2024 Wrap-Up: The Year We Officially Gave Up on Common Sense

Ah, 2024, the year humanity collectively decided that common sense was overrated. We started the year with optimism and ended it debating whether the moon should be privatized by billionaires to host galactic influencer retreats. Spoiler alert: Elon Musk called dibs, and Jeff Bezos is suing for “space squatter’s rights.”

January set the tone when a viral TikTok trend encouraged people to “boil water in a microwave for better hydration.” Hospitals were overrun with steam burns and confused patients demanding refunds from their microwaves. Scientists wept.

By spring, we were already knee-deep in nonsense, with AI-written romance novels topping bestseller lists. One particularly steamy hit, Lust in the Code: Forbidden Algorithms, earned a Pulitzer for “best use of semicolons in smut.” Meanwhile, schools banned To Kill a Mockingbird because someone tweeted that it was “too bird-focused.”

Summer brought peak absurdity when a man in Florida married his air fryer. “It’s the only thing that truly gets me,” he said. The honeymoon ended abruptly when he forgot to clean the grease tray, prompting a messy divorce.

Autumn elections proved that logic was as extinct as phone booths. A candidate campaigned on a platform of replacing all public benches with beanbags, citing “ergonomic inclusivity.” He won in a landslide when his opponent accidentally live-streamed himself saying, “I hate beanbags—and the people who sit on them.” And don’t even get us started on the gubernatorial debate in Ohio, where a contestant’s parrot filled in for him due to laryngitis. The bird squawked “Jobs! Taxes! Pretty Polly!” and somehow surged 15 points in the polls.

By December, society officially gave up. A major retail chain began selling pre-peeled bananas in plastic containers labeled “Eco-Friendly.” When questioned, the CEO explained, “It’s what the people want.” The people nodded in unison, distracted by their AI-generated horoscopes predicting “unexpected traffic delays in the multiverse.”

As we bid farewell to 2024, we can only hope that 2025 brings a resurgence of rationality. But let’s be honest—next year’s trending phrase will probably be “Quantum Zumba for Pets,” and we’ll all act like it’s normal.

Here’s to you, 2024: the year common sense took an extended vacation and never came back. Cheers!