Happy New Year everybody! Hello again1.
I hope this email finds you in something resembling good health.
Maybe it’s the Advertising major in me, but I’ve long been interested in what songs/shows/movies/apps get as much attention with as little promotion as possible.
If your social media feeds are anything like mine, you might have seen some variation of these colorful grids within the last two weeks:
These are auto-generated results from the browser-based word puzzle game, Wordle.
The fraction represents how many attempts it took to guess the five-letter word of the day. For instance, the results above show that it took me four attempts to guess Wordle #208.
Gray squares = “this letter is not in the word”,
Yellow squares = “the letter is in the word, but in the wrong spot”,
Green squares = “right letter, right spot”.
Created by a software engineer with the aptronym Josh Wardle, the game has taken off seemingly overnight. Here is how the game explains itself on its own website:
Put more succinctly, it’s Mastermind meets Bananagrams.
I went from never having heard of it, to my roommate demonstrating how it works, to reading a profile about its creator in the New York Times, to being in multiple group chats where all we do is share our daily, boxy results, all in the span of four days.
So why is it so popular?
Other than a bit of “right place, right time”, with people having fuck-all to do at the moment, my armchair psychologist guess is that it’s one part of a greater band-aid antidote to the languishing many of us have been experiencing over the past year.
Languishing is that somewhat joyless, somewhat aimless, “neglected middle child of mental health”, as recently defined in this timely NY Times piece from December:
In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless. [Languishing] … is the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work.
In other words, languishing is “meh.”
The piece continues:
Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.
I recommend the full article, provided you can get over the writer fondling themselves over their own aggressive – albeit astounding – alliterative abilities (dulling of delight…. dwindling of drive… slipping slowly into solitude…give me a break)
Anyways, I bring this up not to focus on the languishing aspect, nor the abundant alliteration, but to emphasize the state of ~~flourishing~~, and how one achieves it.
One tip the article gives to reach this state is as follows:
To transcend languishing, try starting with small wins, like the tiny triumph of figuring out a whodunit or the rush of playing a seven-letter word. One of the clearest paths to flow is a just-manageable difficulty: a challenge that stretches your skills and heightens your resolve. That means carving out daily time to focus on a challenge that matters to you — an interesting project, a worthwhile goal, a meaningful conversation. Sometimes it’s a small step toward rediscovering some of the energy and enthusiasm that you’ve missed during all these months.
Sound familiar?
The words in Wordle are never that obscure (for example, three of the words since I’ve started playing have been “POINT”, “SOLAR”, and “PANIC”), and can sometimes be mildly British (“ABBEY” and “SHIRE” have also been the WoTD since I started on 1/14), which allows American players to feel extra sophisticated when they finally see that streak of five green letters triumphantly sprawl across their screen.
Something else unique about Wordle, as opposed to similar-ish games like Words with Friends2, is that there is currently no iOS app version (although I’ll be shocked if the Times doesn’t make a knock-off version within the next month to put in their ‘Games’ section). You can only play it in your web browser or on desktop.
While this means you can’t go back and retroactively play the past 200+ Wordles, it also means no free-mium upsells, nor obnoxious ads that appear after every guess.
It’s juuust manageable, easy on the eyes, and isn’t trying to sell you anything.
But then again, so is like… The Cube with Dwyane Wade. And I don’t hear anyone talking about that show with nearly as much fervor in my group chats / Twitter timeline (although, at least the shareable results would look somewhat similar…)
I don’t know. Maybe I’m entirely overthinking this phenomenon, but I’m reminded of when people would post PEMDAS problems on Facebook in the 2011-12 range.
Don’t these people have anything better to do?, I wondered at the time.
Nine, they answered, incorrectly.
And so once a day, thousands of people get to briefly pat themselves on the back for remembering the occasional “BANAL” or “REBUS” from their high school SAT prep, gain a certain level of temporary self-esteem, humblebrag to their linguistically-inclined co-workers, and get on with their otherwise deeply unfulfilling day.
Put more cynically by “Candy”, the sinister third track of the musical Octet:
‘There’s a brand new level every day!
This, I can accomplish.
This jacks my fix right now.”
What about you, dear reader?
Have you played this game yet? Why do you think it’s so popular?
Do you think my negative perception of the game is partially because I was on a 5-day winning streak until “PROXY” came along?
Feel free to share your thoughts below.
I don’t know when it’s officially too late to still be saying “Happy New Year”, but doing so on January 20th, despite only being 5.47% of the way through 2022, feels like pushing it.
AKA “Wordle to Yo Mama”