Curious if you have a sense of how long this has been going on. My perception is that various sorts of rudeness and inconsiderateness have been on the rise for a while, but really jumped post-COVID.
Some of it is minor but just suggests to me that many people lack any sense that they should be aware of others around them. Just today I was walking down the street and a woman was stopped, in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at her phone. She was in front of a shop door but not right in front of it, so she was half-blocking both people passing on the sidewalk and people trying to get into the store. I see this kind of thing so often now, in store aisles, on sidewalks, etc., and a part of me wants to go up to these people and inform them that there are other people around them and that if they want to take a moment to look at their phone they should step to the side.
Definitely post-COVID. I remember going to see bands in between or just after lockdowns ended, and even the bands were taken aback by the change in audience behaviour, commenting on it. Lots of self-entitled behaviour, talking and even yelling out during quiet moments, people walking up to the stage during a seated Nick Cave concert demanding to hand him stuff or shake his hand - I remember him saying "wow, you guys really forgot how to behave over the last couple of years". Now it just seems to be normalised that crowd behaviour is worse, more self-entitled. I'm not sure what's driving it - whether people who previously weren't going to gigs decided, during lockdown, that they wanted to go out and do stuff more, but just had never learned the etiquette, and/or social media making the experience about the individual rather than the performance.
> many people lack any sense that they should be aware of others around them.
It's not "people". One half of all people grows up playing contact sports or at least have some form of rough-and-tumble with their homies in schoolyards. This half also knows that you can get punched if things get too rowdy.
The other does not. Almost all of the entitled road blockers are in this category.
Some of it is minor but just suggests to me that many people lack any sense that they should be aware of others around them. Just today I was walking down the street and a woman was stopped, in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at her phone. She was in front of a shop door but not right in front of it, so she was half-blocking both people passing on the sidewalk and people trying to get into the store. I see this kind of thing so often now, in store aisles, on sidewalks, etc., and a part of me wants to go up to these people and inform them that there are other people around them and that if they want to take a moment to look at their phone they should step to the side.