What are you doing this New Year’s Eve? How about crying and eating bread by yourself on the floor?
That’s what about 72,000 people are planning to do on Dec. 31, according to the public Facebook event Crying and Eating Bread by Yourself on the Floor — one of the hundreds of random hilarious fake events that are taking over Facebook.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Don’t worry, it’s only a matter of time until you get invited to, or notice a friend is “attending” eat flamin hot cheetos till you see god, PET EVERY SINGLE DOG or even get beat up by ur friends for attending fake fb events.
While the events are amusingly random, they evince some motifs like snacks, crying and existential despair.
There are two nearly identical events about Drake and sadness, Listening to drake and crying on Dec. 31 and Listening to old drake songs and cry on Jan. 1. Each has over 20,000 attendees.
The fake events are at once totally unexpected and familiar, as their particular brand of sadness, entropy and hating school is a mainstay of Tumblr and Reddit anti-humor. They perfectly illustrate the self-referential comic possibilities of the Internet, where you can’t take anything for granted or seriously, not even a seemingly utilitarian feature like a Facebook event.
Their timing is perfect, too: a wry counterpart to the endless, replicable, real-life holiday events full of forced cheer that come our way this time of year.
“Crying and Eating Bread by Yourself on the Floor” was created by Sam Foran, a senior at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
“I saw on my newsfeed that one of my roommates was interested in attending some of these fake events and I just thought it seemed funny,” Foran told The Huffington Post. After seeing that his friends were going to the event Become an Actual Potato, he had a sleepless night and then created his own event on Nov. 25. He thought he’d be the only person actually attending the event.
“I remember later that day the event reached something like 500 interested guests, and my friends and I thought that was crazy,” he said. “The next morning it was into the tens of thousands.”
Allan Pham, a high school senior from Anaheim, California, was inspired to create “Listening to drake and crying” with his friend Amanda Nguyen after a sad breakup. He was surprised at the proliferation of similar Drake events, but said, “It’s all good. Life is a competition.”
Who knows how long this trend will last — but for now, let’s celebrate its existence on that most serious and irony-free of online platforms, Facebook.
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