Clickbait is everywhere. Basically anything on the internet is clickbait. But it’s not different to anything else in life either. Newspaper headlines, movie names, even book titles are all cooked up to hook you.
But the internet is pretty much based on clickbait. Articles with titles designed to make you worry, scared, excited or feel FOMO (Fear of missing out, which is different from FML, which is how a lot of clickbait actually makes you feel).
You know the ones:
’14 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Be Drinking Water’
’23 Snapchats That Are So Stupid That You Can’t Stop Laughing’
or ‘Have You Been Picking Your Avocados The Wrong Way This Whole Time’?
And most of the time, reading it and spending a few minutes of your life on that page is not repaid with any benefit.
If you practice Constant Consciousness and do everything for a reason, you actually live more of your life and get more value and benefit from the stuff you do. You feel and live better because you realise what the source of your stress, anger, negativity or sloth is and then you surgically remove it.
I’m not vulnerable to much clickbait (online or off). I don’t use social media (I have a Twitter but I only use it to auto-publish my blogposts and to write to people who don’t have email) and I don’t read or watch the news. But my homepage is Reddit. And I’m on it for 1-2 minutes a day, to see something cool, get a chuckle or smile before moving on to more productive things. But that doesn’t happen every time. Sometimes it’s a just a plain 1 minute of my life that was spent looking at something disappointingly crappy. And in the process, I was just exposed to about 50 other clickbait headlines. Not worth it.
If you combined all the wealth in the world, put every single person’s money into a huge ass pile like the one Uncle Scrooge used to swim in, you still couldn’t buy one thing: time. Yet we treat –and protect– our money like it’s #1. So fuck it, Reddit’s gotta go.
My new homepage is now The Onion. Guaranteed to make me laugh or at least smile every time. So on the topic of Clickbait, courtesy of The Onion, I present to you: