The Descent Of The Fad

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

For most of my life, a “fad” was harmless.  When I was in high school, “streaking” was the latest and greatest thing.  Of course, there had always been fads in clothing; what I wore without shame in college would be considered a costume these days.  And of course, speaking of college – The Pet Rock.  When a joke becomes a fad, there is money to be made.  But like most things in this world – fads are turning darker and darker.

Arthur Brooks, in his latest in The Free Press points out that fads are in fact rational and greatly aided by modernity.

But, in fact, fad-following is a rational behavior, not an irrational one. In a famous 1992 article in the Journal of Political Economy, the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch modeled fad adoption as a way for people to economize on gathering information by imitating others whom, they assume, have more information than them. (And, for my fellow geeks, this 2012 study published in PLOS One offers a neat mathematical treatment of the phenomenon.)

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Typically, a fad would take years to spread. Today, the cycle is enormously accelerated by social media, which is the primary source of information and news for millions of young people.

Brooks writes this in an effort to explain the sudden rise in socialism – which he ascribes to being a fad.  I agree to a point, but I think something deeper is going on.  Fads, I think, gain momentum, particularly in our modern age, when they appeal to our baser instincts.  One could attribute much of the nation’s behavior during covid to a certain fadishness.  But that fadishness was built on a foundation of the desire for raw power by some.  There is a fadishness to the DEI and “justice” movements, but both appeal strongly to those that want wealth without effort – as does the current rise of socialism.  The same could be said for covid which was all about sitting cocooned at home and having people bring us stuff.

Brooks offers a simplistic solution to the damage a fad can do:

But what I can do is offer the same personal advice I give my students and my adult kids, guidance I got that changed my life—from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 classic essay “Self-Reliance”:

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

My gloss on that Emersonian wisdom is that if you see a belief or behavior that appears out of nowhere among your peers (even the smart and learned ones), if you are suddenly pressured to change your life or views, and especially if you face a social cost for not doing so: Run in the other direction. Do not embrace the novel trend. If you are able, don’t even acknowledge it.

That is far easier said than done – especially when the fad in question pretends to give me all the money I need while I sit at home and scroll to my heart’s content.  Besides, some fads are harmless and fun – always being a non-conformist eventually becomes a sort of cloistered existence more akin to monasticism than anything else.  One needs judgement (“discernment” in evangospeak)  and character.  Judgement to know what is and what is not a fad; discernment to differentiate the harmless from the harmful fads; character to withstand the onslaught of criticism when you are being nonconformist.

These are characteristics not merely adopted with a thought – they require a lifetime of development.  They require training from our earliest ages and reinforcement throughout our life.  They require cultivation to bloom beautifully.  They are not wildflowers.  These destructive fads of late are born of a society that has abandoned that cultivation.  The specific fad may indeed, as Brooks predicts fade, but it will soon be replaced by something equally as corrosive and destructive unless we return to the business of that cultivation.