Neckties are the fault of the Industrial Revolution. No, really, I’m serious. Cravats had been around since the first one was worn by one of the French kings named Louis, but neckties didn’t really become common fashion until a lot of men started working in factories and wanted a form of neckwear that was comfortable, fairly easy to tie, and could be left on all day.

A lot of parts of modern U.S. society came out of the Industrial Revolution. National parks, sports as a symbol of masculinity, neckties … things we accept as habitual aspects of everyday life have peculiar beginnings.

Times change, and society makes changes to accommodate them. Sometimes, like with neckties, those changes remain relevant, and they stick around. Other times they aren’t quite as important, but they’re still around anyways. The Interstate Highway System, for example, still conforms to regulation overpass heights that were first written to ensure safe movements of troops.

Other changes, like those to the common vernacular, are more subtle and quickly becoming obsolete. Dialing a phone is a rare activity as is turning a handle to physically roll down a car window. Both of these apply to inventions that have seen barely a century of use, and are already being phased out.

I suppose what I’m trying to drive at here is that mundanity changes, and adapts. That probably isn’t anything new to anyone who’s lived long enough to see the rise of the smartphone or social media and remembers a time before, but it’s something I’m still being reminded of. Everything has a beginning, meaning there was a time before it existed, from the universe to a chair to the saying “what’s up?” The most befuddling part remains how very little we know about what will endure until it’s proven it can. I doubt the average factory worker in the late 1800s would have expected to see men still wearing ties today – I doubt even more that Louis the whatever had any idea his wearing a lace cravat would have repercussions nearly 400 years into the future. Who knows if the term Google will have become obsolete by 2100, or if people will still refer to holographic screens as phones?

The time we live in, as the Internet and electronic connections become even more deeply entwined with people’s daily lives, is changing the average lifestyle as much as the Industrial Revolution did in its time. Maybe in 80 years or so, when everyone telecommutes, no one will even bother with neckties anymore and they’ll be considered as impractical as lace cravats.

— Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy who can frequently be found listening to music, reading, wrestling with a heavy cello case, or poking at the keyboard of an uncooperative laptop.