How to make friends in August
A ridiculous journey of data and meaninglessness
I woke up this morning feeling a bit blue and decided to write a quick article about the beauty of the phrase “Hello world.” It was going to be a piece about the death of innocence on the internet and generally revolve around the theme of the death of society and happiness.
In my conviction to write this, it seemed like a good idea to back it up with some kind of data, so I thought I’d go on Google Trends. I needed to validate if the world was depressed in a blog-sufficient way to seem intelligent but without going through the effort of validating it with any real data, so I entered “feeling depressed”.
Boom! Since 2004, people have become more and more depressed because they’re searching “feeling depressed”. It doesn’t matter that maybe there’s just more researchers looking into it, or the fact that media might be trying to create meaningless hype. I proved my argument. But this is not enough for a sensationalist blog entry. I needed some loneliness in there so I went back and entered “feeling alone”.
Aha! People are becoming miserable and lonely. Look! So much loneliness in this world! If people are lonely, then they definitely want to find friendship right? Rather than learning how to do that alone, these days you just ask the Google God. I went ahead and entered “how to make friends”.
Eh? What’s with this shape? It seems to increase with the depression and loneliness but then tapers off… And also, what is with those regular peaks that start in 2009? A quick composition of a series of mouseovers reveals that they all occur in August.
August? I know! It’s because of university and school. Every August, a whole bunch of hormonal 19 year olds crawling in, craving popularity. I entered “Freshman” and sure enough…
We’ve gotten to the bottom of why one craves friendship in August — except for the date range from Aug 2016 to Oct 2017. Things go crazy there… Maybe there was a sudden interest in university? I scroll down to the related terms and…
XXL? What the bloody hell is Freshman XXL? This time I went to Google to get to the bottom of it and, to my surprise, I discover a rap magazine.
So… A rap magazine threw off the chart for the word “freshman”. What am I to make of this? Google Trends is devoid of context, and this article titled “Stop Using Google Trends” put’s it very nicely:
“It makes “The British are frantically Googling what the EU is, hours after voting to leave it” absurdly disingenuous without better numbers. Update: Remy Smith points out this out: The peak was merely ~1000 people! It’s ludicrous that so few people get turned into a massive story, but it underscores the need for context.” — Danny Page
But what about all the increased depression and loneliness that was revealed? And how do we help those poor souls looking for friends in August? Even then, have we really confirmed that it is college freshmen?
A quick addition of “Game of Thrones” shows that actually, none of the other depressing shit matters anymore after 2012. As you can see, starting July 11, we can deduce that people were looking up “How to make friends” after Game of Thrones ended. They were probably getting lonely as the meaninglessness of their life sets in after the show is done. By 2016, when the “How to make friends” graph shows a decreasing trend, the searches for Game of Thrones start to end in August —but by 2017 the peak month for Game of Thrones happened during August, a total takeover from “How to make friends”.
Thus we find ourselves thinking about the original question and title of this piece: “How to make friends in August”, and the underwhelming answer is: “Game of Thrones”
