As far as I can tell, the mug cake recipe began its life like so many other terrible things—as an office chain email sometime in the mid-2000s. Since then, it has spread its bleak message far and wide across the internet.

If you want to make your own mug cake, you will need cocoa, flour, an egg, a mug, and a microwave. Here is what you will not need: self-respect.

If you think that halfheartedly mixing an egg with some lumpy old cocoa in the bottom of the commemorative mug from your 10-year high school reunion constitutes cooking, you are mistaken. It is not cooking. At best, it is a cry for help. Seriously dude—are you okay?

Let's take a closer look at some classic mug cake recipes.

The whole concept of the mug cake is based on convenience and efficiency. You don't have time to go to the shops. You don't have time to, I don't know, turn on the stove. You're somehow very, very busy—despite the fact that you, the mug cake consumer, are almost definitely the type of person who can be found alone in your apartment, still in your pyjamas, scrolling aimlessly through Pinterest at 3 PM on a Tuesday.

Essentially, you are me.

But here's the head scratcher. If all of this is the case—if you're really so very hungry that the thought of spending more than five minutes constructing a balanced meal for yourself is impossible—why not just eat the chocolate chips on their own?

Chocolate chips are delicious! If what you're craving is a quick sugar hit, some soggy, half-warm microwaved goo really is not any better than just straight up eating chocolate out of a packet.

If you're going to be lazy, why not be really, truly lazy? Why not lean in and embrace the poetry of our own pathetic existences? Just scoop up the chips in your hand and deliver them, express post, straight to your mouth.

This recipe is one of the saddest things I've seen on the internet, ever. Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being single on Valentine's Day. But there's everything wrong with a blogger effectively saying you should be so upset about it that you can't leave the house.

"No," this recipe says. "Stay on the couch. To cope with your spinsterdom, you must resign yourself to an evening spent with lumpy blackened gruel in a mug, crying in your pyjamas, watching reruns of Friends. Not good Friends, either. A marathon of the later episodes, probably the ones where Joey and Rachel start hooking up because they're so afraid of dying alone."

What's perhaps most frustrating about the mug cake trend is that it has, in recent times, turned gourmet. This bizarre recipe by "Kirbie's Cravings" is a symptom of that. Now people are creating mug cake recipes that call for expensive ingredients like blueberries, chopped pistachios, and matcha powder.

Nobody just has this stuff lying around in the fridge—if you're going out to the shops to buy whipped cream, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of this exercise? Which is, as we've previously established, to spend as little time outside of your crumb-filled bed as possible.

If you actually decide to give up on yourself and make a mug cake, this is what you'll end up with. This is what they actually look like, because a mug cake recipe is essentially a set of instructions for creating hot brown mush. The results—not unlike the lifestyle they are inspired by—will definitely, absolutely disappoint.

Also, you will have to clean your microwave afterwards because—as it turns out—if you fill a mug with gooey liquid and stick it in a microwave, the mug will overflow—100 percent of the time.

How do I know? Because I am the type of lazy, underdeveloped person who these recipes are designed for. I have absolutely stirred a bunch of shit together in a soup mug, closed the microwave door and hoped for the best. I am not proud. But if I can change, so can you. Please stop making these dumb microwave mug cakes.

For more easy recipes for self-loathing, follow Kat on Twitter