I hate lists. I’m talking about the list that fits the mold of “92 YouTube videos to get you through an entire work day without accomplishing anything.” A quick glance at my Twitter feed shows three of these monstrosities, including “220 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website & Increase Your Business,” “30 pianos around London for impromptu singalongs” and “40 Great Adobe AIR Applications for Designers and Developers.” Lists are the blogger’s quick substitute for creativity. They undermine the whole point of learning and they destroy family vacations. In that order.

There’s no blogging without a degree of hypocrisy and so I’ll openly admit that I wrote a list once and posted it on another blog I write for (the post was a list of blogging tips). I was lazy and needed to pump something out on a time crunch. The list didn’t have any credibility to it. I had never even tried a couple of the things I was suggesting. It was pointless and idiotic. And then the post got a bunch of pageviews – more than a slew of other posts that I considered more substantive. And because of that, I felt pointless and idiotic. I feel a sense of pity and maybe loathing for a generation of web users (myself included) that cannot identify the difference between quality and crap online, choosing to associate/confuse quality with lists, how-tos, and all the templated garbage that people can spit out without an ounce of thought or research.

Do you really read a list as if you’re trying to memorize it or learn from it? Like with most content online, we’ve learned to scroll the text with our eyes. The brain’s doing nothing with the message. The synapses don’t even have to fire, it’s that worthless.

Lists are a distraction. The writers are merely banking on the fact that your desire for entertainment will trump your desire to learn. I would take a two-item list with enough substance for me to actually learn something over any half-baked list that proves only that the writer can count past the number 20.

Lists have one redeeming factor. They provided me with the contrast needed to enjoy great vacations today. Let me explain.

Lists turned my childhood family vacations into multi-day exercises in impatience and downright malice. My mom has many virtues, but one paradigm she lived by was the need to “check things off the list.” Our family vacations were always structured that way. Mom knew what “tourists see” in any give place and that became her list. (By the way, don’t ever plan a trip in such a way that your kids  conclude that your tastes and preferences are just a carbon copy of TripAdvisor). Our vacation schedule would become so tightly packed with checklist items that she would forget to factor in meals, delays, and fatigue. That is not a vacation. That is a recipe for disaster.

Today, I love to travel. In my married life, I’ve learned how to vacation enjoyably merely by looking at what my family did and doing it differently. I’ll write more about this later. In essence, my vacations have a higher ratio of “exploration time” (with a lower ratio of checklist items). I owe that to lists.