Casual anthropology
Some of the most fascinating cultural signifiers are those which we see frequently and assume to have some meaning yet have no clue about what that meaning might be.* This sounds vague but I’ll explain what I mean. The signifier is usually something like a hairstyle, jacket, type of piercing, general mien, color of purse or style of speaking.
Example: Lately I have spotted lots of girls with their hair dyed a bright safety-orange shade. About a dozen in the past month. This is the only thing these girls seemed to have in common, visually speaking: they ranged in age from 15 to 40, were of different ethnicities and dressed nothing alike. Two were probably lesbians. I could not draw any conclusions except that they had all dyed their hair this weirdly specific shade and must have been influenced by some unknown but precise referent. It is still a mystery.
Living in lower Manhattan means being exposed to a dizzying number of such signifiers all the time. This is due to a few things: the density of the population, the presence of constantly-evolving subcultures and the fact that a lot of people live their lives very publicly.
Anyhow, I imagine this is how old people feel all the time: ever-conscious of patterns and totally befuddled by them.
*Terrible sentence
