People Share 30 Life Hacks That Sound Terrible But Really Work

It seems like life hacks have been everywhere lately, on TikTok, Instagram stories, Facebook feeds, even Linkedin. It doesn't take you long to realize that most of them are utterly useless, like “peeling onions without shedding a tear,” which basically means you have to use a bunch of extra weird gadgets, or “opening a stubborn banana from the bottom,” because damn those stubborn bananas! It’s only fair to wonder what’s up with this modern obsession and whether there's anything it tells us about ourselves.

Interestingly, life-hack content in itself is not a new thing. According to Refinery29, the genre can be dated back to roughly 2500 B.C. It’s the time when the “Instructions of Shuruppak,” one of the oldest pieces of “wisdom literature,” came to being, giving people advice that was passed from a father (the king Shuruppak) to his son (Ziusudra). This is an early Sumerian text and it contains practical and philosophical wisdom bites, such as “Don’t pass judgment when you’ve been drinking beer; don’t buy an ass that brays too much; and don’t place your house next to a public square—there’s always a crowd there.”

So giving one person advice and receiving it from others is the most basic and ancient form of passing knowledge. This is a human thing to do—we share things we’re good at, or that we have knowledge of through experience and skill. I mean, that’s how the education systems work, and that’s how leaders are born.

But life hacks take the concept of sharing something that’s supposedly valuable to us to the extreme. The problem is not giving a hack per se, but rather the content of it. While we may want to know how to start the car in freezing temperatures with a simple trick, we genuinely don’t need a tip on making storage boxes out of coconut shells. Or do we?

Refinery29 suggests that our fascination with life hacks spreading around the internet may have to do with our “deep-seated need to learn more information, without actually requiring that we engage our brains.” If anything, the internet has taught us we can accomplish things without sacrificing our time and effort too much. And if that’s one more weird life hack, so be it.