The publication Vox recently ran an article titled “Are We in a Crisis of Rudeness?” It focused on the American experience, but I couldn’t help thinking about how it plays out here in South Africa.
Now, I don’t know how bad it really is across the country, but from personal experience — well, I’ve seen my share.
Take my local wetland, where I go jogging. When I first started out, I greeted everyone, expecting smiles and replies like in Randburg. But here, near the coast, it’s mostly blank stares. Maybe it’s a coastal thing. Maybe people are foreigners. Or maybe they just don’t do greetings anymore. Eventually, I gave up. These days, I only greet the few who greet me first. Still, it feels eerie — all that silence in a place meant to be shared.
It doesn’t stop there. Another form of rudeness is digital silence. You find something online that you think someone will enjoy — a clip, an article, a bit of good humour — and send it along. Nothing. Not even a thumbs-up. So, you stop sending those people anything. Pity.
Then there’s the daily grind: suppliers who never reply to messages. You’d think they had too much business. Or the surly service in supermarkets and restaurants — the sighs, the blank stares, the feeling that you’ve somehow inconvenienced them by showing up. Sometimes it borders on discrimination, sometimes it’s just bad manners. Either way, it leaves you shaking your head.
And it’s not just me noticing. Scroll through local social media, and you’ll see it everywhere — the thousand little cuts of daily rudeness:
• Road rage and queue jumping: people cutting in, not indicating, screaming at each other at robots.
• Customer service indifference: agents who talk over you, cashiers who toss your change on the counter.
• Public space oblivion: people blocking supermarket aisles or blasting phone calls in quiet places.
• Neighbourly inconsideration: noise, trash, barking dogs, and the ever-present shrug of “deal with it.”
It’s as if the spirit of Ubuntu — that shared humanity we once prided ourselves on — is wearing thin. Maybe it’s the stress: load-shedding, traffic, prices, politics. Maybe we’re all just tired.
But still, it makes you wonder: when did good manners become optional?
So how do we stem the tide of rudeness?
Perhaps it’s as simple — and as difficult — as choosing to be polite anyway.
Read the original Vox article here: Are we in a crisis of rudeness?
