“The whoosh bottle experiment”

“Come on man. You’re scared or what.” Is how it gets started.  “Yeah man, just do it trust me dude, it’ll be fine.” These comments are all examples of peer pressure and in 2022 peer pressure and social media are directly tied together. These past few years alone we’ve had many idiotic, foolish, and ignorant challenges. When are we going to learn to put our own safety before social media fame? We all, as a society, need to learn to do better before something even worse happens. History keeps repeating itself and how we have not learned anything, even with all these unfortunate, preventable accidents that have hurt so many people. A couple of these examples will be listed below.

•  the outlet challenge: where people slide pennies in between the prongs of a cell phone charger and the outlet.
•  the hot water challenge: where people would pour hot water on themselves,
• the pass out challenge: where people would purposely try to pass out, and they would do it to their friends too
• the Tide Pod challenge: where, yes, people were eating Tide Pods

One of the more recent challenges is the whoosh bottle experiment.  

“The whoosh bottle experiment” is a dangerous challenge minors have been partaking in. It was trending all over TikTok to pour rubbing alcohol in a plastic jug and lighting it on fire, and then it would make a whoosh sound- hence the name. Now, on December 28th, 2021 a boy from Connecticut attempted this experiment. It did not go well, as you might have guessed. This experiment led to severe injuries and ended with him in the hospital. The boy was majorly burned and the craziest part of all this is, that’s not even the worst thing that could’ve happened. This experiment, if not done correctly, or supervised, could quite literally end in death. Think about that for a minute. 

What was the purpose of all this? What did they learn out of the experiment itself, not the experience, but the experiment? They didn’t do this experiment for a learning purpose. People already spend eight hours at school every Monday-Friday. The point is this was more of a “fun” trend rather than an experiment. People started doing this simply, for fun and views. People do like to do trends, especially if they want to go viral, anyways. Not to say there’s something wrong with trends but, I’m sure this boy from Connecticut who attempted this challenge, wouldn’t call this fun.

In conclusion, plenty of teens around the world value social media fame over health, meaning they would do almost anything to do well on social media and go viral for a few hours. So many of these challenges start off as a “funny joke” and then lead to severe injuries and even death.  We have to make a change before it’s too late.