There was a time, not too many years ago, when relationship articles were the hot topic. They still are, but they’re not the hottest topic anymore. In its place is now money and security.
One of my publishers, whose opinions I greatly respect, was talking to me about the kinds of articles that most people are reading these days and we thought that with people so concerned about wanting to meet and marry their soul mate, that they were the articles most people gravitate toward. We were wrong.
I was looking over the stats of the articles that I’ve written over the last four years (over 900 articles) and what I discovered is that relationships, which used to be the prime focus of people, has been steadily losing ground to articles about money.
People are now more concerned about financial security than meeting their soul mate. There is more of a here today, gone tomorrow, way of looking at their lives. And business articles, which used to be a big drawing card, don’t seem to have the same impact that they used to.
Today’s hot topics center around getting money for nothing. People have always been attracted to articles about getting a lot of money without having to work for it, but lately, it’s been almost a mania, as evidenced by all the people who set up gofundme websites. This concept is now called crowdsourcing. I call it panhandling or standing there with a begging bowl in your hands asking strangers for money.
I had heard a story about a lazy, spoiled, twenty-one-year-old girl, who is in excellent health, setting up a gofundme website asking people to donate money so that she can go to Japan on a two-week vacation. The hands out, begging bowl concept, annoyed me so much that I wrote an article about it. And, wouldn’t you know it, but the number of people who read that one article climbed much higher and much faster than most of my other articles.
People take a look at Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and all they can see is the billions of dollars they have and they want to have what those two men have. They don’t see all the hard work that went into accumulating that wealth, nor do they see the kind of hard work they do to sustain their wealth. They just see a lot of money and they think they are entitled to the same riches.
Sad to say, but we’re living in a lazy, selfish, society these days and we’ve lost our moral compass along the way. We need to get back to the things that are really important before our whole society comes crumbling down around us.
Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver.