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Hello increasingly estranged but dear reader, and welcome to our superficially expansive list summarizing the top ten reasons to abstain from top-ten lists. Given our propensity for rhetorical(and lucrative) neutrality we’ve provided a click-bait link referencing our ‘Top ten reasons to love top-ten lists’ in the event you find the present experience dissatisfying to your serotonin uptake. Alongside this link is a brief but relatable bio describing me as a general human being with a totally sustainable lifestyle and salary which makes writing look like a viable career path. Anyway, now that you feel comfortable let’s get this ‘banger’ as the kids say underway!
1.Lists are an over-simplification of reality
No matter what we tell you, you’ll always have to settle for the excessive and often intolerable complexity of your life and its various interminglings of relation. There’s no skirting around it, you’ve turned existence upside down bud, whether it be through an inability to process emotions in a pseudo-healthy capacity or if you’re the only sane one and have to contend with monstrosities regularly spitting on you. But between you and I(your reliable and trustworthy friend) needing some simplicity at the expense of a proper connection to reality is completely understandable. You deserve it!
2.They’re motivated out of a false sense of completion
Now, you and I both know it feels amazing to reach competency in a skill or finish a long and drawn out project. Achievement through adversity is the foundation through which we build character...or some other smarmy sentiment to push you through reading another ten words. But, this wave of interim literacy where we perceive finishing snippets of advice in top-ten tidbits as a stepping stone can only be problematic. How many folks will work through more than a list to feel informed? To feel capable? To feel anything other than a brief but pleasurable hormonal imbalance? Put down the list, pick up a book ladies and gentlemen.
3. Are we really making it this meta?
If you’re intent on reading through top-ten lists to inform yourselves on the various aspects of reality, then in order to keep track of all those bite-sized pieces of data may I suggest writing a list? Then if you want to be impartially informed, won’t you have to read your top tens from multiple sources? Perhaps, yes perhaps, you might consider a list to keep track of all those housings of lists? Then! And only then, mind you, if you’re sincere in this arbitrary exercise, you should devote some time exclusively to crossing off your brief paltry achievements on a separate list devoted to all the articles on those other lists. Bam! Then, when you've exhausted the layers of list you can manifest in this strange metaphysical chachkie. You’ve got yourself a makeshift Dr.Seuss novel to boot!
4. It causes cancer!!!!
It might...we don’t know…do you think we do research here? Cite our sources? Umm...anecdotal evidence is admissible, this isn’t a courtroom!
5.What about the innumerable other possibilities?
If we’re doing a top-ten list then necessarily there has to be other reasons, rationalities, objects etc. to which we might reference. Where did they all go? A la our preceding no.4 we don’t do our research here at <corporate name redacted> but that may actually be a fault of our competitors! Think about it, they have to parse through all this research and filter it down into a comprehensive but digestible read, that information can be formed into so many dissonant narratives you’ll never get to see. For the ten items they provide you, if they’re such high and mighty thinkers they certainly must have found hundreds. For it to be the top ten items in that category they must have some disturbingly objective standard to drain it through. Unreliable and illegitimate! Trust us, we could barely come up with ten things to write here...but we did and the paycheck better come.
6. You’re an addict.
‘Just one more list for the night and then I’m done,’ then you say ‘I can stop reading anytime I want, I don’t have a problem. Timothy, first of all, relax. Conveniently, your problem is not only permissible, it’s openly endorsed by the corporate demagogues who want to own you without feeding you. We’re just saying, we both know why you’re here, and you’re ruining your family’s lives. We’re not certain how, but we’re really banking on your natural gullibility given you’re here reading another top ten list.
7.Honarable mentions bring dishonor on you!
To all the writers out there trying to get by writing brief blurb lists celebrating the apex of empty subjects, honorable mentions do not qualify! Cease and desist, we both know you’re just trying to reach a word count and justify the petty fifty cents extra they offered you. And you worked for it like an abused elephant works for peanuts. As to those that insist on receiving honorable mentions, what is it? Pride? Can’t take that your number one doesn’t factor into the statistical preferences of researchers and pointless surveys echoed back to the audience? Be a bigger person, come on now!
8. Could you support my crowdfunded financial safety?
Probably an awkward time to bring it up but it’s actually quite difficult to get by with these lists and rather than overtly pander I’ve decided to hide my humble request in this anti-list list. Which seems ironically and thematically pertinent, doesn’t it? Making a hate list against lists and taking the time to make one of the points completely antithetical to any contextual relevance thus undermining the value of this very list? Yeah...come to think of it, I’m kind of proud of that. I think I’ve earned your continued and sustained support. Please. I need food.
9. Will you ever be satiated?
The internet exists to supplement our informational database, the one we carry with us intrinsically through our experiences and lived-in embodiment. What more do you need? Is it too much to ask that you look for distributed information within the original circumstance that it derives its substance from? Why do you want knowledge to be regurgitated back to you like a bird feeding its freshly birthed infants. The unfortunate reality is that after two or three more rounds of worm-spit-up you’re gonna have to figure it out for yourselves or get pushed out of the nest prematurely. Information isn’t meant to be processed, condensed, and redistributed through so many iterations, why do you insist on reading bits of half-coherent sentences instead of reading a full-fledged article? I swear to you, being conversant in a single subject instead of six million is far more practical and less egomaniacal.
10. The cop-out in finality.
Great work buddy, you made it to the end. Do you feel any more alive inside? No? Shocker. Maybe it’s a product of substituting this poor list of opinions for any genuine movement in life. Just as likely, it’s because you were looking for something I couldn’t give you, like a new stable and concrete direction in a void of existence. Granted, there never seems to be one of those. At any rate this last point of arguing against the top ten list conceptually, is yours to make! I concede I couldn’t identify any viable conclusion here that would solidify my previous reasonings but now, in effort to take up absurd space in your bandwidth here’s an excessive amount of lines for you to print out. Using these lines, make sure to articulate your rationale as to why top-ten lists are pointless exercises in an otherwise potentially productive and beneficial species of consciousness.
Best and utterly empty wishes to you and yours,
From your best friend, a sordid writer,
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Artist-bio:
Charlie is a less-than-prominent writer within our community whom has been working on his magnum opus for about ten years longer than most individuals have worked on any opus let alone a magnum one. He has very few tenable qualities that aren't explicitly categorized within the humanitarian department of your local community college. But he has three cats named Cleo, Pokey, and Tino who all love him dearly. He is grateful for the opportunity to express a disproportionate level of cynicism and distaste towards a community that's done very little to make him feel marginalized. We wish him well and if you've seen him please contact (XXX) XXX-XXXX
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