The ‘Milk Crate Challenge’ is turning the entire world into ‘Jackass’ stars

New “challenges” pop up all the time, but once every couple of years one blows up in a major way. Whether it’s planking, Tebowing, the Ice Bucket Challenge, or flipping a bottle — there’s something about the inherent virality of everyone trying to achieve the same goal that makes us feel interconnected. Well, today we’re talking about the greatest social media challenge the world has ever seen: The Milk Crate Challenge.

Starting as a viral challenge on TikTok, now everyone is attempting to ascend a rickety pyramid of stacked milk crates and make it down the other side in an attempt to one-up each other. Millions are trying the feat, the vast majority are failing — miserably, and that’s why it’s so perfect.

Over the years I’ve become less and less inclined to laugh at other people’s misfortunes. I’d like to call it “maturity,” but the reality is that I’ve probably injured myself enough at this point that I have legitimate empathy for people who bust their ass in a Walmart aisle after they slip of a broken jar of mayonnaise. But this, this is different.

Everyone who attempts this challenge KNOWS it’s a terrible idea. If you explain this to someone who hasn’t seen a video they’ll say “Yeah, that’s a bad idea.” These are willing Darwin Awards participants, without the same stakes of the actual natural selection that’s taking place right now.

The brave souls who attempt the Milk Crate Challenge looked at 2021. They saw millions of people willing to throw their lives away because a discredited doctor on Facebook told them the Covid vaccine contained silver particles and Ryan Seacrest’s DNA, and said “yanno, I’d like to do something really dumb too.” They fashioned their janky towers of heavily used plastic with the care of Icarus sticking bird feathers together with wax.

Milk Crate Challenge participants are also known for flying too close to the sun.

The beauty is in the myriad ways this challenge can go wrong. Every video is like unwrapping a chocolate from an unmarked box. You know you’re going to get something delicious, you just don’t know what it’ll taste like yet. There are people who fail on the first couple of steps, plummeting off the side. Others who make it to the pinnacle before falling into the crates on their descent — and there’s this guy, bless his heart, who tried with all his might to cling to hope at the apex, only to have his world come crashing down.

No matter what the video contains, it’s going to be pure joy. The best part: Those gifted enough to actually be able to complete the challenge are adding their own twists, like “White Mike,” who said to himself “I can walk up this pyramid easy. Why don’t I roll a blunt while doing it?”

But even White Mike, the Bo Jackson of the Milk Crate Challenge world, learned the hard way that in the competition of human vs. crate, the crates always win.

We needed this. The world needed the Milk Crate Challenge. It yearned for a way to laugh at the misfortune of others that didn’t involve Covid. Sure, it won’t last — like all challenges it will soon fade away into obscurity, but for now I will love these glorious idiots for destroying their spines in the hopes of achieving glory. Soldier on, brave fools, continue your quest for immortality by risking your own mortality.