Online Word Games Are Ruining My Life

I am addicted to Wordle. Goddamn it. I first started playing this cursed game, the bane of my existence, in December 2021. Back then, everyone was doing it. Wordle was the fad of the moment. The internet was flooded with articles about mathematically optimizing your starting word. (“Adieu,” we all thought then, in our innocence.) Jovial hackers were peering into the game’s source code, extracting the full list of correct answers, and posting them ahead of time, on a now-defunct social media platform called “Twitter.” We were furious with those hackers. We should have been listening to their implied message, that is, “This game is stupid.” They were only trying to save us from ourselves.