5 Simple Ways You Can Be King Of The World
There is a queen and a castle for everyone
No you can’t. That headline doesn’t make sense, yet you are here to read this article. Alright, I’ll give you some credit, I suckered you in using a very common place link-bait headline that is the life-blood of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy among others. I have done nothing different here. You might hate me for this atrocity, yet you take great pleasure in reading 24 GIFs You’ve Never Seen Before or The 14 Worst People You Meet In Your Thirties. Sure, they are “entertaining” but they have also been lowering your IQ by 10 points for every article you consume (scientific studies have been inconclusive so far).
The crux of this article lies in my hypothesis that, any random statement made by any random person is true in its own small world.
Now, let’s ponder over that argument. Take the statement that ‘God exists’. There is a significant population size in the world that believes this to be true while there are a sizeable portion of humans that believe the opposite. Therefore both statements are largely true and essays could be (and have been) written about each side for their own worlds to believe and live in.
Similarly, consider the statement ‘Technology is accelerating memory loss in humans’. How many of you feel that you often forget what you had for dinner two days ago or the name of the last movie you watched at a theatre? You might have forgotten but Facebook (and your phone) sure does remember. I for one feel this way all the time and I’m sure a lot of you do too. We use technology to store everything in our heads; people we know, places we go to and love, things we like and do and so forth. All of this leaves us in a very treacherous situation, “save everything, remember nothing”. If you believe that our dependence on technology is the prime reason for our forgetfulness, then my hypotheses above are true (in our small world).
Sadly enough, the media, marketers, sales people (among many other opinionated people across the world) have been able to pounce on this huge manipulative opportunity. Alas, we like to be told what is right and wrong and what we should do because that is the path of least resistance. But also, given our laziness and the ease with which we give in to these suckers, we have all become samples in experiments that decide what content gets written and hence the ridiculous rise of sites like Upworthy and BuzzFeed. So, we are all to blame for this. Now consider this article headline from Upworthy, If I Told You What This Is About, You Almost Definitely Would Not Click On It or this one from BuzzFeed, 24 Statements That Get More True The Longer You Think About Them. Those statements are probably true too. But regardless, they evoke a sense of curiosity and a fear of missing out. You might think, what if that article had the secret of life and everyone else except you read it. But as with 99.9% of these kinds of articles, they neither have anything of value to add to our lives nor are they true (unless you are in that “small world”).
So the next time you see an article with a garbage headline like above, please tell yourself that you will not be manipulated into clicking on it (but click on it anyway) and that it is not worth the 3 or 30 minutes of your life you waste on it or the subsequent brain decay. Together, we can save this world. Share this article to save 13 of your friends and have an eternity of great sex lives. You’re welcome.
PS: All the headlines in the article are based on real-life events thanks to Upworthy and BuzzFeed. The links have been intentionally left out for your own good.
PPS: TechCrunch says The Fire Phone Will Not Be A Flop. Oh really? Who knows! But hey, speculation never hurt page views or ad revenue.
PPPS: Remember: if you click, you fail.
