walking on custard

Low Effort Post

17 Jul 2017

Photo by Tucker Good on Unsplash

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Occasionally I wonder if I should post something of absolutely zero value, in order to demonstrate that it’s okay to do something totally rubbish and with zero effort from time-to-time.

(I think a cynical part of me genuinely sees a possible niche for myself: providing a helpfully low bar for everybody else to clear.)

The moral of this Deliberately Bad Post would be “sometimes it’s okay to just show up” or “even a bad post is better than no post”, or something like that.

But then I think about it, and realise this idea might accidentally have the opposite effect than intended. By definition, my deliberately lazy bad post would be – and this is important to recognise – bad.

And it seems unlikely that anybody is going to look at an awful post and think “wow, that sucks… now I feel inspired!”

I can see how that would be possible in theory, but the truth is that it takes a lot of effort to make a good bad post. It’s like a good-bad film… most bad films are just terrible, while creating something so-bad-its-good requires years of work.

And so I haven’t yet attempted to write a post that’s deliberately* low effort and bad.

This one is just bad because I’m tired.

Honest.

* this is an important distinction

The Moral(s) of this Post

Choose your own:

  • Sometimes it’s okay to just show up
  • Even a bad post is better than no post
  • Pointing out that a post is lazy doesn’t make it not lazy
  • Laziness is fine…
  • … sometimes
  • But it doesn’t matter much anyway
  • We should all relax a bit and take the pressure off ourselves
  • Still, though, I COULD have tried harder
  • Sorry
Neil Hughes

Neil Hughes is the author of Walking on Custard & the Meaning of Life, a comical and useful guide to life with anxiety, and The Shop Before Life, a tale about a magical shop which sells human personality traits.

Along with writing more books, he spends his time on standup comedy, speaking about mental health, computer programming, public speaking and everything from music to video games to languages. He struggles to answer the question "so, what do you do?" and is worried that the honest answer is probably "procrastinate."

He would like it if you said hello.

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