5 ways to wash your dishes.
7 less known tips to make your dog happier.
10 unexpected food benefits of avocado.

Lists.

They're everywhere.

They'e the secret sauce of the internet, the sugar in the donut, the juice in the steak and the sting in the wine. And, like all these things, if abused, lists we'll make you feel high and, at the same time, nauseous.

My first big hit as a blogger was a list: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life. It happened almost 10 years ago, when all you needed to get viral was mention on reddit and when digg was making the rules of the game. Out of curiosity, does somebody here even remembers digg? Well, I thought so.

After the success of my first post, I wrote a sequel, 100 Ways To Screw Up Your Life which was also a success, but not as big as the first one. Just 10,000 impressions in the first 24 hours, as opposed to 25,000.

Both posts served as a foundation for my first two books, which are still available on Amazon if you're curious, and which were also translated in Farsi and Korean. And actually printed and published by a Korean publishing house. And actually sold a few thousands copies. Well, those were the days.

Anyways.

The thing is that, during the last 10 years I kinda grew a love and hate relationship with lists. On one side, my blog benefited big time from them, but on the other side, I kinda felt that seeing the world through a "lists-only" lens was making a huge disservice to this wonderful collective hallucination we're calling "reality".

Somewhere in between I can digest them. I can see both the benefits of the disadvantages.

And what better way to go through those than, well, a list?

So, let's see the benefits, first:

1. Quick to digest

Lists are usually bite sized chinks of text, which are giving the reader the impression that the time required to go through the whole content is shorter. And time is a very expensive commodity.

2. The illusion of order

A list will always give this impression of order, because our brains use categorization as one of the primary tools for making sense of the world. So a list will give us the impression of "order in the chaos".

3. The illusion of control

Lists are making it easier to localize ourselves in the current information flow. We're at point 3 and number 4 should come after this. And this "localization" gives us the illusion of controlling the environment.

And now, the disadvantages.

1. They're abused

Because of the above mentioned qualities, lists proliferated way more than I would like to see them around. They're pretty much everywhere and, just like sugar, they give you an illusory high, followed most of the time by a low.

2. They're deceiving (most of the time)

Putting together some pieces of information in a numbered way is much simpler than doing thorough research and crafting beautiful sentences, and yet, we tend to think that people writing lists are smarter. In my experience, that's not always the case.

3. They're limiting

Because we get so addicted to this type of content, we miss out on other, more complex and educative types of content. It's like we're getting a digest of the reality, instead of the full package. And that's limiting.

So, do you have a list to share? Care to write one? About any topic your want.

I'd be curious to look over it.

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Previous posts in the challenge:

• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day One: All Ultramarathons Start With Just One Small Step
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Two: How Much Garbage Do You Carry With You?
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Three: Pushing Things To Happen Versus Letting Them Happen "Through" You
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Four: The Rain In Spain Stays Mainly On The Plain
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Five: Books, Coffee And The Smell Of A Gentle Autumn
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Six: Revisiting The Harry Potter Trees In Turia
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Seven: Sand Castles
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Eight: Be Careful Of New Beginnings
• 30 Days Challenge Fall 2018 - Day Nine: Tuesday's Free Writing

Steem on!

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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