Trends are what impacts what clothes people wear, the humor they use, and what evolves the English language. Additionally, it can be used as something to get famous, by doing a certain action a completely unknown person can become famous. Such trends include but not limited to brain rot, rage bait, dark humor, and TikTok challenges like the tide pod challenge the blackout challenge and the NyQuil chicken challenge

Tiktok challenges are an easy way to gain likes and followers, however the amount of them coming out in recent years have been slow. The past trendy challenge included the tide pod challenge, where a person would ingest a cleaning product called tide pod. Mainly teenagers participated in the trend, and many teenagers ended up in the hospital. Although there were no official cases involving the consumption of tide pods, official statements were made. Tide responded with a PSA with Rob Gronkowski a football player to try and prevent people from eating tide pods. Tide also helped in removing videos on the internet that had involvement with the tide pod challenge, as well as making the plastic around the tide pod harder to bite. Although Tide had involved themselves to perfection it wouldn’t mean other companies would follow suit as most TikTok challenges had no companies involved in the first place. The milk crate challenge is when several milk crates are stacked in the form of a staircase. A person would walk the staircase up and down. The milk crates themselves are hard to balance on, and in that being said the person participating in the challenge would often fall due to the milk crate staircase collapsing under the person’s weight. Most if not all of the people who participated in the challenge ended up with broken or dislocated bones and bruises. A statement released by the FDA had been made discouraging the milk crate challenge in a twitter post, and in later years it would disapprove of other challenges like the NyQuil chicken challenge where you cook chicken with NyQuil, the blackout challenge where you’d intentionally make yourself faint through suffocation and the most recent once, exploding your computer by sticking lead through one of the USB ports. Many other challenges that overall affected physical health were made with countless amounts of victims.

Back in the 1920’s a trend had been created, a trend that involved words having their own meaning, such as being the big cheese meaning being an important person or being a bimbo which at the time meant being a tough man. In short, many words had been created to describe a person or a thing like calling beer giggle water because drinking was frowned upon at the time. Fast Forward to today’s world we have words like sigma and skibidi. Why? There really is no explanation why these two words were created, all we know is that both words can be a verb, noun, and adjective. Although this “evolution” of the English language is somewhat impressive, the words categorized as brain rot isn’t the only subject in the same category. Videos and actions rightfully deserve their own spot inside. The cringe factor of a video or action is what makes it so, such as saying the Japanese word ‘baka” or acting like a literal dog or animal with some sort of genuine intention. There’s a difference from being a furry and being a “weird” person. Although posting cringe usually makes a person hated, it can be the total opposite if the video is obviously satirical. 

Rage baiting is the act in which you say something wrong, even though you fully know that you’re wrong, such as pineapple on pizza even though you don’t even like pineapple on pizza. Rage baiting on the internet used to be funny, and had you laughing at yourself afterwards realizing you got slightly ticked off for no reason. In today’s society rage baiting is highly popularized, mostly for the wrong reasons. People on the internet pushed this concept into a massively distasteful idea. Racial slurs, homophobic slurs, animal abuse, making fun of sensitive topics or even placing themselves as a higher being, some sort of god. There are countless videos and posts that are centered around these ideas. 

Dark humor is also something that has evolved into a pile of garbage. The lion was a viral trend that had placed itself into peoples for you pages for weeks. To sum it up, the joke was that the lion doesn’t need the consent of other animals. Some people would describe themselves as the lion because it had placed them higher in the hierarchy of other people. There was a counteractive trend called the tiger that was the polar opposite of the lion, where the tiger had a quote of protecting the smaller animals, and validating the concept of consent. Although this trend was somewhat short lived it was undoubtedly insensitive, even if some victims of non consensual actions get through their trauma with humor, it isn’t the case for everyone, and the jokes about said actions shouldn’t be validated in any shape or form.

The internet over the years had evolved for the better and worse, because every opposition has its equal and opposite reaction, from the TikTok challenges to new words being in development which is somewhat positive to look at.  It’s important to understand that some things that may get you famous isn’t worth the effort of putting your own health at risk, or potentially putting others at risk.