Plants Were Bullied by IKEA for 30 Days?!

As a furniture brand, IKEA has broken all odds by showing its creativity and innovative ideas on various occasions. But this time, the Swedish brand went above and beyond to spread positivity and warm everyone’s hearts.

The campaign was launched by the IKEA brand based out of the United Arab Emirates, which took two plants from their own shop to run an experiment.

The IKEA team used both plants and placed them in different schools across the UAE. They put each plant inside a transparent glass and treated them the same: they were both fertilized, watered and sunbathed at the same time and the same frequency. Just like twins.

Except, they’re not actually quite the same. If you take a closer look, you’ll see a tag on one of the two plants that reads “This plant is being bullied.”

And another tag reads “This plant is being complimented.”

But wait… How can a plant be bullied? By being stricken violently? Physically abused? Think more creatively… This isn’t referring to bullying in the literal physical sense, but rather verbally.

The UAE IKEA team asked students from the schools to record their voice in advance, and then played the audio next to each plant.

Some of the audio messages were targeting one of the two plants and were very rude, going as far as saying “No one likes you” and “You’re trash. You’re nothing.” How’s that for bullying?

(No one likes you, no one will care if you don’t show up at school today.)

Some of the comments were more personal, like “You’re not even green" and "You look rotten."

Seriously, is this plant still alive?

I feel super sorry for that plant. It didn’t do anything to deserve that.

On the other hand, the other plant received VIP treatment. The audio played for it was always very positive; comments included the likes of “Seeing you blossom makes me happy”, “I love you just the way you are”, “You’re so beautiful”…

It got really cheesy too: “The world has become a better place because of you.”

The experiment went on for 30 days. The results were both unexpected and reasonable.

The plant placed on the left side was the one being verbally bullied, while the one on the right side was the one being complimented. As one could expect from real human interactions, the bullied plant deteriorated over time while the other continued to grow to good healthy shapes.

It’s definitely clear that the power of words is quite strong, particularly hateful ones.

What a great initiative to educate our children on the fact that although they may not have been aware of it before, plants - beings they did not suspect of having emotions - can also be negatively (or positively) impacted by words, the same way human beings are.

The idea behind this campaign is to drive awareness of bullying.

May 4th was 'anti-bullying day’ in the Middle East.

Every year, 246 million children and teenagers suffer from school bullying, which in some cases can cause long-lasting physical and/or mental damages. So no wonder the experiment by IKEA received a lot of publicity online.

IKEA has successfully shown how powerful violence can be when expressed with words, but this problem isn’t only specific to schools. Hateful conversations happen on a daily basis - between friends, colleagues, or strangers - but when it comes from a family member, those words can destroy you.

In a convenient shop somewhere in Thailand, a father blamed his son for playing games and messing around the whole day. '"Kill yourself if you have guts!” he said to his son, and then put a loaded gun in front of him. In an emotional response to his own father’s bullying, the son aimed the gun at himself, pulled the trigger and killed himself on the spot without hesitating.

In another instance, a young girl felt very frustrated and depressed after receiving low grades from her university application exams. Once he heard the bad news, her father lost it and started blaming her for it violently, shouting: “Why don’t you go die somewhere with such low grades?!” Well, be careful what you wish for… The girl took his words seriously, went upstairs and jumped to her death. Before her suicide, she had left a note: “I’m sorry for letting you down.”

A 15-year-old boy from Yunnan province also killed himself from drinking pesticide on New Year's Eve to put an end to his father’s verbal bullying. A tragic death that could have easily been avoided if his father had been aware of how damaging his hateful words actually were to his own child.

I will no longer have to suffer from the hateful words spoken by father anymore. If I don’t die, I have to keep on suffering verbal violence from him. I wish I were an animal so I could swim or fly away freely in this world rather than being human and enduring all this pain. I wouldn’t be crying so much if I were an animal; I’d have no regrets. What I do regret is that I was reincarnated into the wrong body. The world is big, so why was I placed in this family? We all have to die eventually.

Dad, you must be happy knowing I am dead, as I won’t bother you anymore. But know that you have yourself to blame for my death; you and no one else. I had no other choice but to put an end to my own life so that I wouldn’t have to suffer from all the hateful words you constantly threw at me. People often say you should keep on minding your own business and not care about what other people think, well… I know you have your own rules, so I decided to break them by killing myself. Go ahead and only care about yourself, dad! I sincerely hope you and I don’t cross paths in my next life.

I know that to your eyes, I am quite unfilial and that’s okay. You take care of yourself.

Please don’t cause any more problems with my teachers after my death, otherwise you can be sure I’ll haunt you around. Remember that you’re the reason I killed myself.

Oh, and one more thing. Please give my phone to my friend xiaoshuaier and tell him my QQ wallet’s password is ‘112820’. My phone was placed on the desk drawer. Don’t touch anything else.

Half of the teenagers in a juvenile detention center in Shenyang province had been admitted because they had suffered from verbal violence from their parents. It appears their parents would all say something similar to "Why don't you go die?"

(They always asked me to die.)

"Loser" "Shame on you"

(They said that I am a loser.)

"Stupid, stupid, stupid"

When faced with such hateful verbal violence, young adults often choose to either kill themselves or injure themselves severely, while others choose to mutilate strangers and then put an end to their lives. In either cases, the mental damage is obviously serious.

(I stuck a knife into his body twice. )

(I shot him.)

(I killed him)

These words of hate can haunt people and affect them deeply, to the point where they have trouble eating and sleeping. Their world is dark and full of pain, and the only way out is suicide.

There’s a saying that goes “What the speaker did not intend to say, pokes the listener’s heart.”

Needless to say, comments like "You are not good at this and that” can kill people. Literally. 

Though verbal violence doesn't hurt physically, it certainly hurts mentally. Please think twice before you say something you might end up regretting, as this may very well be the last time you speak to the person you’re verbally bullying.

Source: InsDaily

Supervisor: Crystal Huang

Editor: SC

Co-Editor: Ed Bellin

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