Playing the Workaholic on Social Media

Though the sentiment “fuck my life,” expressed in some form or another, has existed as long as life has been terrible, the abbreviation FML is entirely an invention of the internet’s social age. While it’s hard to know from where it originally sprung, it was popularized via the website-or-blog-or-bulletin Fmylife.com.

was created in 2008 by Maxime Valette, Guillaume Passaglia, and Didier Guedjas as an English adaptation of their French Viedemerde.fr. Though the site began just as a work in translation, it quickly gained its own rightful traction and tons of submissions in English. It also set the grammatical terms of use for “FML” more generally. Fmylife.com depended on sharing and thrived on an economy of bad feelings: Users submitted their tales of woe—always beginning with “Today,” always ending on “FML.” Other users then evaluated the stories by clicking either “I agree, your life sucks” or “You totally deserve it.”