Monday, January 12, 2015

The 10 Worst Things About Listicles

10. Listicles destroy the narrative imagination and subtract the sublimity from your gaze.

9. The numerosities of nature never equal the numerosity of human fingers.

8. The spherical universe becomes pretzel sticks upon a brief conveyor.

7. In every listicle, opinion subverts fact, riding upon it as upon a sad pony. (Since you momentarily accept everything you hear, you already know this.)

6. The human mind naturally aspires to unifying harmonies that the listicle instead squirts into yogurt cups.

5. Those ten yogurt pretzels spoiled your dinner. That is the precisely the relation between a listicle and life.

4. In their eagerness to consume the whole load, everyone skips numbers 4 and 3, thereby paradoxically failing to consume the whole load. This little-known fact might surprise you!

3. Why bother, really. La la.

2. Near the end of eating a listicle you begin to realize, once again, that if you were going to be doing something this pointless, you might as well have begun filing that report. Plus, whatever became of that guy you knew in college? Is this really your life? Existential despair squats atop your screen, a fat brown google-eyed demon.

1. Your melancholy climax is already completed. The #1 thing is never the #1 thing. Your hope that this listicle would defy that inevitable law was only absurd, forlorn, Kierkegaardian faith.

(image source)

4 comments:

Callan S. said...

Also usage of the @ symbol with a name behind it...so were at the age of literally talking AT people, instead of with people?

Also children on my lawn!

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

@ Callan: get off my lawn! ;-)

Callan S. said...

*runs away, crying*

Andrew Chuter said...

Probably worse than listicles are those 'by the numbers' type articles that pass for interesting journalism.
eg
6 - the number of bullets in a revolver
270 - the number of passengers that can be fit on a big plane
99 - the largest two digit integer
etc etc