Blood Pressure Blog

Thousands of years ago, humans emerged from the crevices of the world and proceeded to communicate what they wanted with simple words that I can only image were like ‘bork’ and ‘shlurp’. Fast forward, to present day, and we’ve taken our highly sophisticated verbiage and turned it into a way of gatekeeping enemies of the English language and while teabagging our friend’s faces that their happiness can be quantified from a sliding scale of 1 to X. Yet, I refuse to allow 3 simple colors dictating whether I choose chaos or peace at 7:35 in the morning. The firestorm that takes over Twitter from the hours of 7am to noon is the word-guessing game Wordle, a free to play game that was created with innocent intentions by its creators. Frankly, if you love something, set it free, and that’s exactly what the creator by selling it to the New York Times, adding to their juggernaut list of intellectual property in an attempt to copyright the English language.

If we were to power rank different buttons that can cause widespread chaos, at the top would be the button to launch nuclear warheads, that one button in every movie spy car that says do not press, and the share button on Wordle. As it’s extremely easy to share daily Wordle scores, we’ve started looking down on the people that are bad at Wordle – and I’m not meaning people that don’t get the word at all, but people that get the word in 5 or 6 attempts. Instead of starting my day with a nice coffee and peaceful vibes, I now start my mornings with nervousness, gatekeeping, and getting mentally bodied over and over. This is natural selection at its finest.

And I’m not even kidding about the natural selection thing. Colleges and universities around the US are removing standardized testing – setting up for a clear opening for Wordle to take its place for a prospective vocabulary testing section. Hell, screw standardized testing all together, completely gamifying college admissions in a letter and number blindfolded dart throwing competition is what our college admissions process needs anyways, so you might as well make it fun.

Am I anti-learning, am I anti-fun, no? I still play this dumb game and whenever I finish it a feeling of dread washes over me for 30 seconds that I have to wait 24 hours just to play the next round. This what peak, masculine performance looks like the 2022, just monkeys pushing buttons on a screen in a 24 hour while loop.

I digress, maybe I’m just saying this because I’m bad at Wordle – I’m not horrible, I still get the answer every time in 5-6 attempts. I refuse to get absolutely bodied by the 26 letters of the alphabet, but it’s absolutely insane that some players get the answer in 3-4 tries consistently.