Have you ever scrolled through a crowdfunding platform, encountered a campaign that made you pause — not in generous consideration, but in the specific bewilderment of someone reading something that cannot possibly be real — and thought that the gap between what crowdfunding was designed to address and what people are actually using it for has widened into a philosophical chasm that deserves its own documentary? GoFundMe was created for genuine emergencies and legitimate needs – medical bills, disaster recovery, and educational opportunity – and it has served those purposes admirably. But the internet being what it is and human optimism about strangers’ generosity being what it is, the platform has also hosted campaigns whose ambition, entitlement, or fundamental absurdity represents a category of creative fundraising that deserves its own celebration. This blog presents 20 entirely fictional, thoroughly ridiculous, and completely made-up reasons to start a GoFundMe — in the spirit of gentle satire rather than genuine advice.
Table of Contents
1. “I Ordered Guacamole and Did Not Know It Was Extra”
Goal: $3.50 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign description explains, with considerable detail, that the server mentioned nothing about the guacamole surcharge at the time of ordering and that the menu’s communication of this information was ambiguous at best. The $3.50 represents not merely the cost of the guacamole but also the principle. A GoFundMe for the principal. Updates include a detailed account of the conversation with the manager, which did not go the way it should have.
2. “My Netflix Password Stopped Working and I Need to Subscribe Individually”
Goal: $180 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign details a situation that millions of people would describe as a normal feature of adulthood but that the campaign author has identified as a genuine financial emergency requiring community support. The supporting paragraph notes that the campaign author has been using their college roommate’s account since 2017 and that this represents a form of long-standing infrastructure that has been disrupted without notice. The emotional tone is that of someone describing a natural disaster.
3. “I Accidentally Bought Oat Milk Instead of Regular Milk and I Don’t Know What to Do With It”
Goal: $6.50 | Raised so far: $0.00
The funds would be used to purchase actual milk. The oat milk cannot be returned because it has been opened in a moment of optimism that the campaign author now deeply regrets. There is a section of the campaign addressing whether oat milk can be used for cereal that suggests research has been conducted. The research was inconclusive. The author remains distressed.
4. “I Told Everyone I Was Going to Write a Novel and Now I Actually Have to Write a Novel”
Goal: $45,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign requests living expenses, writing retreat funding, and approximately $12,000 described as “inspiration” for the period during which the novel will be written, which the campaign estimates at three to four years. The novel is described as “literary” and “challenging traditional narrative structures. ” There is no outline. There is a very detailed description of the café the campaign author intends to write in.
5. “My Houseplant Died and I Need Therapy”
Goal: $2,400 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign includes a photograph of the houseplant in better days — described in the campaign as “Gerald” — and a detailed account of the emotional relationship between the campaign author and Gerald that suggests a depth of interspecies connection that most people reserve for sentient beings. The therapy is described as “grief counselling”. The campaign notes that Gerald was a pothos and that pothos are famously difficult to kill, which the author has chosen not to address.
6. “I Need to Go to Coachella and I Think Society Owes Me This”
Goal: $1,200 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign makes an argument based on the cultural significance of music festivals to personal development, the specific artists performing this year who will not be touring otherwise, and a broader thesis about access to cultural experiences that starts philosophically interesting and arrives somewhere that most readers would characterise as ‘entitlement’. The campaign acknowledges that tickets cost money and that the campaign author currently has less money than the tickets cost. This is presented as an injustice.
7. “I Would Like a Boat. Not for Any Reason. I Simply Want a Boat.”
Goal: $47,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign is notable for its honesty. There is no medical emergency, no educational objective, and no natural disaster to which the boat would be relevant. The campaign author wants a boat. They have explained this with admirable clarity and without embellishment. There is a section titled “Why You Should Help” that contains three bullet points, all of which are variations on the observation that having a boat would be good. The campaign photo is a stock image of a very nice boat.
8. “I Waved Back at Someone Who Wasn’t Waving at Me and I Need to Move to a New City.”
Goal: $8,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The funds would cover first and last month’s rent in a city where the incident is unknown and where the campaign author can begin again without the specific weight of the waving event, which occurred in front of multiple people and has been described in the campaign with a level of detail and self-mortification that suggests it is still very fresh. The campaign author has not returned to that street since.
9. “My Dog Doesn’t Like Me as Much as He Likes My Partner and I Need This Acknowledged.”
Goal: $0 | The goal is not financial but spiritual
This campaign represents a philosophical evolution in crowdfunding — the request is not for money but for validation, moral support, and the collective acknowledgement of an injustice. The dog — described extensively — demonstrates what the campaign characterises as a systematic preference for the partner that has no rational basis, as the campaign author is, by their own account, objectively the better human. Comments are enabled. Strangers have begun weighing in.
10. “I Ordered Decaf by Mistake and the Afternoon Was Lost”
Goal: $250 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign seeks compensation for what the author describes as “productivity damage” sustained when an afternoon meeting-heavy calendar was navigated without the caffeination it was designed around. The $250 represents lost hourly value. A supporting document is attached. It is titled “The Decaf Incident: A Financial and Personal Impact Assessment”. It is two pages long. There is an appendix.
11. “I Need Someone to Tell Me It Gets Better Without Me Having to Explain What ‘It’ Is.”
Goal: $1 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign is vague in ways that suggest its primary function is not financial but communicative — the $1 goal appears to be the minimum required to activate the campaign’s comment functionality, where the author has been engaged in extended conversation with internet strangers about unspecified life circumstances. The comments contain more genuine warmth and practical support than most campaigns with significantly higher goals. This is perhaps the most accidentally successful campaign on the list.
12. “I Have Strong Opinions About a Parking Situation in My Neighbourhood and I Need a Lawyer”
Goal: $15,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign provides an extraordinarily detailed account of the parking situation—including a hand-drawn map, a timeline of events, and a section titled “Who Is Really at Fault Here?” that names seven individuals and one municipal parking authority. The campaign author has not received legal advice about whether this situation warrants legal action. The campaign author has strong feelings about this. The feelings are expressed at length.
13. “I Keep Buying Books I Don’t Read and I Have a Problem and I Need It Funded.”
Goal: $500 per month | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign is notable for its self-awareness — the author acknowledges that the funding request will be used to purchase more books that will not be read and that this pattern has continued since approximately 2009 without resolution. The campaign argues, philosophically, that the problem is the book-buying rather than the not-reading and that funding the book-buying without requiring the reading represents a form of unconditional support that the author finds meaningful. The “to be read” pile photograph is genuinely impressive.
14. “I Need to Try Every Item on the McDonald’s Menu for Science”
Goal: $85 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign is the most coherently argued on the list — it has a methodology section, an expected output (a “comprehensive review”), and a timeline. The $85 represents a realistic estimate of the cost of the proposed research. The campaign has a clearer research design than several actual academic papers. Whether this constitutes science is the only genuinely contested question in the campaign, and the campaign author addresses it with more rigour than expected.
15. “I Made an Extremely Confident Prediction at Work and It Was Wrong and I Cannot Return There”
Goal: $20,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign requests funds to support the author during a career transition necessitated by a statement made in a meeting approximately three weeks ago about a project outcome that did not materialise in the predicted way. The campaign does not specify what the prediction was. It was bad. The author’s expression when it became clear it was wrong has been described in the campaign as “career-ending”. Funds would support the author for six months while they “figure things out”, which is described in slightly more optimistic terms than the evidence supports.
16. “I Need to Attend Every Taylor Swift Concert on This Tour for Completeness”
Goal: $140,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign makes an argument about dedication, about the cultural significance of the body of work being performed, and about a commitment to completeness that is described as non-negotiable without clearly establishing why it is non-negotiable. A significant portion of the campaign is devoted to the tour schedule, annotated with notes about which shows feature setlist variations that make each individually necessary. The author has attended fourteen concerts already. The tour has sixty more.
17. “My Smart Speaker Has Started Doing Things I Didn’t Ask It to Do and I Find This Ominous and Require Relocating.”
Goal: $35,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign provides a detailed account of several incidents — the unsolicited playlist, the timer that nobody set, and the ambiguous response to a question nobody asked — that the author has interpreted as evidence of something they describe as “ambient awareness” and others might describe as “software bugs”. The relocation is to a rural property with limited Wi-Fi. The budget is detailed. The smart speaker has been photographed for the campaign in a way that emphasises its expression, which is a speaker and therefore has no expression.
18. “I Was Rude to a Waiter in 2016 and I Would Like Professional Help Processing This”
Goal: $3,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign is the most self-aware entry on the list — the author acknowledges that the incident was minor, that the waiter has almost certainly forgotten it, and that the campaign represents a form of accountability theatre that may say more about the author’s relationship with guilt than about the waiter’s well-being. The funds would cover therapy. This is actually a reasonable use of GoFundMe. The campaign’s own self-sabotaging framing may be its only real obstacle.
19. “I Said ‘You Too’ When the Cinema Employee Told Me to Enjoy the Film”
Goal: $500 | Raised so far: $0.00
The funds would be used to not return to that specific cinema for a period of five years, which requires attending an alternative cinema that is £3 more expensive per ticket. The campaign includes a cost projection. There is genuine mathematical rigour applied to the avoidance of mild embarrassment. The campaign author would like to be understood, not judged. The comments contain exclusively people who have done the same thing and are using the campaign as a support forum. This was not the campaign’s intention but may be its legacy.
20. “I Would Like to Retire at 28”
Goal: $4,000,000 | Raised so far: $0.00
The campaign does not provide a plan, a product, a service, a proposal, or a rationale beyond the expressed preference not to work beyond the age of 28. It was launched on the author’s 27th birthday. The campaign update, posted three months later, notes that fundraising is “going slower than hoped” and that the author has begun exploring what they describe as “a more realistic timeline”. There are no donor comments. The campaign remains active. The author remains 27 years old.
Key Takeaways
The twenty campaigns in this blog share a common quality — they represent the full, magnificent spectrum of human optimism, entitlement, self-awareness, and the specific confidence that other people’s generosity is available for the asking in situations where other people’s generosity is definitively not available for the asking.
GoFundMe and equivalent platforms have been genuinely transformative for people navigating genuine emergencies — the medical bill that insurance will not cover, the community devastated by a natural disaster, or the student from a low-income background who needs a specific opportunity. These are the campaigns that the platform was designed for and that represent its best and most important function.
The twenty campaigns in this blog are not those campaigns. They are the other kind — the kind that the existence of GoFundMe made theoretically possible and that human nature made eventually inevitable. They deserve not condemnation but the affectionate, slightly bewildered laugh that is the appropriate response to the discovery that human beings, given a platform, will use it in every conceivable way simultaneously.
If you are currently considering starting a GoFundMe for any reason on this list, please reflect carefully. If you are considering starting one for the guacamole situation, we understand. We have all been there. The $3.50 is real money. The principle is real. The GoFundMe will not help. But the feeling is valid.
