I struggled with thinking of an article topic for this week. I actually have a lot of ideas, but it didn’t seem like the right timing for any of them. I looked up trending topics on various sites and finally resorted to blog idea generators, which did, in fact, provide inspiration, but probably not in the way their creators intended.
You see, all of the generators provided clickbait-y titles and I was supposed to fill in my topic. No, idea generator! I don’t need a title; I need a topic. Needless to say, I was a bit discouraged. I sat at my desk trying to think of a topic that I actually knew well enough to write “hacks” for or “10 mistakes to avoid when ___” or “How to” do anything. The problem is, I’m an expert at very few things (Harry Potter, watching Youtube videos, procrastination) and I had zero inspiration to write an article about any of those topics that hasn’t already been written.
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**We interrupt this article for a newsflash:You can now read about the history of the North American school of magic, Ilvermorny, at Pottermore. You can also be sorted into an Ilvermorny house!**
Anyways. So, as I thought about all the topics that I was definitely not qualified to write any listicle about, I realized three things: first of all, I really am not able to advise people on most topics. Secondly, any listicle I would ever come up with has probably already been done by Buzzfeed. Lastly, people really don’t care about the process.of coming up with these lists. What I mean is that I can’t write articles like the ones the idea generators suggested because those findings are an end-product of something—whether it is research, personal experience, etc. To be fair, it makes total sense that people wouldn’t care about the process. After all, people create these articles to prevent others from having to experience the same long suffering they endured or to have #relatable content. They do stuff so you don't have to.
However, I considered how this mindset played out in other aspects of my life and I realized that it’s actually quite prevalent. No matter how many songs we sing about how it’s the journey/the climb/the dash that matters, people don’t seem to care about the road of learning lessons (or, at least, hearing about other people’s road trips). People are much more concerned with the end result for your beliefs, your goals, even your worldview and philosophy. The problem is, in life, you should be constantly learning and sometimes, it takes you awhile to come to a conclusion about a topic. And sometimes, these conclusions are not permanent.
Yet, no one wants to hear about you processing the information, analyzing your experiences, wrestling with potentially conflicting ideas. People want you to continually be moving forward, even when you’re stuck in the muddy, gray areas. They don’t want to hear you’ve made little progress or you’re struggling with your stance on ___. And if you say that you don’t know, I’m sure they are more than willing to inform you on their opinion of it.
We’re all works in progress. Maybe some of us have parts of our story more defined than others, but one isn’t better than the other. It’s okay to take time to figure out how you’re feeling, what you’re doing, what you think is the right way to approach something. Lessons aren’t learned instantaneously because it’s the struggle that leads to the learning and true understanding.
Now, try telling that to a culture where everything is instantaneous.
