There's been an explosion in a top-secret science lab. A group of researchers are trapped. But an acid leak threatens to contaminate the water supplies of several U.S. states, so the government is going to destroy the lab, sacrificing the scientists, unless the liquid can be contained. Fortunately, there's someone on the scene who can help. He has no tools. He does, however, have a candy bar—and the knowledge that sugar and sulfuric acid react to form a sealant (at least on TV). Hole plugged. Lives saved. All in a day's work for MacGyver.

Back when the mulleted master first appeared in 1985, this is what constituted resourcefulness—or at least our shared cultural understanding of it. You had to "look at what you have and ask yourself, 'Is there a way to turn this into what I need?' " says Lee David Zlotoff, MacGyver's creator. That koan of wisdom is how we got fire about a million years ago and the wheel around 3500 B.C. Today, though, necessity isn't the mother of invention—inanity is. Rendered vapid by the virality of the Internet, creative problem-solving has devolved into something more insipid than ingenious, more MacGruber than MacGyver: life-hacking.

In today's world, everything is a life hack—a compulsive atomization of personal and material improvement commonly involving inventive applications for wire hangers (fashion a microphone stand!) and duct tape (open a stubborn jar lid!). JesusHacks.com offers tips to live like Christ—"Jesus Never Set Goals. He Did This Instead." Google "hacks from prison" and you'll get more than a million results, none of which can touch El Chapo's tunnel.

There are hacks to get stronger (lifehack.org suggests taking supplements "that are proven to work") and slimmer (weather.com advises blasting the AC) and have better sex (women should wear socks, according to redbookmag.com, because warm feet calm fear), and there are hacks to improve your time management, mood, and desk organization (unwieldy electrical cords, meet binder clip). But if we want to get stronger, why would we take nutritional supplements proven not to work? If we want to get slimmer, here's an idea: Eat less and exercise. And if women want to have better sex, maybe they should look less at hosiery and more at why they're intimate with partners who scare them in the first place.

The coinage was innocent enough. In 2003, tech writer Danny O'Brien used the term life hack to describe how programmers were creating shortcuts to make their daily lives more efficient. What started as geek-speak went viral soon after with the launch of YouTube, which gave anyone with any hack a platform to make the idiotic into an infomercial. But while it's one thing to find solutions to actual problems, it's another to act like an innovator because you're able to open canned tuna without a can opener (this video, by Crazy­RussianHacker, has nearly 26 million views). In its current state, life-hacking is mostly about rigging ever-more-mundane objects for amusement. The term is devalued. "It's a scary thing. We have an environment today in which people use unverified sources of data with great abandon," says the retired astronaut Ken Mattingly. "It's easy to confuse hype with good ideas." If you don't recognize the name, Mattingly, portrayed in the movie Apollo 13 by Gary Sinise, played a major role in what could be (but luckily isn't) called one of history's great hacks. Left behind on terra firma, he helped jury-rig equipment to return the crippled spacecraft to Earth after an oxygen tank exploded, severely limiting the power, navigation, and air-filtration systems. Mattingly, now 79, has never heard of life-hacking; he preaches "constant preparation" instead.

But that, of course, takes work and accountability. The more we oh-so-cleverly hack our bad habits, the more we can avoid developing good ones. In Germany, there's an elevator that drops you off on the wrong floor so you're forced to exercise. Lift-hacking! A start-up called Digit siphons money from your bank account to trick you into saving. Thrift-hacking! It all suggests that our brains are actually backsliding. "I saw one about cupcakes," says the comedian Maddox, whose anti-life-hacking YouTube video has almost 2 million hits. "There are all these techniques about how to eat them. The main one is you cut the cupcake in half, horizontally, put the bottom on top, and make a sandwich. The life hack requires utensils. The whole point of a cupcake is that it's a portable dessert. If you need to use utensils, then just have fucking cake."

Related: 9 Totally Useless But Awesome Hacks