You're Doing It Wrong

Here’s why you’re doing it wrong.

You know the thing you’ve been doing all this time? Probably since you were a kid? Maybe it was something your parents taught you to do, maybe you learned about it from friends. Perhaps you took a class — or a whole semester — about it. Maybe you even learned how to do it on your own. Well, you’re doing it wrong.

I know this sounds strange to you. “I’m very good at doing this thing,” you’ll say. “I’ve never had any problems with it. People have even complimented me on my thing-doing abilities. I won an award once. I get paid a good salary doing the thing.”

It doesn’t matter. However you’re doing the thing, whatever the thing is, there is a different way to do it, a way that is better than the way you do the thing, which is, that’s correct, wrong. You specifically, the person reading this piece, are doing it wrong. (But so are your friends, so be sure to share this.)

Why are you doing it wrong? Maybe you received incorrect information. Maybe there have been advances in the field of the thing and its proper implementation since you did the thing for the first time. Maybe someone realized that the quickest way to drive traffic to an article is to tell people that even though they know for a fact that the way they are doing the thing is the right way the thing should be done, that they aren’t actually doing it right and now an entire industry template is based on the cynical manipulation of your basest emotions to garner the click you can’t help but give. (You are clicking wrong, by the way, but that is the subject for another article.) Maybe you are actually doing it mostly right, but there is one subtle difference between the way you do it and the way this post is telling you that it should be done that we can exaggerate enough to justify an entire piece, and hopefully an accompanying video, explaining.

What’s the alternative? Well, obviously, you should do the thing that you are doing wrong the way we are telling you to do it instead. But also don’t worry about it too much. Give it a week or two, maybe less if this post is very popular, and there will be another post explaining that, no, the way that you are told you are doing it wrong is itself wrong, and there’s a third way you should be doing it. Or maybe you should even be doing it the way you were doing in the first place. It doesn’t matter, because you will already have clicked and shared and either responded with anger or humorous acknowledgment. (“I so do this!”) You’re a sucker, and you’re easily baited, and rather than confront the emptiness that is all around you as the moments of the one life you get speed past, you will get drawn in by something that has been designed to insult your intelligence so that it will elicit the very response it was created to engender. What else are you going to do? Read a book? Develop your personality? Be alone with your own thoughts? Of course not!

Listen, I’m not happy with the way the Internet turned out either. None of us are. But the money showed up and the phones made it impossible to escape and we decided that we were all going to throw our hands in the air and jack ourselves into whatever lowest common denominator matrix the people who sell our information created to keep us in a state of ovine complicity about our own pacification. Hahaha, you’re barely registering this, right? What are you going to click next, clicky? I bet it will be something that lots of other people are awfully mad about on the Internet at the moment. Or maybe it will be a piece that explains what we know and what we don’t know about a story that is trending highly enough that someone has decided it is worth explaining what we know or what we don’t know about it right now. It could even be a work of genius, the superiority of which is assured by the number of people who have so indicated with a pictogram of flames. There are so many options! You’ll just click, click, click. You might even forget to go to the bathroom, or feed yourself. You’re a big ball of soggy meat whose main purpose is to click. You’re so disgusting! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Being a gigantic waste of space who exists only to build buzz for a bunch of properties that are looking to cash in before the whole pile of bullshit collapses in on itself may be the only thing you’re doing right.

But it isn’t. You’re doing it wrong. You’re doing everything wrong. We all are. We’re all doing it wrong. What’s the point? Why even go on? It’s all wrong. Please like and share.