Here’s What People On Twitter Say They’re Giving Up For Lent

All over the world, people are giving up on things, like their New Year’s Resolutions, failed relationships, and fixing the WiFi router.

But believe it or not, some people are actually giving things up as a form of religious penitence and holy atonement.

That’s right: Lent, the season of renunciation, is upon us. It’s the 40-day period when the adherents of many Christian denominations, including Catholics, Anglicans and Calvinists, forego some quotidian pleasure from Ash Wednesday (that’s today) to Easter Sunday, to honor the forty days when Jesus fasted in the desert and endured temptation by the devil.

Open Bible used Twitter to track some of the main things that people are giving up for their Lenten fasts. Top of the list? Chocolate. Not a big surprise there, but second was Twitter. Apparently, using Twitter to denounce Twitter is definitely in vogue.

Out of 50,899 tweets during the week of February 15, 2015, there were 2,343 chocolate-related tweets, 2020 twitter-related tweets, followed by 1,789 abdications of social networking in general. School came in fourth, and alcohol rounded out the top 5.

Granted, many of the Lent-related Twitter posts are likely facetious, so the list is to be taken with a grain of salt. But it does open a window into our collective guilty pleasures and greatest shames. (One of which appears to be “boys.”)

You can see the full list here.