Life is absurd enough without the added indignity of having to give people respect for things that are just plain stupid. There are so many things that have been created for the sole reason of allowing some people to feel superior to others that it's all I can do not spend my entire writing energies listing them on a daily basis.
In the interest of my time and your painfully short attention span let me give you a few brief examples.
Professional wine tasters.
What a bunch of pretentious dickwads. Get a fucking real job. Dig a ditch for fuck's sake.
If you want to pollute your body with alcohol go right ahead. I do it all the time. Knock yourself out, just don't drive into my house at the end of the evening, but to sit there and try to make a profession of tasting wine ...? Are you fucking kidding me?
I'm not saying that every winery shouldn't have a guy at the end of the line taking a swig every now and then to make sure it still tastes like wine and something didn't go horribly wrong, but to pretend that you're somehow “cultured” because you swirl it around in your glass and sniff it before you start chugging it down is just embarrassing. When otherwise-intelligent adults start talking about how the bouquet is “impish” I want to smack them in the mouth.
It's a drink. Drink it and shut the fuck up.
There are dogs that can smell cancer, if you want to put your super-cool taste buds to work learn how to gargle pee and tell if the person has a urinary tract infection.
That's a constructive occupation. That would be contributing to the greater good.
Wine tasting is something invented by people with empty lives to try to somehow feel “classy”.
The same goes with the morons who claim to be cigar aficionados. You do realize that cigars cause mouth cancer, lip cancer, tongue cancer, throat cancer, esophagus cancer, larynx cancer and lung cancer right? That in addition to heart, lung and gum diseases. You are literally judging something that will kill you.
“I particularly like the way this bullet feels as it passes through my head. It leaves a nice clean hole.”
It's one more way for empty people to pretend to be better than others. They want to take something that is painfully self-destructive and somehow spin it into something hip.
It's not.
It's like starting an exclusive club to taste various household cleaning products.
“Mr. Clean has a nice clean finish ... now if you'll excuse me I feel a little lightheaded. I think I'll retire to a nearby hospital and writhe in agony.”
A subscription to a magazine that rates cigars is the best way I know of to tell the world that you are a completely vapid, soulless douche. They should sell the subscribers list to those in need of organs. You know who you see enjoying a lot of expensive cigars? Lawyers. Enough said.
I'm not as angry as I no doubt sound but sometimes I feel like I'm living in Bizarro World when I see the time and money people invest in such dumbfuckery. Celebrities and politicians and yuppies loitering in cigar bars with literally nothing better to do with themselves than to sit there puffing themselves to death.
And everyone else buys into it. How glamorous. An entire industry built on self-importance. There are people that think that snorting buffalo semen would be the height of sophistication if they saw Rush Limbaugh doing it.
Even when these dipshit cigar smokers eventually get face cancer and we all have to absorb the cost of their treatment.
“I bet they get the coolest rooms at the hospital!”
You'll notice I used quotation marks when I said “cultured” and “classy”. That's because these are made-up words that don't mean dick. If you are worried about being either you are wasting the precious moments of your life on nonsense.
Wake the fuck up. Don't buy in. It's all bullshit. There are real and very valid reasons that other people are better than you.
Or do you keep tugging on this thread and watch the whole sweater come apart?