fmylife

Becks is right: this FML phenomenon is intolerable. I don’t really agree with her complaint about its negativity being the problem, though. The problem is that it isn’t negative enough. The people participating in this meme are doing it wrong.

The phrase “fuck my life” is a setup for comedy about hopelessness, but it’s being adopted by people who don’t understand either of those things. Most of the entries on FML are about minor inconveniences or embarrassments. #whoops! would be a more apt hashtag.

There are occasional outliers that begin to get at the point of the exercise (this is on the right track, though the execution is clunky). But it’s clear that most of the entries are from fresh-faced twenty year-olds who rarely, if ever, find themselves using the phrase “alone in an uncaring universe”. For these jokes to work their implications need to stretch further into the future than next week. Otherwise the natural response is, “That’s too bad, but I’m sure things will pick up soon.”

UPDATE: I was remiss in not linking to Jake‘s effort to highlight the worst FMLs. And it reminds me to mention my other objection to this whole business: how transparently fake most of the entries are. Really, some slight effort toward plausibility is not too much to ask.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under pop culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.