Weekly Internet Roundup: Hiking is Bad, Australian Sushi is Canceled, and Gen Z vs. The 9 to 5

Happy Friday, it's roundup time! It is with a heavy heart that I must reveal the past week has been dominated by predominantly Twitter-based discourses both insane and inane. It might be bad for our collective mental state, but at least they're somewhat entertaining. Let's begin.

More Bad PR For the 4HL

Pretty much anyone who has ever existed (and not always been rich) has suffered disillusionment when it comes to the world of work. For some reason, this doesn't stop many people from gaining the tiniest bit of security and then sneering at young people who are new to discovering that the 9 to 5 can really suck.

Perhaps the headline TikTok to Twitter storm this week, a young woman posted a tearful video about how she was struggling with maintaining a quality of life while working and commuting full time. Many Gen Xers and grind-addled millennials saw his as a good opportunity to mock her.

Unsurprisingly, this led to a backlash of those suggesting she was making some obvious points. The 40 hour work week was only widely adopted in the 20th century, y'know. 

Walking in Nature? Feel Bad About It

Regrettably, the full time grad students are at it again. In a particularly spirited case of Twitter brain, one of them got on the platform to point their scathing critical eye at hiking, a pastime beloved by otherwise sedentary middle class thirtysomethings everywhere.

The argument was that this popular form of exercise was a symptom of how a 'bourgeois' concept of nature allowed hikers to romanticize a tiny proportion of the outdoors while the effects of climate change raged around them. What followed was some heated debate over the issue, as well as an in-depth roasting of Twitter's public intellectual of the week. This is old-school discourse, baby.

California Rolls = Colonization 

Perhaps everyone is on edge from everything that's going on in the world, because the social media haters seem to be on steroids at the moment. As if there wasn't already enough stupid arguments going on about how we work and what we do in our free time, the notoriously tricky topic of food had to be brought into the conversation.

An Australian woman living in New York has been dubbed Sushi Sheila after documenting her journey of quitting her job as a lawyer to open a sushi shop in Manhattan. After a TikTok sharing her story went viral, restauranteur Eric Rivera dubbed her a ‘colonizer’ for being a white woman starting a business based on ‘Australian-style’ Japanese food. 

While his callout got so much traction that Sheila eventually took down her TikTok account, not everybody was on board with the criticism. Some also pointed out the Puerto Rican Rivera was planning to open a Japanese and Puerto Rican fusion restaurant of his own. Whoever's in the right, it definitely gave the insufferable anti-woke brigade something to chew on.

Hustlers Take Note

Two years after it was the question du jour on Twitter, Jay Z has finally weighed in on the conundrum of what we should choose in the hypothetical situation that we are offered either $500,000, or dinner with him. As many canny commentators predicted, the rapper and entrepreneur said that people should ‘obviously’ choose the money in an interview with Gayle King on CBS.

Claiming fans should simply listen to his discography if they wanted tips on how to emulate his success, it's a definite L for all the grindset worshippers who argued that his advice over a meal won out over cash. It's not like this will stop their delusions, though.

So ends another few days of online derangement. I'm sure it won't be long before we are refreshed with a new set of things to find amusing and/or get mad about. Until next time!