smpaterson:

lieslieslies:

thegoodthebadthemike:

1. Before you status update, Tweet, Tumble or Instagram, pause and say to yourself, “is it entirely necessary that I share this morsel of thought with my entire social network?”and if the answer is not, “yes, I absolutely must,”then step away from the Internet.
2. Spend less than or equal to the money you earn each month.
3. Wear clothes that fit you, especially to work.
4. Wait 30 seconds before you look up a fact you can’t remember on your phone, and try to remember it using your brain. This is what the olden days were like.
5. Try that food you think you don’t like but have never actually tried, unless it’s brussels sprouts. They really don’t need any more attention.
6. Cut one person out of your life who you truly do not like and add one person who you truly do. Note: not on Facebook, on Earth.
7.  
8. Crap or get off the pot. This applies to whatever thing you’re not doing that you should just sack up and do already.

  

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Thanks to Tumblr’s horrible formatting (everything) this post probably looks like complete bullshit. And I’m not trying to be two-negative-nancy-posts-in-a-row but resolutions are for YOU and not for telling other people how to run their own fucking lives. Especially when it’s filled with personal and judgmental bullshit. So let’s look at some of these points. The one’s that have been deleted were either 1) fine with me 2) not worth getting into or 3) already well-worn territory. If Tumblr didn’t suck all the dicks that it did, I could have done this in a more pleasing way. But whatever! It’s 2012 lololololol!  

1. This excludes comedy! Sure, it’s not necessary to make jokes. So let’s all say goodbye to Rob Delaney and every other hilarious social commentator on twitter or tumblr! Later dudes! Don’t share your art! It’s not entirely necessary! By this logic, please don’t tell me if you bought a dog. EVEN IF YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. IT’S NOT ENTIRELY NECESSARY. Fuck man, it’s the internet. Not a goddamn NORAD communication line.

7/8 (2/3). Good luck, poor people!

11 (4). Fuck you. I learn so much more these days than in the ‘olden days’ thanks to technology. I’m way fucking smarter than my parents were because of the fact that I can look things up. Go eat a volume of dicks in a cave.

13 (5). This one is personal: brussels sprouts rule if you’re not a child.

14 (6). You just told someone to cut another human being out of their life. You didn’t say, you know, like, try to accept someone or try to forgive someone, no, you just said, in real life, not on Facebook lolololol, to completely write somebody off. Cool ways.

19. Thanks, Uncle Rich. We’re all mad capable of doing whatever we want whenever we want.

Look, I don’t really care too much about navel-gazing modern advice, but when you do it like this and completely alienate and disregard normal human realities, then, come on. Don’t make people feel bad for the things you wish you were. And don’t involve this nastiness when you’re blanketing 20-somethings. We get enough shit as it is just for being in our 20’s. We don’t need to make ourselves look more like know-it-all-motherfuckers. 

For what it’s worth (and that’s not a whole lot): 

-My life has been so much better since I stopped reading Thought Catalog. I decided to give it up because my response to the average article seemed to be more-or-less a mixture of irritation and apathy. I have enough of that already, thanks. I don’t need to take any guff from people who should (in my opinion*) be writing fiction instead of obsessively cataloging the various failures of their most recent ex, or whatever. On the rare occasion that I did read something I enjoyed, I’d always end up feeling like I’d just rummaged through a gigantic pile of shit in order to find a single gold nugget. Also I would sometimes start fights in the comments section. I’m not proud.

-Last week I was bored and decided to have a quick look through the TC frontpage, for the first time in about six months. The most recent article was an interview with that dude in the video for Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born To Die’. I felt vindicated, somehow.

-I am right now suppressing an urge to delete everything I’ve just typed and replace it with “Enough with the 14-day juice cleanses”, repeated over and over and over, because that phrase just tells you everything you need to know, both about the post under discussion and about Thought Catalog in general.

*By which I mean: the self is the subject of almost every ‘personal’ Thought Catalog article. Prozac Nation is almost always the root, the traceable DNA, of this type of post. Self-analysis and self-awareness are fine, desirable even. Endless self-analysis is nothing more than masturbation. It turns you into the protagonist of DFW’s ‘The Depressed Person’. And so on rare occasions when I’d see a post that actually resonated emotionally, I’d almost always end up thinking: this person can write. So why are they choosing to express their feelings in a form that essentially amounts to a LiveJournal post with better grammar? Come on. There are limits to what you can achieve with this. Endless emotional immediacy eventually becomes boring as fuck. Enough with the fourteen-day juice cleanses. Get your shit together. That’s enough of a New Year’s resolution for me. 

Excuse you, my LJ posts have excellent grammar.

(Source: sugarshannon)

togetherforjacksoncountykids:

“It’s Okay to be Neither,” By Melissa Bollow Tempel

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