salads, several types of hot and, of course, alcohol on the table.

It's one thing if you really love to cook and think that the best way to celebrate something is to eat and drink heartily. But more often it happens that feasts take a lot of time, energy and nerves, and as a result, tired and angry hosts no longer want to celebrate anything. Not to mention, overeating is bad for your health.

The traditional feast is no longer the only way to celebrate an important event.

You can arrange a light buffet or, if the weather permits, a picnic. Or organize a candy bar. You can generally just grab a bite to eat at a nearby café between ice skating and trampoline jumping. There are many options, and you can choose any without looking back at how it was done before. In the end, the holiday should bring joy, not mountains of dirty dishes.

3. Send congratulations in messengers and social networks

No, we are not talking about sincere and warm congratulations that you write yourself for each of your friends. It is always pleasant and appropriate. But to send everyone the same poems or send ugly postcards and gifs … This is not a desire to please a person, but a desire to comply with stupid formalities and put a tick: congratulated everyone, I’m done.

And congratulations on religious holidays deserve special attention. It's one thing if you know for sure that your addressee belongs to this particular confession and observes all the rituals. And it is completely different when you simply launch the same congratulatory picture across the entire list of friends. Without figuring out whether a person marks this date and whether he believes in God at all.

4. Communicate with all relatives

Just because they are related. It doesn't matter if these people are interesting to you, whether your views on life coincide, whether such communication brings joy.

You have to endure all this, simply because you and these people have a number of common genes.

Yes, before, it was necessary to be friends with all relatives up to the seventh generation for survival. People settled in large families, and in which case they could only count on each other. And even some 50 years ago, it was family ties that helped to get a job, find the right specialist or find an overnight stay in a foreign city.

But now these problems are much easier to solve. And a real family is often completely alien, it would seem, people. And there is no reason to communicate with those who are not interesting to you, just because "blood is not water."

5. Steal brides or pay a ransom for them

There is such a “cute” wedding custom: in the middle of the celebration, the guests suddenly grab the bride by the arms and drag her away so that the groom then looks for her. It may seem ridiculous to some, but the roots of the “Russian Wedding: History and Traditions” tradition are actually terrible: in ancient times, girls were often abducted against their will and forced to marry. And even now the custom of stealing brides has not yet been eradicated either in Russia or in the CIS countries.

Therefore, attempts to portray the abduction, albeit in a playful way, look rather creepy and return us to the days when a woman was considered a thing.

The same applies to bride ransoms, which few weddings do without. Previously, the groom paid for the girl, because her family was deprived of working hands, but in the modern world this is somehow humiliating.

True, this custom has one more meaning, a more romantic one: undergoing symbolic tests, the groom seemed to go after his betrothed to another world and showed that he was ready to overcome any difficulties for her sake. But modern ransoms bear little resemblance to fairy tales, but the theme of money and payment for the bride (albeit symbolic) is played up quite often. And living people are not a commodity.

6. Change your surname after marriage

Earlier, after the wedding, the girl ceased to be part of her family and moved to her husband's family. Therefore, she renounced everything old, including her surname. But now this tradition looks like an atavism.

First, strong relationships are built on equality and partnership: a woman is not the property of a man and his relatives, he does not accept her into his family, but enters into an equivalent alliance. Secondly, running through different authorities and changing a whole mountain of documents is still fun. Third, changing your last name can hurt your career.

If it is convenient for a person - for example, the surname of the spouse or spouse likes more than his own - why not. But giving up part of your name just because someone once decided so is pointless. By the way, now women are increasingly leaving their last name after marriage, and this is quite logical.

7. Strictly separate responsibilities for men and women

Washing the plumbing, floor or dishes is definitely not a man's occupation: "What am I, a woman, or what?" And hammering nails and assembling cabinets is definitely not for women: "Well, you are a girl, not a horse with eggs." And in this harsh and merciless division of household responsibilities, there are several problems at once.

First, you don't need to assemble cabinets, nail shelves and change faucets as often, but you have to cook and clean every day. As a result, housework is still largely the responsibility of women, and traditionally only taking out the trash and servicing the car are considered male duties. However, if a lady at the same time works on an equal footing with her partner, this is unfair.

Secondly, because of such stereotypes, girls are simply not taught to change these ill-fated mixers or to hammer up stools, and boys are taught to cook, sew and clean. And any attempts to reverse this situation run up against a wall of indignation.

Although the ability to bake a cake or fix furniture will come in handy for anyone, regardless of gender.

Thirdly, it is simply illogical. Yes, there are tasks that require great physical strength or high growth, and it is more difficult for women to cope with them, but they are negligible. But it is much more efficient and faster to do homework on an equal footing, without dividing it into male and female.

8. Dress girls in pink and boys in blue

Newborn girls wear pink hats and roll them in red and pink strollers. Male babies are entitled to various shades of blue and other subdued colors such as gray. The toys are also clearly separated by color. And in the adult world, this line is erased, but not completely.

How and why the colors acquired a gender connotation, no one knows for sure. It may have all started in the 1950s, when pink was suddenly declared the color of women. Joe Paoletti, a professor at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue, suggests this was a marketing ploy to get people to buy more children's clothing.

However, the division of colors into masculine and feminine is at least meaningless.

In addition, this stereotype brings a lot of inconvenience. Men are embarrassed to put on a bright pink shirt or socks, while women overpay for pink products, which differ from similar ones only in the color of their packaging.

9. Follow tradition for show

We do a lot of things for one reason: it's customary. We repeat rituals that have long lost their meaning, and we build our lives according to the recommendations and principles of centuries ago. But at the same time, we forget that we should not do this at all.

For example, they should not invite 150 distant relatives to a wedding just because their parents want it. And in general they are not obliged to conduct a ceremony if there is no desire. Should not give up torn jeans or colored hair because "it is not accepted at your age." And of course they shouldn't have children or get married because "it's time."