The social convention you privately think we should just quietly abolish

[Linda52]

Not a rant thread, a genuine reform proposal. Name one social convention, a norm, a ritual, an expected behaviour that everyone quietly participates in despite most people privately finding it pointless or actively unpleasant, and make the case for why it should just quietly disappear

The best entries usually reveal a convention that survives purely on inertia, nobody actively defends it if you ask them directly, everyone just keeps doing it because stopping first feels awkward, which is precisely the kind of social fiction that could collapse the moment enough people simply agreed to let it

The fun follow up is imagining the actual mechanics of abolition, who goes first, what replaces the gap it leaves, because most conventions exist to solve a real coordination problem even when the specific solution has become outdated, so a good proposal usually needs a replacement not just a removal

So name your convention for the chopping block, the case against it, and if you can, what should quietly take its place, because half the fun of a thread like this is discovering how many people have been privately hoping someone else would say it first