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OPINION

We need to stop listing out our lives, break the order

Amanda's Approach

Of the items listed under "my thing," numbers don't make the cut. If you couldn't tell by the lack of mathematical charts and Excel references on this page, I'm a words kind of gal. I would much rather weave together my points and my perspective on life with a string of delicately-selected words and build them together like a stack of colorful legos than try to fit my life into an equation.

Which is why I'm really starting to grow a distaste for lists - those finite outlines of tightly arranged bits of information that all seem to revolve around numbers. Lists are slowly and subtlety invading our number-obsessed society, putting a limit on our daily interactions and attempting to plot out our futures in an easy ten-step plan.

Don't get me wrong, there are certain places where lists reign: pros and cons, grocery stores, to-dos and Christmas gift ideas you send to your mom.

But lists can't do everything. They can't embody the whole journey of your unique life, the hidden moments, the maid-of-honor speech, the taste of blueberry waffles, the rush of air you feel during an early morning run, the late night conversations with your family around the fireplace.

Those are places where you need words to fill in and form full-fledged ideas. To me, the best aspect of list-making is breaking the order: adding a carton of ice cream to my cart or scrapping my homework in order to grab coffee at Kofenya.

The completely off-the-fly decision to not follow what your list is telling you at all, because something beautifully unplanned is waiting for you. If we didn't have lists, we might not know the thrill of crumpling that post-it note up and tossing it away.

You'll find plenty of quickly digestible factoids in lists, those ones that circulate on Facebook and you scroll through while you should be listening to a lecture, but does it really tell you the whole story?

Lists are all around us and we are becoming more and more conditioned to swap big, bright, complex ideas for short snippets of half-truths.

Suddenly, the entirety of world happenings can be summed in 5 things to know and quick tweet-able nuggets. Sorry kids, that's not journalism.

And when it comes to BuzzFeed's incessant need to tell me "17 reasons why my best friend is neat" or "21 ways to make the coziest cinnamon rolls," I have to roll my eyes. Because BuzzFeed gets it wrong.

There are not enough bullet points in the innards of Microsoft Word to tell me what a conversation with my best friend actually means to me and I'm extremely loyal to my cinnamon roll brand (it's called Pillsbury, what up).

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As we continue to read these lists, share them and nod along to their relatable moments, they force us to start viewing our days, our jobs, our relationships and our most daring aspirations in a small, oversimplified way.

When we continue to view our life events as something to check off, as a quick tagline next to an ascending set of numbers, so much of the in-between kind of experiences get lost.

You start to believe that life can fit into a standardized recipe, instead of a figure-out-as-you-go adventure. And if it's up to me, I vote for the latter, the adventure, every time.

Because lists rely on the certainty of whole numbers and I would rather reside in the infinite fractions of life; I would rather set up camp right there where no scary number, big for small, can reach me.

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