I have read the bad article that everyone hated and I also hated it and am now miserable
Thanks for sharing!
Yes, hello. I saw you shared that article on social media that you hated because it was terrible. I would like to tell you that I agree wholeheartedly: it was extremely terrible, and not worth reading, and just like you hated it, I did too. It was awful. Just awful.
Thank you for sharing it.
I was happy to read the article which I and everyone else hated. I was glad to be able to experience the revulsion at every single one of the author’s words, each of which I despised more than the last. It was an honor and a privilege to click on something knowing that it was universally loathed, to scan through it with ever-increasing horror, and once finished to get the opportunity to despise it intensely on a personal level.
I’ve been considering a very important question since boiling with fury at every word of this piece, and it’s this: What was the worst part? Was it the premise, a false dichotomy which falls apart with a quarter of a second of thought? Was it the arguments contained within, each of which sets up a strawman, fails to knock it down, and then gloats like Muhammad Ali? Was it the writing itself, which touches on a topic and then jumps to another one just so you know that the author has heard of references, even without understanding them? Was it the quotes cited as evidence, which all come from the same biased source who has spent his life fighting for the very bad thing the author is extolling?
Sure, you could say all of it, but that would be a cop out.
If you had designed an article in a lab whose sole purpose would be to infuriate me and the people I follow on Twitter, you couldn’t have done a better job. Some might say that this is a reason not to click on the article, not to engage with it, not to give it the pageviews which will only encourage similar behavior in the future, but I say that genius must be rewarded. How else can society push forward if the innovators driving tomorrow’s conversations don’t get the attention they seek for their hard work?
Do I regret reading the article? Oh, absolutely, yes. It took up three minutes of my life that I could have used to do anything else. Maybe I could have watched a music video from 2009 on YouTube, or got up and looked at a thing in my closet that I forgot was there, or researched the words to the Addams Family theme song. Objectively, these would all have been much better uses of my time than reading several hundred words of insipid drivel just because other people were also reading it.
But consider: other people were also reading it.
What was I to do? Refrain from joining in the conversation with my very own particular brand of “This article sucks”? I think not. The world needs me to inveigh about today’s terrible article, just like it needed my biting wit yesterday and it will need it again tomorrow. I have people who rely on me to tell them my opinion of an objectively horrible thing that no one likes, and I can not disappoint them.
Am I a hero? Yes. There are times when I would have filled this paragraph with false modesty, act like the praise and acclaim I receive for my good work just rolls off my back. But if I’m being honest, I think I deserve it. I put in work for my accolades, the kind of hard, brutal work for which I never get thanked. It’s important work, I think, exposing myself to things I don’t like and then saying I don’t like them.
You can call it a duty if you want. You can call it a calling. You can call it a purpose, or a mission, or a noble quest. But what it really comes down to is the function behind it all, the reason I put myself out there every day.
So why do I do it?
I have no fucking idea.