Are you one of those people? You know, the type of person who's always saying profound sounding things that don't really mean anything but make you look smart when they leave your mouth? Oh you are! Well this blog post isn't really for you, it's more about you and how everyone else would appreciate it if you shut the hell up. Did that sound profound too? Nah, not really, but it had a point unlike all of the crap you talk about.
The kind of person I'm referring to tends to be the sort who calls themselves a 'guru' or an 'expert'. They'll advise that you put the word 'like' in capital letters on your social media page, or dress for the job you want and not the job you have as that is obviously the best way to go about making something of yourself. They'll use buzzwords often and send out a newsletter to all of their email contacts even though no-one has read a newsletter in around five years and nearly all of those emails go straight in the trash, despite the fact the person sending them was dressed as someone whose emails are read with great interest. They'll send a daily report out on Twitter that people will only read if they're mentioned in it, and the only way to get mentioned in it would be to interact regularly with the writer which no-one will do because their content is made up of daily reports. They might give motivational talks. Perhaps they're part of a local chapter where they meet up for monthly chats about business matters whilst sipping on cold tea and applauding people for having the motivation to wake up and attend what is, ultimately, a cult with suits on.
The thing is, none of that is really an issue. If people want to do that then fine, who are we to say no? Obviously we can mock and laugh and know, deep down, that our lives our better off with those features existing in them, but we can't stop others from enjoying what they bring. It would be wrong of us, in the same way it is wrong for people who support the Labour party to judge those who support the Tories; ultimately they both have incredible flaws, it's a case of brushing them under the carpet to preserve sanity. If we ostracised other human beings just because they did things that we didn't then we'd basically be... well... humans, I guess. But bad ones! Let us not become bad.
The issue is that all of those things combine to make a lot of hot air and empty messages. Those messages dilute what would otherwise be a very informative and creative world and fill it with supposed facts that are actually nothing more than metaphor or hyperbole. Hyperbole is often not as fun as it sounds. (Hyper Bowl - What the Superbowl will become when aliens take over.) The 'gurus' and 'experts' dishing these messages out are doing so not because they're terrible examples of life; they're doing so because it's a disease. They no longer know how to stop, so instead of sitting back and realising that, actually, everything they've said recently is vacuous and self-serving, they carry on thinking that they're offering the rest of us a service. It's a service that none of us want, yet we're going to sit there and be subjected to it anyway because the chances are if we decide to ignore one avenue for this nonsense we're going to walk head first into another. It's all around us like a plague and the longer we accept it, the faster it will spread. Before you know it you too could be using lines such as,
"Marketing isn't about sales; it's about conversations!"
or
"Today is the first day of the rest of your career!"
What do they mean? Nothing, that's what, but people use them anyway. For giggles, I guess.
But if we all started to claim we knew about things just for kicks then the air would become so hot that we'd flood in a tide of melting polar ice and the combined sweat of the population of Grimsby.
No-one wants to die in Grimsby sweat, do they?
