Lifehacks and You

             A few nights ago as I bashed my head into my floorboards, fruitlessly trying to invent new ways to clean hardwood, my roommate showed me an image macro. A picture of a Swiffer – wrapped in a sock. “Clean your floors with socks”, bold overlaid text read, “If you run out of Swiffer pads”.

            That picture was a genius. My floor sparkled. It was the first time that I ever used a lifehack.

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Lifehacks are advice – good or bad – that are meant to show novel ways to make your life easier. Typically presented as an image macro, they’re their own subgenre of internet meme.

That’s everything I knew about Lifehacks.

To me, they’ve always existed somewhere in the background of the internet; something that exists, definitely, but not something I care about. I’d become jaded to the splendor of free advice offered by strangers.

So I thought I would change. I wanted to find out the history and the meaning of the lifehack.

            As luck would have it, I didn’t have to go very far back. The term was coined in 2004. During the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, tech writer Danny O’Brien used the term to describe the quick, dirty solutions that many IT workers used to get things done. It’s a portmanteau of the words ‘life’ and ‘hack’, which should be immediately obvious. Less obvious is the reason these words were chosen. The word ‘hack’ has many meanings; in this case, it’s used to refer to a  cobbled-together solution to a problem that’s only meant to get things done quickly. The word ‘life’ suggests applying this hack-methodology to everything.

            Since 2004, when it was meant to refer to badly-written scripts by tech professionals, the term lifehack has come into its own.  By 2005, the word ‘lifehack’ was awarded runner-up for ‘most useful word of 2005’ by the American Dialect Society. 2005 also marked the launch of Lifehacker.org – the first of many lifehack aggregation sites.

            After 2005, the lifehack remained dormant for eight years, like some species of arctic frog. Starting in 2013, however, the lifehack explodes in popularity. According to Google Trends, the term begins to spike all over the web, and especially on news sites. This popularity has maintained itself.

            What are the reasons for this popularity? Just about the same fifty image macros from the late 00’s make up the majority of articles today. Buzzfeed, lifehacker.com, and lifehack.org pass around and reassemble the same pictures into new articles like a co-op Frankenstein’s monster.

            I would argue that the lifehack represents the ideal of internet culture. You can make long articles of lifehacks out of easily subdivided blurbs; all the better to split your attention with. The concept of the lifehack is that ephemeral promise of an easier life, streamlined and multitasked to perfection. And, they’re eco-friendly; most have been recycled since 2006.