End of year summations

Like Rob Ford, it’s time for Top Ten lists to hit the road. (Photo by Amin Helal)

It’s the beginning of 2014, which means it’s the beginning for the 2013 “wrap up” lists that every site has become so fond of since the internet became high speed. Now, there are a lot of things I look forward to at the end and beginning of the year: New Year’s resolutions, watching my friends make up excuses as to why they couldn’t keep their New Year’s resolution. These lists are not one of them, and here’s why.

1. We know already

Maybe I’m jaded from the fact that I follow the news through my Twitter feed, but there has yet to be a single list of “Big Events” or “Disasters” that has put anything that wasn’t common knowledge on the list. Perhaps if there were secret events, this sort of list could be interesting. If everything on your list was in the news for a week, I don’t need to hear about it again.

2. You’re doing it wrong

I know that it’s fun to make fun of celebrities, but when your list of “Worst things to happen in 2013” ends with Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke attempting to ‘twerk’, we have a set of priorities that are a little off. As much as she came in like a wrecking ball and makes all of us feel a little uncomfortable, I don’t think her absolute butchering of the thing previously known as ‘dancing’ was worth being ranked above anything.

3. The market is over-saturated

I do research for my articles. When I googled ‘List of Worst Things in 2013’, I got 964,000,000 results. I personally don’t think that there needs to be a single list for one out of every seven people. There are 2,360,000,000 results for the ‘List of Best Things in 2013’, so at least we are optimistic about it.

4. You tend to repeat the answers, but worded differently

5. You don’t put the right things on your list

This one refers specifically to the Huffington Post. I read a good amount of these ‘end of year’ lists to remind myself how much I loathe them. On that trek, I found the list of “10 Good Things to Happen in 2013” by the Post. Everything was going very well on this list until number 10 (I wish I were joking here) was the fact that Uruguay legalized pot. This was ranked above the news that cancer death rates are down 20 per cent from 1990.

There are a lot of things wrong with these lists, they are a pandering to an easy-to-read format that we have all grown to love. They were fun for a while, but at a point, like Rob Ford, they have to go.