Full list of the 100 Counterproductive Situations
1. Oedipus left Corinth to prevent the prophecy of him killing his father and marrying his mother from
fulfillment which leads to the realization of patricide and marriage with his mother.
2. A fortune teller predicted that he would die because of his relationship. Thus, he broke up with his girlfriend. His girlfriend went insane and killed him.
3. Public service advertisements call on people not to eat pangolins for lactation, but instead educate this knowledge, leading to more serious indiscriminate killing of pangolins.
4. Locking up my bicycle with many locks for security instead attracted more thieves.
5. The more one tries to hide, the more is exposed.
6. A man buried 300 taels of silver in the ground with the banner ìThere are no 300 taels of silver buried hereî. But his neighbor saw through the lie and dug up the money.
7. People withhold secrets to avoid troubles in explaining while the act of concealing leads to a bigger misunderstanding.
8. Being misunderstood by others, the more I want to explain, the less people are convinced.
9. Striving to correct the misspelt words makes them more obvious.
10. Trying to overcome insomnia by counting sheep. The more I count, the harder it is for me to fall asleep.
11. Trying to forget undesirable unforgettable memories deepens it instead.
12. Streisand effect
American singer Streisand sued Pictopia.com for violation of privacy as an aerial photograph of her residence is one of the 12,000 California coastline photographs in the publicly available Project. The image had been downloaded only six times prior to her lawsuit and led to more than 420,000 page views after.
13. Trying to quit smoking. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to smoke again.
14. Trying to quit drinking. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to drink again.
15. Trying to quit sugar. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to eat chocolates again. Trying to quit playing Minesweeper.
16. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to play again.
17. Trying to perform well in a speech and become even more nervous and stutter.
18. Following the instruction “Don't think about a pink elephant”, you will have a pink elephant in mind.
19. Trying to wake up early the next day with a fulfilling schedule leads to anxiety and insomnia at night and oversleeping till noon.
20. The more you are afraid of making mistakes, the more mistakes you may make.
21. Being so nervous about breaking a cup that I broke it.
22. The more I want to quickly make good works, the less inspiration I have.
23. Throwing a bag of garbage with all my might into a high trash can to prevent it from scattering. Because of my great effort, the key to the garbage room was thrown into the trash can together, forcing me to crawl inside the garbages to pick it up.
24. Wishing only to do good, often cannot help doing harm.
25. An animal protection organization discovered an albino brown bear in North America, gave it an anaesthesia injection and sent it directly to the North Pole.
26. The zoologist who saw the platypus for the first time tried to free it by removing its beak.
27. Seeing someone arguing and coming forward trying to stop the quarrel but being jointly attacked by both of them.
28. Four knights of Henry II of England assassinated the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, in order to alleviate the king's troubles, but the Pope ultimately forced Henry II to walk barefoot and go to Beckett's grave to wash away his sins in this matter.
29. A man wanted to help farmers grow wheat seedlings taller by forcefully manually pulling them up, causing all the wheat seedlings in the area to die.
30. Bakery owner Martha sympathizes with a customer who always only bought a loaf of white bread and once added cream to his bread secretly, but ruined his drawings cause he usually uses white bread as erasers to wipe the them.
31. Experts were afraid that the iron lion sculpture that has stood for thousands of years will corrode, so they added pavilions to it, causing poor air circulation and corrosion.
32. Cecilia GimÈnez, an untrained amateur artist made a good-faith attempt to restore The Fresco Ecce Homo in 2012. The intervention made Christ in it look similar to a monkey.
33. Parents are so protective of their children that their children are socialized and ostracized.
34. Making funny faces to make the child laugh, but scaring him to tears instead.
35. Telling a joke to make an angry friend laugh, only to offend him and make him even more angry.
36. A mom sewed on the holes in her daughter's ripped jeans, which caused her daughter's complaints.
37. Reaching out to feed birds but scaring them away.
38. Picking up a snail and putting it on the other side of the road to save it a long journey, not knowing that it just crawled from there.
39. The snake and the farmer.
40. Mr Dongguo and the wolf.
41. Lv Dongbin and the dog.
42. More haste, less speed.
43. Trying to manually moult a cicada will kill it.
44. Keep eating pretzel-my favorite food for ten days for joy. No longer can I derive happiness from it any more.
45. Climbing mountains every day to exercise can gradually damage the meniscus.
46. Penny wise, pound foolish.
47. A farmer pushes his ox to work day and night to plough more fields, causing its death of exhaustion.
48. Overkill
49. Sanding too hard the favorite model and over-polishing it.
50. For fear of their children catching colds, parents wear too much for them which causes them fever.
51. Too eager to achieve good grades and stay up late to study, unable to study due to exhaustion and illness.
52. A tailor worked overtime to weave more cloth but had to stop because the loom broke down due to overuse.
53. Feeding a goldfish too much bait for fear that it will starve to death causes it to die from overeating.
54. Eating low-calorie food to lose weight but hunger triggers overeating.
55. Trying to reach the glass bead that fell under the bed with a stick but pushed it further away instead.
56. Buying cheap food to save money. Got sick because it's not fresh. Spent a lot of money on medical treatment.
57. Attempting to fix a chair that was still functional. After repairment, it became completely unusable.
58. Cooking mushrooms for a short time to make them tasty leads to mushroom poisoning.
59. Going out early for fear of missing the bus and got caught in a shower while waiting. It stopped raining when the bus arrived.
60. Applying toothpaste on a burn to cool it down can raise your odds of infection and trap heat.
61. Changing the queue and found the one that I left starts to move faster than the one I'm in now.
62. Falling down the stairs and trying to use the handbrake resulted in a finger fracture.
63. Using complicated passwords in order not to be hacked, but I forgot the passwords myself soon.
64. Imitate others and thus lose one's own individuality.
65. Too eager to swat the mosquitoe that I slapped myself hard on the face.
66. A spider was crawling on the ceiling. I reached out to drive it away out of fear, but let it fell onto me.
67. Frantically swatting mosquitoes and breaking the window.
68. A decamping criminal was identified and arrested while using his ID to withdraw money in a
bank.
69. Trying to save time by taking the lift while the lift arrives late and the waiting takes up more time.
70. Frequent shampooing to keep hair clean may cause it to get oily faster.
71. The more parents want to control their children, the more rebellious their children become.
72. Doing a seemingly clever thing which turns out to be a foolish one instead.
73. Grabbing some pills for digestion to fill myself up, resulting in more hunger.
74. A man who dug a hole in the road intending to tease others accidentally fell into the trap he made.
75. When a fish bone is stuck in the throat, swallowing a large piece of bread hoping that the weight of the bread will dislodge the bone may actually scratch the esophagus.
76. A student imitated his father's handwriting signing a D transcript to avoid criticism and was detected by his teacher and subjected to more severe reprimands.
77. Keep scratching to relieve itching after being bitten by a mosquito. The more I scratched, the itchier it became.
78. Buying a second-hand car to save money while the money spent on repairs is enough to pay for a new car.
79. Buying heavy cameras for better photography, but using them infrequently because they are too heavy to be taken out.
80. Choosing an unpopular major to avoid employment competition, surprisingly everyone thinks this way which leads to intense competition.
81. The more familiar this person is with me, the less I know how to comfort her when she's upset
82. For a while, Hong Kong encouraged people to wash used bottles before throwing away. However, the washed bottles still need to be washed again before being recycled which led to a great waste of water and human resources.
83. The United Nations Drug Control Agency releases reports on drug in various countries urging them to actively combat drugs, until the police seized a large number of reports from drug traffickers, which were used to study the market.
84. Applying a membership card to save money, but spending more as a result.
85. A man posted that he received a full bag of chips and expressed his thankfulness to whoever made it with bag serial number 8043000162. The responsible worker was tracked and fired because of that.
86. A kind-hearted person helped up an old man who fell on the roadside but was falsely accused of being the culprit.
87. A young man from the state of Zhao heard that the way people walked in the city of Handan was very elegant, so he went to Handan to imitate them and forgot how to walk, ending up crawling back home.
88. A famous beauty Xishi often frowned because of her heart disease. An ugly woman of the same village imitated her to but in turn made herself bizarre and scared away villagers.
89. A painter asked his students to do the coloring of one painting, and one of them showed off his cleverness by painting a lotus flower in the bottle, not knowing that the bottle was designed to be a demon-quelling bottle.
90. Writer Yu Hua falsely claimed to have pain to skip school during his childhood. He was sent to hospital by his father to have his appendix removed.
91. A prisoner kept digging a hole for ten years to escape and eventually made his way to the guard’s room and was inevitably given an additional sentence.
92. Too much desire to get closer to others, the more it deprives others of their personal space and pushes them further away.
93. Applying anti-peep film on the phone screen to prevent prying eyes, but can't watch the guidance video when doing yoga.
94. Libraries are designed quiet for concentration, but the slightest sound is noticeable which causes distraction.
95. Elderly people buy useless health products to save money on medical treatment, but the money is wasted and their conditions are delayed.
96. Jevons paradox: When people install energy-efficient light bulbs, they may relax other energy-saving behaviours e.g. leaving lights on for long periods of time, with the result that overall energy consumption may not be reduced.
97. Induced Demand: In the field of transportation, increasing road capacity (such as building more highways) is supposed to reduce traffic congestion, but it may actually attract more vehicles, leading to unchanged or even worse congestion.
98. The Government provides subsidies for maize cultivation in order to support agricultural production. However, this may result in farmers planting large quantities of maize and the excess production of maize becoming worthless.
99. Parkinsonís Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Even if work efficiency is improved, the number of tasks may increase, resulting in no reduction in work time.
100. Becker Hypothesis: Increasing education levels might increase crime rates because the opportunity cost for educated individuals is higher, leading them to choose higher-reward but illegal activities.
2. A fortune teller predicted that he would die because of his relationship. Thus, he broke up with his girlfriend. His girlfriend went insane and killed him.
3. Public service advertisements call on people not to eat pangolins for lactation, but instead educate this knowledge, leading to more serious indiscriminate killing of pangolins.
4. Locking up my bicycle with many locks for security instead attracted more thieves.
5. The more one tries to hide, the more is exposed.
6. A man buried 300 taels of silver in the ground with the banner ìThere are no 300 taels of silver buried hereî. But his neighbor saw through the lie and dug up the money.
7. People withhold secrets to avoid troubles in explaining while the act of concealing leads to a bigger misunderstanding.
8. Being misunderstood by others, the more I want to explain, the less people are convinced.
9. Striving to correct the misspelt words makes them more obvious.
10. Trying to overcome insomnia by counting sheep. The more I count, the harder it is for me to fall asleep.
11. Trying to forget undesirable unforgettable memories deepens it instead.
12. Streisand effect
American singer Streisand sued Pictopia.com for violation of privacy as an aerial photograph of her residence is one of the 12,000 California coastline photographs in the publicly available Project. The image had been downloaded only six times prior to her lawsuit and led to more than 420,000 page views after.
13. Trying to quit smoking. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to smoke again.
14. Trying to quit drinking. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to drink again.
15. Trying to quit sugar. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to eat chocolates again. Trying to quit playing Minesweeper.
16. The more I want to be self-controlled, the more I want to play again.
17. Trying to perform well in a speech and become even more nervous and stutter.
18. Following the instruction “Don't think about a pink elephant”, you will have a pink elephant in mind.
19. Trying to wake up early the next day with a fulfilling schedule leads to anxiety and insomnia at night and oversleeping till noon.
20. The more you are afraid of making mistakes, the more mistakes you may make.
21. Being so nervous about breaking a cup that I broke it.
22. The more I want to quickly make good works, the less inspiration I have.
23. Throwing a bag of garbage with all my might into a high trash can to prevent it from scattering. Because of my great effort, the key to the garbage room was thrown into the trash can together, forcing me to crawl inside the garbages to pick it up.
24. Wishing only to do good, often cannot help doing harm.
25. An animal protection organization discovered an albino brown bear in North America, gave it an anaesthesia injection and sent it directly to the North Pole.
26. The zoologist who saw the platypus for the first time tried to free it by removing its beak.
27. Seeing someone arguing and coming forward trying to stop the quarrel but being jointly attacked by both of them.
28. Four knights of Henry II of England assassinated the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, in order to alleviate the king's troubles, but the Pope ultimately forced Henry II to walk barefoot and go to Beckett's grave to wash away his sins in this matter.
29. A man wanted to help farmers grow wheat seedlings taller by forcefully manually pulling them up, causing all the wheat seedlings in the area to die.
30. Bakery owner Martha sympathizes with a customer who always only bought a loaf of white bread and once added cream to his bread secretly, but ruined his drawings cause he usually uses white bread as erasers to wipe the them.
31. Experts were afraid that the iron lion sculpture that has stood for thousands of years will corrode, so they added pavilions to it, causing poor air circulation and corrosion.
32. Cecilia GimÈnez, an untrained amateur artist made a good-faith attempt to restore The Fresco Ecce Homo in 2012. The intervention made Christ in it look similar to a monkey.
33. Parents are so protective of their children that their children are socialized and ostracized.
34. Making funny faces to make the child laugh, but scaring him to tears instead.
35. Telling a joke to make an angry friend laugh, only to offend him and make him even more angry.
36. A mom sewed on the holes in her daughter's ripped jeans, which caused her daughter's complaints.
37. Reaching out to feed birds but scaring them away.
38. Picking up a snail and putting it on the other side of the road to save it a long journey, not knowing that it just crawled from there.
39. The snake and the farmer.
40. Mr Dongguo and the wolf.
41. Lv Dongbin and the dog.
42. More haste, less speed.
43. Trying to manually moult a cicada will kill it.
44. Keep eating pretzel-my favorite food for ten days for joy. No longer can I derive happiness from it any more.
45. Climbing mountains every day to exercise can gradually damage the meniscus.
46. Penny wise, pound foolish.
47. A farmer pushes his ox to work day and night to plough more fields, causing its death of exhaustion.
48. Overkill
49. Sanding too hard the favorite model and over-polishing it.
50. For fear of their children catching colds, parents wear too much for them which causes them fever.
51. Too eager to achieve good grades and stay up late to study, unable to study due to exhaustion and illness.
52. A tailor worked overtime to weave more cloth but had to stop because the loom broke down due to overuse.
53. Feeding a goldfish too much bait for fear that it will starve to death causes it to die from overeating.
54. Eating low-calorie food to lose weight but hunger triggers overeating.
55. Trying to reach the glass bead that fell under the bed with a stick but pushed it further away instead.
56. Buying cheap food to save money. Got sick because it's not fresh. Spent a lot of money on medical treatment.
57. Attempting to fix a chair that was still functional. After repairment, it became completely unusable.
58. Cooking mushrooms for a short time to make them tasty leads to mushroom poisoning.
59. Going out early for fear of missing the bus and got caught in a shower while waiting. It stopped raining when the bus arrived.
60. Applying toothpaste on a burn to cool it down can raise your odds of infection and trap heat.
61. Changing the queue and found the one that I left starts to move faster than the one I'm in now.
62. Falling down the stairs and trying to use the handbrake resulted in a finger fracture.
63. Using complicated passwords in order not to be hacked, but I forgot the passwords myself soon.
64. Imitate others and thus lose one's own individuality.
65. Too eager to swat the mosquitoe that I slapped myself hard on the face.
66. A spider was crawling on the ceiling. I reached out to drive it away out of fear, but let it fell onto me.
67. Frantically swatting mosquitoes and breaking the window.
68. A decamping criminal was identified and arrested while using his ID to withdraw money in a
bank.
69. Trying to save time by taking the lift while the lift arrives late and the waiting takes up more time.
70. Frequent shampooing to keep hair clean may cause it to get oily faster.
71. The more parents want to control their children, the more rebellious their children become.
72. Doing a seemingly clever thing which turns out to be a foolish one instead.
73. Grabbing some pills for digestion to fill myself up, resulting in more hunger.
74. A man who dug a hole in the road intending to tease others accidentally fell into the trap he made.
75. When a fish bone is stuck in the throat, swallowing a large piece of bread hoping that the weight of the bread will dislodge the bone may actually scratch the esophagus.
76. A student imitated his father's handwriting signing a D transcript to avoid criticism and was detected by his teacher and subjected to more severe reprimands.
77. Keep scratching to relieve itching after being bitten by a mosquito. The more I scratched, the itchier it became.
78. Buying a second-hand car to save money while the money spent on repairs is enough to pay for a new car.
79. Buying heavy cameras for better photography, but using them infrequently because they are too heavy to be taken out.
80. Choosing an unpopular major to avoid employment competition, surprisingly everyone thinks this way which leads to intense competition.
81. The more familiar this person is with me, the less I know how to comfort her when she's upset
82. For a while, Hong Kong encouraged people to wash used bottles before throwing away. However, the washed bottles still need to be washed again before being recycled which led to a great waste of water and human resources.
83. The United Nations Drug Control Agency releases reports on drug in various countries urging them to actively combat drugs, until the police seized a large number of reports from drug traffickers, which were used to study the market.
84. Applying a membership card to save money, but spending more as a result.
85. A man posted that he received a full bag of chips and expressed his thankfulness to whoever made it with bag serial number 8043000162. The responsible worker was tracked and fired because of that.
86. A kind-hearted person helped up an old man who fell on the roadside but was falsely accused of being the culprit.
87. A young man from the state of Zhao heard that the way people walked in the city of Handan was very elegant, so he went to Handan to imitate them and forgot how to walk, ending up crawling back home.
88. A famous beauty Xishi often frowned because of her heart disease. An ugly woman of the same village imitated her to but in turn made herself bizarre and scared away villagers.
89. A painter asked his students to do the coloring of one painting, and one of them showed off his cleverness by painting a lotus flower in the bottle, not knowing that the bottle was designed to be a demon-quelling bottle.
90. Writer Yu Hua falsely claimed to have pain to skip school during his childhood. He was sent to hospital by his father to have his appendix removed.
91. A prisoner kept digging a hole for ten years to escape and eventually made his way to the guard’s room and was inevitably given an additional sentence.
92. Too much desire to get closer to others, the more it deprives others of their personal space and pushes them further away.
93. Applying anti-peep film on the phone screen to prevent prying eyes, but can't watch the guidance video when doing yoga.
94. Libraries are designed quiet for concentration, but the slightest sound is noticeable which causes distraction.
95. Elderly people buy useless health products to save money on medical treatment, but the money is wasted and their conditions are delayed.
96. Jevons paradox: When people install energy-efficient light bulbs, they may relax other energy-saving behaviours e.g. leaving lights on for long periods of time, with the result that overall energy consumption may not be reduced.
97. Induced Demand: In the field of transportation, increasing road capacity (such as building more highways) is supposed to reduce traffic congestion, but it may actually attract more vehicles, leading to unchanged or even worse congestion.
98. The Government provides subsidies for maize cultivation in order to support agricultural production. However, this may result in farmers planting large quantities of maize and the excess production of maize becoming worthless.
99. Parkinsonís Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Even if work efficiency is improved, the number of tasks may increase, resulting in no reduction in work time.
100. Becker Hypothesis: Increasing education levels might increase crime rates because the opportunity cost for educated individuals is higher, leading them to choose higher-reward but illegal activities.