Flustered by an Egg? (Commentary by Joan Bomuhangi)

Flustered by an Egg?

(Commentary by Joan Bomuhangi)

What is it about this generation and its obsession with trolling? Because that’s what this is. The ultimate form of trolling. Posting a simple picture of an egg with the specific goal of dethroning Kylie Jenner as the person with the most liked Instagram post. It’s a stupid waste of time, yet over 50 million people - yes 50 MILLION PEOPLE - have like a simple picture of an egg. I also succumbed to the temptation and dashed over Instagram to like the post the minute I found out about it. See, that’s the thing about my generation, we love to take the piss out of any situation.

It always baffled my parents and my older sibling how my brother and I spoke to each other. You see my sisters are significantly older than my brother and I (we’re twins). So, despite being siblings, we are technically part of two different generations, and thus we have different ways of behaving. My brother and I, like most people our age, talked to each other in a way that to the untrained eye would seem like arguing, when in reality we were just taking the ‘P’ and having a good old laugh. It’s the same with the egg. The stupid, stupid, hilarious egg.

You can blame it all on the internet. The combination of kids who are willing to literally put themselves in a dangerous situation just for laughs, and a global computer network that allows us to share the dumb things we do, fosters an environment where people will go out of their way to like a picture of an egg for no apparent reason, other than to dethrone an internet celebrity - who’s famous for being famous.

The internet has created an entire generation of human beings who share memes daily, post any funny situation we have ever experienced on Twitter, and are only able to show genuine emotions like love and admiration by “roasting” each other – publicly and privately.

To make matters worse, there’s even merchandise being sold with the tagline #EggGang - to be honest, I’d buy it if I could, but it’s currently sold out. My generation does a lot of things just for laughs and fortunately or unfortunately, we’d buy useless overpriced items just for the mere fact of being funny. Look at Vine before it met its untimely death in 2017. It was a perfect platform for us to post all the stupid things we did just for laughs, to get even more laughs and maybe even popularity.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In a world where everything is seemingly bleak: Theresa May and Brexit, the Yellow Vest riots in Paris, global warming, World War 3 seemingly approaching, and everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, just to name a few; having an escape where we can just be idiots and not care about “the important issues” is a relief.

No doubt this fad will be forgotten soon and we’ll all move on to the next stupidly funny thing that will be even dumber and funnier than a silly egg, but it was damn funny while it lasted.

P.S, I’m betting anyone RM5 that in a few months someone is going to challenge the egg for the position of most liked post on Instagram. What the image will be of is a mystery, maybe a pacifier. #PacifierPossy.

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Reference:

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/3kg8q3/world-record-egg-instagram-photographer-surprised-serghei-platanov-egg-is-just-an-egg-vgtrn

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