Last night, I got home from a brutal doctor’s appointment, so I wanted to eat away some of my pain. I ended up getting a burger with extra beef, bacon and cheese. ClearIy, I was in the mood for some beef and cheese, because this week, I’ve been observing beefs all over the place that started with cheese. While I was at work, I was listening to a YouTube video in the background and the subject was a YouTube beef between two creators. The one creator called out the other for using other people’s videos and not attributing them, and not commenting enough to “justify” stealing the videos. Apparently, YouTube requires you to add something meaningful to reaction videos. It’s hilarious to me that two people, who are basically famous because they post a lot of YouTube videos, were being so petty about something so stupid. They were fighting each other, not up close, but through the 1’s and 0’s.

My first reaction to it was that they were both pretty greedy. They are both already rich, YouTube famous, and have millions of subscribers (which equals $$). If I was a betting man, I would wager that they set it up, just so that they could garner more attention, clicks and money. In a sense, they did a collab, except instead of working together, they probably pretended to not like each other. They know that the algorithm favors negative attention, so they pettied it up on YouTube.

It was such a petty reason to start a battle over. The YouTuber that stole the content was doing something wrong, sure, but the one that pointed it out, was kind of being petty by calling them out (and got more views and attention).

If you think about it though, all beefs are petty. No feud, war, conflict, rivalry, or marital conflict, has ever started because of an actual good reason. I should know. I lived in a time when beefs were fresher, and local, the beefs were also full of cheese as well. Fights broke out in the hallways for such stupid reasons as someone looked at someone else the wrong way, or someone was holding someone’s girlfriends hand. Sure, we were like the YouTubers and used words to start fights too, but we also used our fists. But the reason we started the fight was never non petty.

If these internet beefers ever met in person, most of them wouldn’t even know what to do in a physical fight. They would probably sit down on their comfortable chairs right across from each other and see who could publish their subtle video crack back faster, looking at each other as their publish bars raced to 100%.

The internet beefers are always about petty things like who stole a brand deal from who, or how someone claimed that they came up with a trend first, and someone was “stealing” their content and not giving correct attribution to someone so they can get more internet clout. Who didn’t Snap who, or complaining in a video about how a guy didn’t pay for a $500 first date to a fancy restaurant.

Even most celebrity beefs are because someone liked an Instagram post of an ex, and the current flame found out. The biggest beefs come from female celebrities making subtle jabs at one another. Somebody needs to send out a syllabus about the ideal Hollywood body shape, so celebrities can conform to that standard. Clearly it’s leading to a lot of fights, because some celebs are called too beefy, and some are called too skinny. If we had a clearer direction, then there wouldn’t be as much fighting. Maybe that’s why they don’t have a syllabus. They need petty reasons to fight to get that all-important attention.

The biggest rivalries are between countries that we call war. They are always started for 100% legitimate reasons. There’s the territorial wars, where one country is trying to expand their borders. Or in other words, they are fighting for more dirt. Maybe some water, and possibly some metal, screws, and trees. Maybe some chemicals. But mostly for more dirt. Pretty petty.

Then there was the Pastry War of 1838, between France and Mexico, that started when a French pastry chef said some Mexican officers damaged his bakery and demanded compensation. The war lasted a year, until the Mexicans finally paid him back. I’m sure he had a smug look on his face when they paid him back, and was probably proud of himself that his bakery was worth fighting for.

The Pig War was a big one too. The U.S. v Britain war started because someone shot a pig on the San Juan Islands. There were no casualties in that war, except for the pig. RIP, Porky the.

In the end, beefs, rivalries, wars, men v women, always start because of something petty. If there isn’t some petty reason to start a war around, there is always someone in a group of people that will find a reason to spark one. As humans, we crave conflict, but more importantly we crave pettiness to be the reason why we start a war. We love our beefs, but only if starts with cheese.

Last night, I decided to get a burger…

It was a lot of beef…

One of them claimed that the other was stealing…

So of course it escalated into a war of dueling…

Back in my day…

But don’t worry…

We didn’t like when people looked at us…

Even wars were started for petty reasons…

Of course, there was the Pastry War…

Or the Pig War, which started a conflict between the US and the British…

We humans love our beefs…

ARRRGGGHHHHHH

Bitter Beef with Cheese Ben