FML

Hi, I’m Adam Baum, here today to present my views about a known popular website you all should recognize by now:

"Today, I was sitting in class and I fell asleep during the lesson. I was wearing sweatpants and had an erection. My teacher came up to me and grabbed my penis. She thought it was my phone. FML"

Short. Hilarious. Entertaining. Reassuring. These feelings, within a span of five seconds, contaminate the reader’s brain. No other source of entertainment achieves such an instant and brainless satisfaction in such a short period of time. The site is absolutely and undeniably ingenious. What could be better than knowing someone out there just had this impossibly shitty day? After all, people judge their lives based on comparisons. And if someone else’s day sucked, that made yours good.

However, perhaps the most disturbing and f***ed up part of FML is not the stories itself but the readers who visit the site daily, chuckle to themselves, and stare at the screen to ease their own grievances in their own stupid and insignificant life.

First of all, the stories probably never happened. I could conjure up some random story on how a truck ran through my house and blew up and then I was arrested for committing arson and then post it. And no one would confirm it. These stories are all cleverly designed to make people think, “wow that’s f***ed up”. And yes it is f***ed up, not in the sense that the story is nearly impossible but in the sense that people enjoy reading these things and ignore the more f***ed up things in life.

There are no stories about a skeleton like African girl starving. No stories about someone’s parents arrest for protesting the election in Iran. No stories about the deaths of a person’s loved ones. No stories about the thousands of people dying each day in the slow and painful war in Congo. No stories about deaths, arrests, and the deprivation of basic human rights. No, these are too realistic, too depressing, too f***ed up for our shallow minds to comprehend in our sheltered world with internet access. People simply ignore these problems. People find someone’s terrible imaginary situation in his sheltered world more F***ed than the larger more important and often ignored world problems.

And that, I think, is the most F***ed up thing of all.