I got a video in my YouTube recommended about a new challenge spreading on social media, and I remembered just all of the dangerous and dumb challenges that have been pushed by social media over the years.

I think my interest in these things was started when I heard about the Blue Whale Challenge all those years ago. Although the Blue Whale challenge was more of an exaggerated hoax than a thing people actually did, it seems that some kids actually ended up self-harming for this game. In case you're not familiar with the challenge, it's a 50-day challenge in which the task you have to perform get more difficult and harmful every day (depending on who's hosting the game, at least, since challenges can differ depending on whose rules you're following). The final task is always the same, though: commit suicide. Ain't that just fun and flowery? Although the challenge has not harmed many people, as the challenge was widely talked and warned about and most children weren't so retarded as to take on a challenge which they knew would result in suicide, I still think the Blue Whale Challenge is THE ultimate scary internet challenge, and I've been interested in fucked up internet challenges ever since.

I also remember the Momo Challenge and later the Jonathan Galindo Challenge making rounds online. In case you're not familiar with that, they're basically the Blue Whale Challenge, but with a scary character as the face of it. Now, the challenges were basically just hoaxes and no one was actually doing them, but teens wanting to push others to do fucked up things ran with the story to make copycat accounts. They'd threaten minors that if they don't complete the challenges, that bad shit would happen. Honestly, I can't even blame minors much for this. Lots of them didn't seek this stuff out, they just got texts from these accounts on social media.

But nowadays you don't have to wait around for some weirdo to message you. Ridiculous challenges are shoved in kids' faces on social media, and the peer pressure and desire for "clout" (internet fame and popularity) gets the better of them. There are so many of these challenges. I'll list some examples. You have the Skullbreaker Challenge, where two people convince a third to jump up and then sticking out their legs to make the unknowing person fall on their head. Then there's the Tide Pod Challenge that went really viral, where people would put a Tide Pod in their mouth and would bite them to spill the liquid inside into their mouth. Another wonderful addition to the challenges list is the Benadryl Challenge, in which you're supposed to record yourself overdosing on Benadryl to hallucinate. No, I'm not kidding. The challenge is doing a drug overdose. And also dumb pre-internet challenges can make a comeback because of how widespread everything can be with social media. The Blackout/Choking Challenge is one of these dumb trends. It blew up on TikTok for some ungodly reason. The whole point of the game is to choke yourself/get choked until you blackout. Now, not only is this bad for your body in the first place, but if you get choked too long, you might actually get killed or kill yourself. There's a story of some girl who used a dog leash as a noose and she actually ended up accidentally committing suicide.

Now what do I think of these tragic losses? I think they're FUCKING FUNNY. No, seriously, this is just natural selection. Even as a kid you should be smart enough not to try a CHOKING challenge or a DRUG OVERDOSIS challenge. Let's be for fucking real: not much is lost on these kids. If they didn't accidentally kill themselves now, they would've probably just done so later in an equally dumb fashion. I'm not saying dumb people SHOULD kill themselves, but I think we need to stop thinking of this as tragic. You mess with the bull, you get his horns. But the worst of all is the parents blaming social media or even specific platforms. YOU allowed your kid to have a phone, YOU allowed your kid to be on social media, YOU did not monitor them. Honestly, it's these parents that should've died. Maybe we can put the parents on death row for being so stupid and negligent? If you truly love your children, you don't let them roam social media unfiltered. If they die doing something stupid they saw on social media, that's on YOU, the parent.

And there's even challenges in which parents endanger their children, even risking THEIR LIVES, for some stupid online challenge to get five minutes of fame. To those parents I want to say, from the deepest of my heart: kill yourself. Cut your throat. Jump off a building. Shoot yourself. I don't care HOW, just KILL YOURSELF. People see people abuse their children like this and still get surprised that I'm an anti-natalist.

So what's the moral of the story? Don't do stupid internet challenges if you don't want to be known globally as the retard who accidentally killed themselves.