A Death to All Neta

I call for a death to all neta, for the benefit of the world at large, and you yourself in particular.

I borrow the term "neta" from the Japanese. Neta can be a story, a photograph, or a concept. Uniting all neta, though, are their worthlessness. If you have finished reading a story and can say, "This story will not affect anything I do now or in the future," then you have absorbed neta. Many well-read blogs such as Boing Boing focus themselves on neta. A focus on some humorous topic, such as monkeys, robots, zombies, or pirates, also has its roots in neta. But neta need not be funny; as long as they are of no use to you, even if they are the most solemn piece of unimaginative fiction, they fall into this category.

What chocolate does to the innards, neta does to the brain. While you enjoy them, neta make you happy; once you are finished, though, you find that an interval has elapsed, and your organs have been bloated with the excess load. If the most valuable thing you can do with your time is catch these tiny, temporary bursts of happiness, only to watch them flutter away, then there is no further reason to live. You know this is not true; so, neta must be disposed of.

Ridding yourself of neta is not something that can happen instantly. Like chocolate, neta is addictive; it calls out to you from its position on the highest shelf in the kitchen. But if you can recognize something to be neta, you can learn to distance yourself from it before you are absorbed.

Reader, your time on this planet is short. You have been placed here in a body of goodly manufacture, the envy of all the lower creatures, and yet I see you sitting still, not knowing what to do. There exist ancient temples towering above the sea of neta, populated by dead and living men who claim to offer you this knowledge if you can acquire the will and effort to approach them. The difference they have from neta is that some of their stories are true.