0 Ways to Live (and Write) Better! 0 Reasons to Change the Way You Live (and Write)!
Fetching headlines promise ways (count ‘em!) to self-improvement. But the allure of countable fixes just leads us around corners to more of the same.
There was a time coy headlines appeared primarily in tabloids and celebrity gossip magazines. Serious media enticed readers with the promise of information. That changed as print and digital media began vying for our ever-shortening attention spans. Now headlines in even the most staid media outlets are written in the genre: “just begging to be read.”
Fair enough. Clickbait is not new. Probably the cave wall writing that endured had more human interest than dry information. I get it. But will someone please tell whoever is in charge of trends to stop bombarding us with numbers?
Five Secrets to Landing an Agent!
Three Mistakes Every Editor Hates!
Ten Things I Didn’t Know About Being a Uber Driver!
Unless someone actually does know the exact number of ways to achieve perfect bliss/health/fame/fortune/what have you — please — drop the numbers. It’s like hearing someone crying wolf. I believe at first, and then I’m just dizzy and confused about what to read and who to believe.
Five Must-Make Resolutions for Writers in 2021!
Five Reasons Writers Should Not Make New Years Resolutions
The headlines work as clickbait because they arouse our innermost doubts that we know what we are doing. They promise that whoever wrote that article has distilled a quick-step-formula from life’s baffling quest for how to make the most out of life.
These headlines are ubiquitous and they take their toll. I have devolved slowly from being a person who found comfort in the promise of countable-fix-solutions —
Three Reasons to Write The Memoir Your Mother Wouldn’t Want to Read
to shying away from overlapping promises —
Six Key Considerations When Writing Mother Memoirs
Five Forget-Me-Nots For Mother Memoirs
to cringing from dubious content —
Two Takeaways From Writing My Mother Memoir That Tell Me I Should Have Become a Botanist.
If I click on one article telling me: Five Reasons You Should Sleep Upside-Down there’s bound to be another telling me: Six Reasons to Sleep Upside-Down — and then I’ll start to wonder if the first article gave me the same reasons but just lacked one reason, or if there really are eleven reasons to sleep upside-down, or if I am supposed to read and compare the five reasons to the six reasons —
— which is probably the case, but a critical comparison would take too much effort. It defeats the purpose of the countable-fix system!
I never knew I had passive-aggressive tendencies until recently when I find myself screaming, I’m not reading YOU! to any headline containing “the number of ways…”, which is most articles these days, which alarmed me and caused me to write this.
I’m worried. If I keep up my no-click-on-boastful-countable-fix-articles policy there may soon be nothing for me to read. Then what? Fix my own bad writing habits? Find my own reasons to drink a gallon of water a day? Develop my own sure-fire method for getting my mother memoir written?
Oh, all right.
