Hello, I'm Mervi!
An artist, nerd and business sorcerer, dedicated to make world more beautiful and strange with art, illustrations and logos + to help you figure your sustainable business out.
How you are doing everything wrong
Have you seen that joke women's magazine cover which was making rounds on Facebook? The cover features multiple fake headlines, such as You look so old and Women richer than you wearing things. One of the phoney headlines took my attention. The headline was How you are doing everything wrong with a subtitle And other ways we are trying to control how you think.
I don't myself read that much of these magazines, but I found it very familiar. These types of articles are all over the web. Every day you can go about and read about your mistakes in using social media and how living a life will kill you. I even saw an article about how you are drinking water wrong. Probably the wrong way of drinking water is to put it in your mouth and swallow. The image above would be great for a list post titled "How you are boating wrong". Less water inside the boat would be a great start.
The how you are doing this wrong types of articles are highly popular for many reasons. They have shock value. You can gasp and be surprised to find out how horribly wrong it is to eat vegetables or to wear black clothes. Besides making you feel bad about what you have been doing wrong they make you also feel superior when you realise you have been doing these things right. Perhaps someone else has been doing it all wrong and you can now show them. They appear to offer quick solutions to your problems. If you are doing all these things wrong with your blog that must be the reason why you aren't getting all that traffic and those comments you want. How you are doing wrong articles also are easy for their writers. You can always find or come up with ideas on how people are doing something "wrong". These articles rarely give very deep and defined solutions to the problems, thus writing them requires mainly just showing off the problems.
Not that long ago I saw someone's funny little skit about how you are doing something right. I don't really remember what it was about. It was a cute idea, reaction to the popularity of how you are doing wrong articles. I was actually thinking about creating something like that, but I realised my natural temperament doesn't work for being overly positive. It would have come out wrong, sarcastic and, even worse, pretentious. It's an intriguing thought, don't you think? That positivity would be pretentious or sarcastic, not genuine. Negativity is a great way to get people to read, share and comment. We are suckers for negative.
My issue with these articles and their popularity is that they can distract you from doing things your own way. These articles represent the usual kind of unsolicited, useless and snarky advice given to you by know-it-alls. Their value is low and they are, generally speaking, a facile look into the issue they discuss. They are too easy, there's too many of them and they are making you work on fixing things you don't really need to fix. I wonder if anyone has written a serious piece about how you are doing a how you are doing this wrong article wrong.
