Kill Motivational Shit-Posting

It’s 2020 motherfuckers. Welcome to the future.

Here’s a New Year’s Resolution: I’m not going to write about motivation anymore. That’s it, I’m done.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to avoid writing about mental health struggles or lessons I’ve learned from being 41 and confronting shit in my life; it’s more that I want to avoid clickbait, listicle bullshit.

I want to focus on writing about real things and real life, not meaningless, vacuum advice or positioning myself as some sort of guru.

I’m not a guru and neither is anyone else.

As I’ve written before, no one really knows what they’re doing and it’s best to be wary of anyone who pretends they have answers.

Ultimately, we all need to come to conclusions ourselves.

So no more motivational shit-posting.

This mental gear shift was triggered by a recent time on Facebook when a young girl dropped a link to her blog on a page I follow. I was curious so went and had a look. Every post title looked like the promoted stories on Medium. You know the stuff: ‘10 things mentally strong people do’ and ‘12 ways to change your life and empower the real you.’ All that shite.

Seeing those titles outside of Medium, (and Thought Catalog), sitting there naked and quivering on a blogspot website, made them seem all the more ridiculous. It brought home how generic and meaningless they are. I felt foolish. It became clear that this is the starting point of internet writing: Mindless motivational advice.

Honest question: Do those articles ever help anyone? Do they mean anything? Has anyone’s life been changed by a fucking motivational listicle?

Medium is chock full of them and I’ve contributed to that landfill too. But humans have remarkable bullshit detectors and if a piece of writing isn’t coming from an authentic, true place, we sniff it out and disregard it.

Look, good for this girl to sit down and write, good for her to formulate thoughts in her head about how to be a better person and good for anyone to write anything and put it out there.

But I didn’t read a single post she wrote. It could be amazing but those posts are most likely part…