Are you having a good day? Are you feeling rested, and happy, and ready to conquer the week ahead with your signature mixture of aggression and aplomb? Are you on top of your game, and thus on top of the world?
Then you might want to get off the Internet. Because the Internet does not agree with your sparkly sense of optimism. The Internet—with all due no offenses andsorry, buts—does not think you are on top of your game. Your capacity to work? To love? To live your life? You may not have asked for the Internet's opinion on these matters, but it will tell you anyway: It thinks you are Doing It Wrong.
Well, not the Internet (if, when it comes to precision, we are Doing It Right). The people who are employed to write things for the Internet. "You're doing it wrong" has become a common headline cliche, a sassier, snarkier version of "8 Questions You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask" and "You'll Never Believe What Happened Next." Here, according to the Internet/journalism/your fellow humans, is an incomplete list of all the things you—yes, you—have recently been doing wrong:
Yeah. Sorry.
Like so many such things, "You're Doing It Wrong" started as a meme. In the early 2000s, you could often find it as the all-caps wording on "FAIL" images (like, say, a guy taking an electric shaver to his forearms, or George W. Bush talking into a the earpiece, rather than mouthpiece, of a telephone). But, unlike many such things, the meme didn't die. Instead, it evolved. Journalism reclaimed it for preachy headlines like "Doing It All: You're Probably Doing It Wrong." I've used it. Slate has a topic section dedicated to it.
We should probably stop with all this. The headlines are cheeky, sure, but in the aggregate, they are simply sad. In the name of helping people out, we have become a group of wanton, finger-wagging judgers. Which, no matter the particular moral or ethical code you subscribe to, is probably doing it wrong.
This article was originally published on The Atlantic. Click here to view the original. © All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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