It’s time for a Grumpy Old Man rant – the kind that I occasionally unleash at the poor people I work with, but that I rarely put the effort into typing for public consumption.

“You’ve won the internet.”

“This is it. I’ve found the best gif. EVER!”

“This wins the prize for best sign.”

“World’s best pull request description.”

Why must everything be constantly turned into a competition? Why can’t we just enjoy something on its own merits without frothing with hyperbole about its place in the annals of human history? By constantly over-inflating the importance of every tiny insignificant thing, we produce a false economy. When everyone and everything is special, nothing is.

Not everything is special. Not everything is the best. And that’s perfectly fine – in fact it’s desired. Life is not purely black and white, it is full of nuances and shades of grey (far more than 50). Without lows as a counter-balance, the highs have no reference and no meaning. But instead of embracing that, we seem to be desperately polarising and categorising all that we encounter.

We are creating a false dichotomy. It has become more and more common to treat things we see on the internet as a binary state: “It must be best in class, even if we have to invent a new class for it to be best of” versus “It’s not even worth my time to look at it”. It’s like George W. Bush declaring “You’re either with us or against us.”

By all means, enjoy things that are amusing. But seeing someone write something clever doesn’t mean they’ve “won the internet.” (Quite frankly, the internet’s been won so many times that it’s surely just a faded hand-me-down prize by now.) Enjoy it for what it is – an isolated moment in time, unencumbered by the need to measure and compare it.

Step away from the white spotlight and the black abyss, and come join me over here in the grey areas. (Just don’t get me started on the hyperbole of sports commentators.)