Places like Medium are a recovering perfectionist’s worst nightmare.
Here I am trying to train myself out of absolutes and all-or-nothing thinking, only to be told by headline after headline that I must, I should, I need to, I mustn’t, I can’t…
Unfortunately that’s the way that content works these days. We’re all so time starved, not to mention spoilt for choice, that there’s been this kind of nuclear arms race in the realm of headline writing to discover to the most attention-grabbing collection of words known to humankind.
I mean, you don’t create FOMO with a heading along the lines of ‘Three things that may prove useful to you if you’re the kind of person that wants to try and get better at being more productive, which you may want to consider’.
We don’t have enough room on our screens for titles like that, for one thing.
There’s always a secret waiting just around the corner…
The easiest way to get our attention is to appeal to our baser emotions: fear, desire, greed, Salt and Vinegar, Texas BBQ, Sour Cream – wait, some of those are Pringles flavours. These are the things we have the least control over, and that we still struggle to understand.
So it’s not surprising that article writers find the most effective way to get eyeballs is to suggest there’s some amazing secret just a click away. It’s going to completely revolutionise the way you approach your life and allow you to achieve things you’ve never thought were possible outside of your dreams.
Or it’ll tell you that you’re doing something terrible that is ruining your life and you need to stop it. Right now. Have you stopped it yet? Unless it was a thing you were supposed to start, in which case: how’s it going?
And the problem with headlines especially is that you can’t ignore them.
We choose to read articles. We often have to read headlines.
If you object to the content of a certain writer’s articles, for example, you can just not read their articles. You can unfollow them; you could mute people on Twitter with whom you disagree; you know which publications there are online and in the real world whose values don’t align with yours.
You don’t have to read content by the kind of muppets who talk about Pringles in the middle of trying to make a serious point.
We can curate our experience to a great extent, but it’s more difficult with headlines. If you’re on a platform like Medium or YouTube looking for content, it’s impossible not to see headlines.
In the same way you’ll see a lot of products when you go to the supermarket, even if you’ve only gone in looking for sticking plasters and garlic mayonnaise.
Which means, assuming you’re like me and have read the odd article about productivity or self-improvement, that your feed on any network you choose is going to be full of articles, videos, posts or podcasts telling you that you need to be better and that you’re doing life wrong.
It’s possible to scroll through these articles without ever reading one of them and yet, thanks to the headlines, still get the overwhelming feeling that you’re just doing something badly. Or not doing the right things.
Here’s what you must do about it – if you like, that is
It’d be ironic if I ended by telling you what you must do about this, wouldn’t it? It’d be nice if someone could just make this all go away – for instance, by using AI to rewrite all the clickbait. In the meantime, may I humbly suggest we all remember that, while these headlines do have some power over us, this is still our domain.
In the same way a market stall trader can be very pushy in trying to get people to come and look at their wares, these types of headlines will do their best to low-key bully you into reading. But we still have the power to walk on by.
Every article headline is a pitch. It’s trying to sell you on the idea that there’s valuable information waiting just a click away. But in the same way you wouldn’t necessarily engage a salesperson you don’t have to pay attention to an article that starts by suggesting you’re making a mistake or need fixing – especially if they’re being mean to you.
For instance, you wouldn’t buy a new umbrella from someone who shouted, ‘Buy an umbrella, you sopping wet moron’, would you?
Ultimately I help myself resist the detrimental impact of constantly seeing these kind of messages by reminding myself that these people have never met me.
How could they possibly know for certain they have the solution to our problems, when they have no idea what our problems are?
Having said that, I could use a new umbrella…
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Header photo by Chris Thompson on Unsplash
