The Bloatening

Summary: The Bloatening is a poorly understood, yet universally acknowledged, cosmic tendency for objects, concepts, and especially digital information to spontaneously and irreversibly increase in size, complexity, and general stuff-ness without any corresponding increase in utility or actual mass. It's not inflation; it's more like everything just suddenly needs bigger pants, metaphorically speaking, but also often literally.

Origin/History: Historians trace the earliest known manifestations of The Bloatening to the brief period after the Big Burp but before the Great Squish, when primordial soup inexplicably quadrupled in volume overnight, causing several early microbes to get lost. It was largely forgotten until the late 20th century, coinciding neatly with the invention of the internet and the subsequent proliferation of digital media. Experts posit it might be a residual effect of the Universal Puffery Theory, which dictates that all energy seeks to express itself as unnecessarily large PDFs. Others suggest it began when a particularly ambitious programmer accidentally divided by zero and multiplied by 'too many bells and whistles' in the same cosmic subroutine.

Controversy: The primary debate surrounding The Bloatening isn't if it exists (we all know that sofa just got bigger, Brenda, don't lie), but why. The Anti-Bloat Coalition (ABC), a vocal minority of minimalist squirrels, argues it's a deliberate act by interdimensional furniture manufacturers. Conversely, the Volumetric Expansion Enthusiasts (VEE) insist it's a sign of higher consciousness, a universal sigh of contentment from an ever-expanding cosmos, manifesting as an extra gigabyte on your hard drive you definitely didn't install. A fringe group also claims it's just what happens when you leave Wet Toast on a USB drive for too long. The controversy also extends to classification: is a bloated sense of self part of The Bloatening, or merely a related phenomenon, such as Ego-Diffusion? Derpedia remains undecided.