Kids on Social Media have been boiling chicken in Nyquil for videos. People are shocked by this, but is this really new?
One of the latest trends online has been people boiling Chicken in the nighttime medicine Nyquil. It’s difficult to figure out just how popular the Nyquil Chicken trend is. Social Media platform Tik Tok (where the trend took off) has deleted the tag for “NyquilChicken”, meaning that one can’t view how many videos were made with this trend.
However, the fact that the FDA warned against the trend on their official website shows that the trend seems to have gone beyond harmless fun. Social media news outlets have jumped on this story, allowing those who see the story to comment their thoughts on the whole trend.
The results have not been surprising.
Oftentimes when trends like this take off on social media, people will jump onto their high horse and proclaim that the new generation is dumber than any generation previous, It doesn’t occur to people that perhaps when they were the age of these people, they did silly stuff like this as well.
Every year, there seems to be another wacky internet challenge which people are up in arms about. Last year, people were climbing stacks of milk crates for online videos. Back in 2018, the big trend was eating tide pods. Kids taking spoon-fulls of cinnamon to intentionally gag and choke was a trend for so long that I’m hard pressed to find anyone around my age who hasn’t done it at least once.
Now one might respond that this is the fault of the internet. People online are encouraging others to partake in these activities and as such, dangerous activities like this are specific to this current generation.
To an extent, this is true. It’s much easier for trends like this to spread because with the internet, you have an opportunity to reach more people than ever. The idea that this means dumb and dangerous trends never existed before the internet though would be a lie.
Even as far back as the 1930s, there’s stories of kids doing stupid things for attention. For example, a fad spread among college campuses where kids were swallowing live goldfish.
Yes, the 1930s. No internet. Most homes didn’t even have television at this point.
Another wacky fad which spread across college campuses was people stuffing themselves into phonebooths until there was no room left. While this one doesn’t seem as dangerous as some of the other ones, it’s not a far stretch of the imagination to think that parents nowadays would decry that kids are risking suffocation or illness by stuffing themselves into phonebooths.
How about hazing? There are news stories all the time about college students being injured or even killed because of hazing practices from fraternities. Surely this is a modern practice, only the modern generation could do such dangerous acts to join a fraternity. When did the practice of hazing begin?
Yes, some attribute the first concrete definition of acts equating hazing to PLATO!
In case that’s not solid enough to convince you, there’s a sourced list of deaths due to hazing on Wikipedia (Yes, Wikipedia isn’t a good source but they just make the list) which starts in 1738!
With this in mind, is the current generation any dumber than the generations before us?
No!
Why do we think this way? It seems like people are perfectly happy to participate in these wacky trends but once they’re old enough, they throw the new generation of kids under the bus.
There’s a really interesting quote attributed to an activist named Jack Weinberg, who was a champion of the free speech movement throughout the 1960s. When interviewed by The San Francisco Chronicle, Weinberg told us not to trust anybody over 30.
Think about how old young people from the free speech movement in the 1960s are now. In your experience, has the young generation today been well received by those people?
That’s not to attack older people or to call anyone hypocrites because I think everyone does this. To an extent, I think everyone has some discontent for the trends of the new generation and while we can pretend that kids today are dumber because they have IPads, I think the reality is that these feelings come from a discontent from not being young anymore.
Do you remember what was popular when you were in college? Would you do any of that now? Probably not.
Does that make the kids in college now stupid for doing the same thing? Of course not.
The best thing we can do as we get older is to support this newer generation. This doesn’t mean let your kids overdose on cough syrup flavored chicken. Let’s just not start spreading bitterness about the latest generation because whether you like it or not, that was you once.