Think? Or pretty?

# Chapter 88

Seth Godin: If we only forward the easy, short and funny things we read online, why are we surprised that our inbox is filled with nothing we’ll remember tomorrow? What would happened if instead, we shared the most complex, useful and thoughtful things we discovered instead?

I get far too many cutsie emails and forwards from too many people. I don’t respond to these kinds of emails. I don’t forward these on to other people and pollute their email inboxes. And some events happen automatically, like facebook reposting my video 10 times yesterday. That was not a particularly cutsie email or video, but what if I had shared something amazing instead of merely pretty? What if I had written a thought-provoking blog or challenging piece that made people think, instead of being merely pretty?

It gets worse. What this actually reveals is that few of us stay in the realm of complex, useful and thoughtful, which is a more important issue honestly. It means that we are bored and so we send cat videos and emails. It means that we are mentally lazy and so we forward emails about spectacular ways to die. We don’t care enough to change the world (the complex useful and thoughtful) and so we watch YouTube vids all day. We are just obsessed with entertaining ourselves instead of doing something that matters, and if you or I arrogantly sit here and think that we never do this, then we can check our inbox and see how many frivolous emails and entertainment emails we have resting in there.

Here is the deal, lets live in the world of the complex and useful and thoughtful and leave the world of entertainment behind.