You’re sitting at your computer, maybe on your phone, browsing Facebook like you always do when you’re bored. You stumble upon a friend’s profile (“I’m not stalking, I swear!”) and you see the option glaring at you: “Poke Friend.” You mindlessly click the button, unaware of the future implications it may have on your relationship.

Soon you get a notification saying that your friend poked you back. So you poke back and it says, “You poked your friend back twice in a row!” You think to yourself, “How high can we get this thing?” Where in reality, there is no limit. It becomes an addiction.

Welcome to the world of Facebook pokes. Pokes, a feature buried deep in the depths of the behemoth called Facebook, is the reason I go onto the site half the time. It’s addicting, it’s fascinating, it takes over your life.

You can’t stop poking. Your grades drop. Your life goes down the drain. Your friends don’t talk to you anymore. You just become known as “that guy who pokes on Facebook all the time.” All because you poked.

Okay, it might not be that bad, but I’ll admit to wasting too much time poking. It’s the greatest thing ever. It’s the worst thing ever created.

Before you know it, you have 46 poke wars going on at the same time, and once you’ve got through poking all of them, they’ve started poking you back. It’s impossible to stop.

What if you stop poking your friends? Will they ever talk to you again? Will they think you have some kind of life or something more important to do? Of course they won’t. That’s not how life works. So what are you waiting for? Poke.