The unusual always sticks

Today during my run I was thinking about what to write on my blog. Out of all the things, I could think about one story from almost a decade ago came to my mind. A story so simple and unimportant it surprised me that I still remember it.

Here’s the story. The story is about the check-in feature of Facebook. Who remembers when that feature first started? I remember that this was something people used to do on foursquare. Then just like its other features, Facebook had to copy it. Facebook check-in gave users the ability to pin their locations. You can let people know where you are at that moment. People mostly used that feature to check in to restaurants and hotels. At the peak of its popularity, this feature was used a lot by businesses. A lot of restaurants in Bangladesh used to give discounts if you checked in the restaurant on Facebook. It was also a way for people to flex if they visited expensive places.

This story is from that time. When checking in to places on Facebook was a thing. This involves one of my friends from high school. I was scrolling through Facebook and I see that he just checked in to a popular and expensive restaurant in Dhaka. Along with his check-in, he had uploaded this photo of the dessert he was having. I was about to scroll through my feed when I noticed something on the photo. On the bottom right side of the photo, there was a watermark of the hotel. I immediately got curious. I wanted to know why there was a watermark. Instead of messaging the friend, I did a reverse google image search and I found that the image was taken from google. So he probably wanted to flex that he was at that restaurant instead of actually being there. I messaged him to let him know about this. He joked that he was there but forgot to take the photo of the food. So he used one from the website. We both knew the truth.

But the takeaway from this blog isn’t the story. It’s about why I remembered this story. It’s been almost a decade since this happened. So many things have happened since this stupid and funny story but I still remembered this. In my opinion, I still remember this because of how unusual it was. It was something unexpected. That is what always sticks to us human beings.

This is true in different aspects of our life too. If you are a creative person and want to stand out among the noise of the internet, you have to do something unique or unusual. You have to look at trends and break them and create your own trend. There are multiple examples of this but not enough time for me to write about them. I will be off to bed.