"Everything You Know About Breakfast Is Wrong" [Outside Magazine]
"Let's be honest: Hillary Clinton is Running for President" -- Subhead: "I mean, seriously." [Washington Post]
"Learning to Love Sugar Again" [The Atlantic] (Actual article title is 'Being Happy With Sugar,' which is just as dull, but the editors apparently felt they needed to, ahem, spice up the link title.)
"The Girl Who Was Raised By Monkeys?" [NPR] (insert inflection) This is a question? Were they expecting an answer?
"This Clever Site Tells You If Your Favorite Bar Patio Is Sunny" [Gizmodo] Well thank god; massive white-person problem = Solved.
I definitely don't think people are getting less creative, even though these headlines lack any creative effort. But there's so much content out there and major editors/publishers are just losing their minds. I do tend to think young, expendable web editors get hired in massive numbers, are overloaded with horrifying pressure to generate clicks, so they basically write bullshit. I believe this because I was one of these folks for a couple different institutions. My jobs didn't last and paid basically nothing--huh.
The worse side of this freak out by editors/publishers is that they'll tend to publish insanely extreme opinions (from any viewpoint) simply because they know it'll generate InternetOutrage, meaning clicks, money, and a lot of dumb stuff.
Take this recent George Will column in the Washington Post; only the most insane, clueless, downright evil-spirited person would not think twice about writing the phrase, "supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a 'sexual assault.'" (Just thinking about using snarky air quotes for "sexual assault" in a serious way, like Will does, makes me hyperventilate.)
It's easy to go on about how vile that column is: e.g. he tries to use his own arithmetic to tell you that sexual assault statistics are grossly exaggerated, when if you use your brain at all with the knowledge that it's pretty impossible to know exactly how many sexual assaults occur for any number of reasons, arithmetic kind of becomes useless; or this sentence: "...capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also non-consensual touching." Dear George: 1). you are a Grown White Man complaining that non-consensual sexual touching ought to be OK? 2). your "capacious definitions" are both things that only terrible people do.
But the publishers know exactly how vile that column is; it's why they published it. They know there'll be a whole slew of subsequent rebuttal columns and internet arguments about the whole thing, and they'll laugh all the way to the bank while nobody really learns a thing. I'm probably even feeding into it just a bit by writing about it myself. But I think it's massively important to be aware of how it's in many media outlets' best interests to generate nothing but outrage, fear, and anxiety; and it's equally important to exercise your free will to turn away from these articles (and in many cases the media outlets themselves) as fast as you can. Because...
The world, as a whole, isn't as bad as it seems through these lenses. This is not to say that there are not vast swaths of people who struggle for survival on a daily basis. In real life, there is an unassailable fact that not everybody is going to have everything they need. But a lot of things point toward a world that is considerably safer than it used to be, and we are, more or less, pretty unaware of it. These are really hopeful trends that should keep us moving and innovating into the future.But I think we need an innovation of thought, because the negative things that are on the rise are not so easily tackled with major advances of media and technology. While gun homicides might be down over the last decade, gun suicides are way up. Diagnoses of anxiety disorders, particularly in the US, have skyrocketed over the last decade (this is more complicated than this little sentence, but still). Like Tom Waits says, way too many people seem to be confusing information with knowledge, and it's rattling their brains apart.
You know me, I won't ever claim to have all the answers, and sometimes I'll claim to have exactly zero answers. But I do believe that one major factor is a problem of perspective and mindset. If you do not believe things are going to be OK, you're probably never going to be very satisfied with what life hands you. If you always expect things to be perfectly shaped, you're going to miss a lot of the weird accidental beauty that's out there. If you can't see things from other people's perspectives, you're bound to run into trouble with some of the 6+ billion people in our contained sphere from which there are few escapes.
If you french fry when you're supposed to pizza, you're gonna have a bad time.
I am reminded of the character of Mario Incandenza in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on an almost daily basis. He is physically and mentally deformed, is unintentionally hilarious, and is the single most compassionate, hopeful character in the book. He has a whole lot to be hopeless about, but it rarely shows.
I'm working on a little song that's based on a line of Mario's. For a little context, it's a kind of alternate reality and giant fans ('Air-Displacement Effectuators') surround Metro Boston and blow pollution up to Canada. Mario's roommate and brother Hal is losing his mind as they fall asleep talking, and Mario, in his own little way, is trying to calm Hal down:
"I like the fans' sound at night. Do you? It's like somebody big far away goes like: It'sOKit'sOKit'sOKit'sOK over and over. From very far away."
Then later in the same conversation, while not understanding a word Hal's just said in an anxious rant, Mario says:
"Hal, pretty much all I do is love you and be glad I have an excellent brother in every way, Hal."
