why i hate pinterest

everybody has told me that it is totally a thing i should be all over. amazing pics of cute stuff, fun ideas, creative ways to keep it all together, and, of course, food porn. seriously, awesome stuff made by awesome people and shared quickly and easily so that everybody can be bowled over.

and i really do get why it's so popular. normal people make things and then pin them. and then some other random somebody sees it and shares it. and it gets repinned and repinned and repinned. and eventually everybody knows what a cool idea it was. before pinterest, if you made something and wanted to share it, you had the regular social media sites, mostly facebook. but then only those people who are friends with you would see your pics and ideas, not the world. or, if you had lots of great ideas, then you could create a blog and share your amazingness that way, and possibly reach many more people.

the thing is, i followed many different blogs by some very amazing people for a very long time. so not only did i get to learn all sorts of fun tricks and tasty recipes, i got to learn about the writer personally. it made things more interesting, because i almost felt like i had a personal connection with them.

and unlike pinterest, it made things more manageable for someone like me. reading blogs takes time, whereas pinterest is like flipping through a magazine and just looking at the pictures. if you like something, you can stop and take a closer look, but otherwise you can keep flipping. it's like sensory overload, too much too fast, and i can't take it all in. you can look at things in different categories, but there are thousands of things in each. or you can only follow what certain people are pinning, and hope they are finding all the interesting things. but then i feel like maybe i'm missing something, so i look at more and more and more. it's too stressful for me like that.

the other thing is, when i would read full blog posts, i would get more than just a simple recipe. there are tricks to cooking, and sometimes little tidbits of information would be stashed in posts that seemed to have nothing to do with that fact. or, though i wasn't interested in the dish they were making, i would read through anyway and might learn a new technique that i could apply to something completely different. if i had just been looking at pictures, i would have flipped past and missed those things.

the biggest reason i hate pinterest, though, is that it makes me feel bad. seriously, there is all this amazing content right there in front of my eyes, and then i looking around at my own life and i just feel so much less creative or clever or talented. whereas when i read a blog for a long time, the authors not only talk about their triumphs, eventually they talk about their failures, which always makes me feel like less of a bumbling mess up.

i know i'm probably missing things by not jumping on the pinterest bandwagon, and by only following a select few blogs regularly. still, for my sanity, i like my way better.