Nobody Wants Your Take

It had to be said.

Nobody wants to read this.

Nobody wants my take on anything.

Oh sure, maybe a snarky comment here or there, but a three-page thinkpiece on anything?

Unwelcome.
Unasked for.
Unwarranted.

Awhile ago I wrote that all I wanted from everything I consume (podcasts, books, cheese, etc) is insight or information.

Once I set that threshold for reading articles or clicking on links, I immediately cut down my consumption of just about everything by half.

It's remarkable how many people, myself included, have no information to offer and nothing new to say and yet churn out an unbelievable amount of content seemingly just for the sake of churning out content.

Honestly, who is reading most of this stuff?

Have you looked at Huffington Post lately?  It's a collection of tweets stating the obvious, many of which are probably fake accounts made up by Huffpo's editors, with little paragraphs in between them saying things like "But other people feel differently."

Is that...supposed to qualify as news?

Don't we call it news because it's supposed to be new information?

Have you listened to NPR lately?

I get that not everybody gets their news from the same place and so you shouldn't report on anything assuming people already know what you're talking about, but with the amount of news coming down the pike, I think at some point, we have to tell people to catch up on their own time and just stick to reporting the latest, because the bulk of what I'm listening to lately are recaps of what's already happened.

But the worst is--as you can expect--social media.

Awhile ago, I posted on Facebook that overnight everybody seemed to have gotten a job as a spokesperson for...everything.

I'll never forget--try as I might--the day I saw someone post a status beginning with "I should probably address my feelings on--"

No.
No, you shouldn't.
Nobody cares.

I know that sounds cruel, but when every meme is all about how people need to mind their business and those same people think it's their job to let us know where they stand on every single issue, you have to wonder where the disconnect is.

Nobody wants your hot take.
Or your cold take.
Or any take you have on anything.

I'm saying this in the context of a blog, so I understand the irony, but I don't expect anybody to read this.  I use blogs the way we used to use LiveJournal.  I treat it as shouting into a black hole and then walk away feeling a little bit lighter and still morbidly depressed at the state of the world.

But I'm not promising you're going to learn anything from me or look at things a different way based on what I'm saying here.

I am, without a doubt, the least insightful person on the planet.
I never have a new way of looking at...anything, really.

As for information, if gossip counts as information, then yes, I can definitely give you some information, but other than that...

I'm only spending a few minutes writing this because it's cathartic to write something that you wish you could scream at all of Twitter.

Lately I dread seeing any cultural touchstone happen in front of my eyes, because I know it's going to be picked to death for hours the next day until nobody ever wants to talk about it again, and in that way, we end up giving tons of importance to things we don't have the hindsight to understand, while simultaneously erasing our history before it even has a chance to become history.

So here's my solution:

From now on, just post gossip.
Only gossip.
That's all anybody wants to hear anyway.

You know how you stop scrolling immediately as soon as you sense that a status is even remotely inflammatory?

That's what people want to see.

Otherwise, pictures of cute babies and/or animals, and...

That's about it.

No more hot takes.

Please.

Nobody's reading them.

And nobody's reading this.

Probably because it's a hot take on a hot take.

But one can dream, right?

One can dream.