For those of you who do not frequent Facebook, (I have no idea how you found my article otherwise, but snaps to you for that) the Thought Catalog is a website with an archive of about 40,000 articles and almost 9,000 different writers striving to reach its goals of creating dialogue and believing that “all thinking is relevant.”
I hate that stupid website.
I’ll admit, its ideals are great. Clutter-free, entertaining and fun journalism? Awesome. The way the majority of the most popular articles are executed on the site? Horrific.
Much like The Odyssey, the site focuses on relatable content and clickbait, which means being able to get people to click on links from social media or other sites to get them to fall down the rabbit hole and read articles for hours. I see no real issue with any of that as I’m an advertising major. I love stuff that makes people look at ads, because if people don’t look at ads I will not be employed one day.
My problem with the Thought Catalog goes beyond the way the website works. It's the content that becomes so popular on the site, the stuff that gets endlessly shared and the stuff that we as consumers share ourselves on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else that makes me irate. The fact is the content we’re given to share may be relatable or nostalgic, but a lot of these articles also give us something to feel bad about as a millennial generation - and offer no solutions to the problems we apparently face.
The current most popular article is “This Is How We Date Now” by Jaime Varon. The piece is a manifesto of how terrible 20 somethings’ love lives are, it reads like a seventh grade English assignment asking you to use descriptive language. It tells us that our romantic relationships have been destroyed by technology, leaving us sharing the highlights of a relationship or completely unwilling to commit to one. It offers no new outlook of how to change your fate from living through this emotional turmoil, it just describes it. It so perfectly pulls at your heartstrings and leads you right to a little tab to share the article to your Facebook page.
What this article is telling you is that you should feel bad about dooming your own relationship by sharing everything about it with all of your Facebook friends, and the reason your last relationship ended is because you were too idealistic about it, and in the end all we want is a relationship we don’t need validated on the number of likes that #mcm or #wcw picture gets, but hey, you should totally share this sob story with all your friends.
An article like this has 3.2 million shares and counting. That alone means that at least 3.2 million read this, related to it, saw a reflection of themselves somewhere in it and decided to share that shard of relatable content with their Facebook friends. 3.2 million people read this explosion of adjectives and woes of the new social media age and were given zero solutions.
As a regular writer for The Odyssey, I hate the Thought Catalog. At least when I write relationship-type columns and break out my best Carrie Bradshaw-esque musings, I try and offer a solution to the people experiencing relationship problems. I try and tell people what they’re feeling is valid and if they don’t like it, here’s a way to help. The Thought Catalog’s articles, at least the ones I’ve decided to click on, rarely offer a speckle of hope for any change in your social life or relationships.
Basically, if you’re going to make people feel terrible because Facebook stole their boyfriend, at least give them some advice so it doesn’t happen again, do some decent journalism next time, not something that sounds like a 13 year old’s language arts assignment on descriptive language.
