You can find just about anything on the internet now a-days. From cars, to houses, to horses, to camping gear, to clothes, the internet has it all. You can even buy marriage online!…but that’s still pretty frowned upon.
The internet, like everything, goes through phases and trends. Right now, the big things are social media accounts (Snapchat, Facebook, Insta, Twitter, YouTube etc.) and psuedo-news-entertainment sources like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.
Fact: Everyone loves BuzzFeed quizzes.
They’re a favorite pastime for bored-to-tears desk workers on slow days, distracted college students in class, and late night procrastinators everywhere. However, one in particular has received some negative attention recently.
The quiz titled, “Should You Break Up with Your S.O.?” can be found here.
Let’s start with the most obvious issues here:
First of all, if your relationship is fragile enough that you are willing to rely on the answer of an online quiz to determine the longevity of it—you should probably get out of that situation…ASAP. This basically screams, “I’m looking for an out.”
Secondly, we’re praying that no one actually uses these quizzes for legitimate purposes, but on a more serious note, it can seriously impact readership of BuzzFeed. Typically, BuzzFeed promotes a brand of fun-loving diversity, representing a wide span of groups in all of their videos, articles, and other posts. However, readers expressed discontent with this particular quiz on facebook, specifically for being “shallow”. The quiz questions were also mainly about very surface level things, such as texts and whether or not you are eachother’s phone background.
One could pretty much equate it to a game of MASH in elementary school.
Dually noted, these types of articles can be very triggering to folks who have anxiety. This may sound like quite the stretch, but it is completely fathomable. If you understand mental illness in any facet, you know that with anxiety in particular, irrational fears can be triggered by just about anything. It doesn’t take much, perhaps just a simple quiz result that says, “you should break up with your S.O.,” to allow the dark strain of doubt to creep into someone’s mind.
The saddest part is, of the millions in this world, there’s someone out there who will let these negative entities take control of their happiness. There’s someone out there with the lack of common sense it takes to know you probably shouldn’t rely on the internet for legitimate life decisions or concerns. (Seriously, don’t look up any sickness symptoms, the internet will convince you you’re dying.)
However, the problem is not exclusive to these quizzes anymore! Scrolling through Facebook, or any social media outlets, it’s hard to avoid the silly posts that proclaim things like, “If your man don’t leave roses at your bedside each night, leave him.”
Head over to any other web based news source like BuzzFeed, Yahoo, or the Huffington Post and you can find a plethora of articles that can completely justify you leaving someone you actually love and may want to spend the rest of your life with.
So what?
The point is, these posts are poison. We become what we surround ourselves with, and our subconscious can work in crazy ways. Our advice? Don’t let other people, or inanimate websites decide the facts of your relationship for you. If YOU’RE happy, stay away from the outlets that may make you doubt that. We’re humans, we’re imperfect beings, and we always want to find ways to second guess ourselves (probably some evolutionary thing). Of course, you can’t completely ignore negative stimuli, but we recommend you make your best attempt at avoiding it by keeping positive and close people as your friends and followers.
If someone you know is sharing these posts, perhaps mention to them the damage they can cause. They create unrealistic expectations for relationships, and most importantly they diminish the value of the connection between two people. Yeah, yeah, it may have just been a quiz for fun, but we’re probably all better off leaving it alone.