Being busy isn’t something to be proud of. At some point in the recent past we got brainwashed into thinking that being constantly busy and having no time to stop and think was admirable. That’s utter bullshit.

Passed down by people paying for labor, the idea lets you give up vacations and downtime happily – it means you’re a good person. Work so hard you never have time for anything but work. And see how awesome you are?

This spills into everything else, too. Look around. How many of you are just constantly busy? Even if you aren’t getting anything done or actually doing anything you are somehow always busy. That’s because of two things:

A) Busy is supposed = good, so even when you don’t have much to do you want to seem busy, even just to yourself, so you inflate what you do have to do. You make yourself a false busy schedule.

B) The less you have to, when this idea is in your head, the busier you feel. Because you don’t inflate the real things to make yourself feel busy – the busier you actually are, the less busy you feel. Silly, but true.

But the root of all of this is still – why do we think it’s good to be busy? I have a lot to do. I am constantly busy. But I don’t enjoy it in that sense. I enjoy the work, the chances and the product I produce but I miss having more time to sit and read, or watch the sky, or just think. I miss it and I try to sneak bits of it in when I can.

I don’t know. I can’t get behind the Busy Culture.

You know what doesn’t work? SEO. It’s bullshit. Flat out. Sorry, guys. But the entire idea that you will sell more/get more customers/readers/etc. by upping your ranking on a damn search engine is broken at the core and meaningless when you look at it.

We can start with the fact that 99% of all SEO is designed to push bullshit sites up the ranks. Now I’ve even recently seen people blaming Google for this. “There are people in the field who misuse it and Google should be stopping them.” Nope. Google’s job isn’t to police your industry. It’s a sign that the industry itself is badly broken.

The problem is in the core concept though.

SEO is a short-cut. Short-cuts don’t work. They might give you a fictional bump, a rise in hits that seems like it helps, a ranking that says “Hey look I show up faster” but it isn’t growing your business, no matter what that business is. If you want to build a successful business it takes work and time and selling something people want more than they want that other thing.

But, you think, how will people find out? Not, I point out, by search engines.

Remember when we used phone books and companies would name themselves AAAmazing Cleaners so they would land at the top of the listing for cleaners? They thought it would help and yet that just isn’t how most people work.

The people who do work that way are one-offs, small time fluff that might end up in business but generally take up your time. They’re people who threw a dart and will waste your time with nonsense more often than not. That is in detriment to your business, not help for it.

Instead people ask friends. They think of places they’ve heard of, through their community. People try to use places with a reputation for doing good work. Those are the places that survive. And they aren’t the ones screaming to find shortcuts to the golden land.

So you build your name in the community. You do good work, you talk to people, engage them and be a part of things. You put in the work. Good writing on a website, clear information, follow-through and great customer service. And yes shady folk will skim content from you and use SEO and end up on top of rankings. Great! Let them get the chaff! Takes it off your hands. You want to spend your time with the people who are serious and will come back and will talk about you and enhance your standing in the world – not the yapping fish that swim away more often than not.

Stop chasing short cuts to success, even when they look like they’re working they will be short term and hopefully any business you want to build should be long term. Put in the work, it’s harder but it pays off over the long term and is the only thing that matters.

The Top Ten Cars, Top Ten Blogging Tips, Top Ten Celebs Who Lick Otters. This is the state of websites these days. This. This reductive, mindless bullshit passing itself off as content is what we’ve come to. People don’t want to read thoughts, opinions or concepts these days.

No, as far as the eye can see, we’re proving that what we seem to want most is a shiny picture, stolen from somewhere, along with maybe 60 words that sum up and say “Remember this thing, here is validation – we remember it too!”

The Top Ten list entry is the laziest thing (next to say, the Top Five) you can write. Need to create a post? Find some theme that you can hang ten tiny lights on and run like the wind, Thumper.

Top Ten lists are the Reality TV of the internet. Each time you hit post on one, you’re basically going “Yes, I do think Jersey Shore is the pinnacle of culture.” You are part of the problem. Yup. You.

And we’ve all done it, sometimes. Sometimes you eat Funyuns. Sometimes you make a Top Ten list. You don’t feel good about it, and you wash your hands afterwards, but it can happen. But when you do it a lot, say more than once every quarter, you have a problem.

Seriously, if you can’t find real content to produce then shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. Sorry, but if your site has nothing but lazy slideshows and Top Ten lists I will stop going to it, and so will a lot of people.

Dear Cracked – yes you are our collective exception.

But if you aren’t Cracked? Stop. And yes, Buzzfeed, you bottom feeder of finding the cheapest way to monetize other people’s creativity via endless lists and pasting twitter feeds I am looking directly at you.

Create actual content or go home. We have, at our fingertips, the greatest, fastest and most robust form of human creation ever invented. Can’t we, just maybe, use it for something other than cheap page view grabs and lazy fucking Top Ten lists?

Today I am going to let you in on a little secret:

Someone not liking the thing you like, and having valid reasons for their dislike, in no way limits your ability to enjoy that same thing.

Now, this shouldn’t be a secret. This shouldn’t be a surprise, or even something that anyone hasn’t thought of yet. But I look around at Ye Olde Internets and I see a ton of folk who don’t seem to get this yet.

If I see a thing you like – a video game, movie, comic, book, piece of art, whatever it may be – and I do not enjoy it, that’s fine. I may feel it is sexist, racist, ugly, cheap, and far too green. That does not mean that you can not enjoy it, yourself. It just means I have my valid reasons for not liking it.

And asking for more of what I like, because the stuff out there upsets me, doesn’t mean you can’t have what you like, too. It just means that maybe you can’t only have what you like. That there is room for sharing, and that it isn’t a zero sum game.

But come on, people need to stop acting like anyone having a problem with a thing that is liked somehow invalidates the thing in question. That reaction only shows your own shame and humiliation, honestly. See, when you get all het up about someone calling a thing you like sexist, let’s say, and rush to yell at them angrily, it just manages to tell everyone else that you know it is sexist and are ashamed of the fact you enjoy it anyway. So in your shame you lash out at the person who dared make you think about it in uncomfortable ways.

Grow up, you big baby.

Some things are problematic. Liking them can be an act for a grown-up. I love Mickey Spillane novels but they are racist and sexist. Now a lot of that was the product of the time, and all, but it is still there and still an issue. And it’s a shame. But despite those decently-sized failings, I enjoy his prose and his plots. I also understand when others do not, and why. I am fine for liking it, they are fine for not liking it. But at no point does my enjoyment stop theirs or their lack of enjoyment stop mine.

I don’t get why this is so hard. Why people are so defensive about this stuff. Look, that RPG you love has some problems with the fact that every women depicted is in bullshit “fantasy” armor that doesn’t protect anything and just serves to show off her cartoon tits. It might be a great game, but you have to see how that would be off-putting to other people who don’t appreciate that or who, rightly, wish we could depict women on the same footing as men. Asking that images such as that consider changing lessens your enjoyment how exactly?

No, really, exactly how?

Because if your entire enjoyment of a game is based off that cover art – you are reading this on the internet, go find bad porn instead. If you feel they shouldn’t have to change anything at all ever to accommodate any customer besides you we go right back to it being time for you to grow up. The world is about more than just you. And if this change in no way effects the game, only the packaging, what does it hurt?

It hurts your shame at knowing it’s crappy, knowing it should be changed, but wanting it anyway, because you can’t just own that and seek it elsewhere. Instead you have to spray the walls with it, because if it is literally everywhere then it can’t be a problem. If it was a problem then it wouldn’t be everywhere, see?

Chipping away at it means it is a problem and once you let that sunlight in, you can’t get rid of it and you vampire out into flames.

Too bad, so sad.

Just. Grow. Up.