F My Life

There is no better way to form connections with people than bonding over the humiliating stories of others. Enter fmylife.com, a site where users can post embarrassing stories about themselves, and read ones from others. Originating in France, the ‘Vie de Merde’ site was Americanized to ‘Fuck My Life.’ Although the title got lost in translation, the sensation of the website hasn’t. It yields about one million hits a day. I guess about a million people suffering from their own sorry lives cope by injecting themselves with a boost of self-confidence from reading the blunders and misfortunes of others. Lee Greenwood might want to make some changes to his song.

In a sense, people are confessing, telling their stories of misfortune, and at the same time they read other people's stories. There is an understanding that these things can happen to anyone. I don’t have to be Nancy Drew to figure out that the World Wide Web is a community within itself. But is the message of fmylife.com telling it’s community that it’s perfectly fine to feed off of people’s calamities? Indeed it is. The website features a tool where one can read a story and then vote whether the story writer’s life is fucked or if it was deserved. And the writers only have three-hundred characters to tell their condemned tales, the last three characters being FML.

One of the top FML posts is: “Today, I received my passport in the mail. They got my birthdate wrong. Then I picked up my birth certificate that I had sent in with the application. Turns out my parents have been celebrating my birthday on the wrong day for 16 years. FML.” Unlike this story, some aren’t deemed worthy enough to even make it onto the website. There are moderators assessing people’s submissions to make sure they are unfortunate enough. And to fit a particular mood, users have the convenient ‘categories’ tab, where they can choose what kind of stories they are interested in. The site is a black hole of sick humored parasites who jump from story to story, feeding off awkward and mortifying accounts. And I’ve fallen into it. FML.