Sometimes I wonder if I'm just getting old and no longer get things, or if the world is just getting crazier.
Then the internet came. Now we can find it real time. Imagine it and it may exist, find things you never imagined and they do exist.
All comes down to all us being better for it all. Think of how much exposure that all the conflicts bring about as we learn about people we would have only had a by line about. Now we get video of who they are, how they live, what they like to do.
Many talk about the good old days, heck we are living them
Sometimes it starts getting more formalized and attracts slightly older kids. People usually think it's weird, then they get used to it. ...like dungeons and dragons.
Skeptical articles lean into the knee-jerk reaction that "something must be broken with society."
Ultimately, lots of stuff is wierd if you approach it from a judgemental outsider's perspective. Wtf is golf all about, for example?
Square dancing, freestyle canoe [2], cosplay, cross-stitch etc. These are all activities that people do for the sake of the activity itself without any extra motivation except maybe to be able to hang around with others.
Also I think most that of those mocking Morris dancing probably do it from a safe distance!
so it's like bitcoin 'investing' before computers.
At first, I even had trouble with the act alone, but I do remember doing silly things as a kid because they were fun, so that's understandable, even if they look silly doing it. I certainly looked silly a lot as a kid.
Then, my issue was that there are apparently whole competitions as if this were a real sport. But then I realized that there's no reason it can't be. We have all kinds of sports that require things that ultimately look like dancing... And that's basically what this is, in the end. Dancing with certain other rules.
I also stopped and considered it compared to LARPing. I mean, they're play-acting a scenario and using actual physical skills and routines. It's actually probably a lot more educational than a lot of things they could be playing instead.
But in the end, I'm getting old and new things are making me feel uneasy increasingly more often.
Just don't be a dick about it.
It seems analogous to that rhythmic gymnastics discipline where they do routines with a long ribbon attached to a stick.
Too often my knee-jerk reaction to unexpected things is "There's no possible cultural value in this." But it usually pays off to put in a bit of effort to try to understand what the practitioners are getting out of it.
For the record, I'm all for fun physical activities like this, just don't try to compare it to rock'n'roll.
I'm glad for surprises like this even though I don't quite (or at all) understand them!