A fad is a brief hallucination we agree to share. It arrives with a rush of hype, a whiff of urgency, and the faint threat that you’re already late. I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when the parade was loud and shameless: the Hula Hoop spinning on suburban hips, vinyl and spandex chasing the “wet look” like a costume department for perspiration, pukka shells clicking at the throat, CB radios chirping coded bravado, clackers smashing together with cheerful menace, 8-tracks thudding mid-song, streakers sprinting through polite society, bean bags swallowing spines, water beds sloshing like inland seas, lava lamps bubbling in slow hypnosis, and the Pet Rock—a joke that sold by the millions because everyone understood it was a joke.
Two traits define a fad. First, it burns fast and dies young. Second, it requires distance to reveal how thin it was. Time is the solvent; it dissolves the glamour and leaves the residue of absurdity. We laugh because the stakes were low. No one built a moral code around a lava lamp.
But something has shifted. The fad has learned to dress itself as a life. What used to be a passing amusement now arrives with a manifesto, a diet, a wardrobe, and a tone of sermon. A temporary preference hardens into a permanent identity. Call this Fad Apotheosis—the elevation of the trivial into the sacred, the conversion of a momentary craze into a governing philosophy. It is the difference between owning a thing and being owned by it.
The present offers a crowded gallery of such conversions. Dietary choices expand into totalizing creeds; efficiency hacks become liturgies; aesthetic preferences acquire moral teeth. A person is no longer someone who eats a certain way or experiments with a regimen; he becomes the regimen, a walking billboard for it. The point is no longer practice but proclamation—signals sent to a tribe that rewards conformity with applause and dissent with exile.
This inflation does not occur in a vacuum. A culture that reads less and scrolls more trades patience for immediacy and argument for alignment. Nuance is heavy; slogans are light. In that environment, a fad’s simplicity is not a bug but a feature. It offers clean edges, quick belonging, and the comfort of certainty. It replaces the slow work of thinking with the fast pleasure of declaring.
The cost is not subtle. When identity is outsourced to trends, judgment atrophies. Public life begins to resemble a stage populated by performers fluent in lifestyle rhetoric and thin on competence. The same habits that turn a diet into a doctrine can turn a platform into a career and a persona into a credential. The result is a politics of surfaces—loud, confident, and frequently hollow.
A society saturated with such performances doesn’t flourish; it frays. Attention splinters, conversation coarsens, and the serious tasks—those that require continuity, humility, and evidence—lose ground to spectacle. The nation doesn’t collapse in a single dramatic gesture; it erodes in a thousand small substitutions, trading substance for style until it can no longer tell the difference.
The remedy is unfashionable. It requires recovering the ability to see a fad as a fad: a diversion, not a doctrine. It asks for a renewed appetite for depth—reading that resists skimming, arguments that resist slogans, and commitments that outlast the season. In practical terms, it means choosing people who do the work over people who perform it.
Until then, we inhabit a curious landscape: a fever swamp of borrowed identities, where trends masquerade as truths and the trivial is worn like a creed. The exit is not complicated. It is simply difficult: step back, refuse the costume, and let the lava lamp return to being what it always was—pleasant, pointless light.
Cinemorphosis 
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