What are Lists For?

I used to believe in the tidy summaries that listicle headlines promised. Even as I know they’re mostly clickbait, it’s tempting to think I can adopt “3 Proven Formulas” or “Stop Making These 8 Mistakes” and live a perfect and productive life forever after. There’s probably some neuroscientific reason or ad algorithm for why a column of words arranged by category makes me click the link like a lab monkey pulls a lever. Maybe it’s related to the sense of control a To-Do list brings, with less pressure to actually complete the task and check the boxes, but also less satisfaction than when a To-Do list is conquered.

Great Inventions That Transformed Daily Life:

• Chemicals and pharmaceuticals
• Internal combustion engine
• Electricity
• Modern communication
• Urban sanitation (my personal favorite)

The new TV show Forever features list-making as conversation piece. A couple played by Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen amuse themselves by brainstorming out loud about the best way to sit in a chair, or the best way to spend a half hour (their winner: “Eat a large McDonald’s fries in bed, then nap for 25 minutes”). I’m still pondering why their spontaneous list-making seems like their most intimate moments and also evidence for the wife June’s boredom in the relationship.

Things I Stash Everywhere:

• Lip balm
• Earbuds
• Pens (Bic Atlantis retractable or Pilot G-Tec-C)
• Something to read (lifelong compulsion)

One of the first literary listmakers was Sei Shonagon of eleventh-century Japan, a lady-in-waiting whose Pillow Book adds color to the stifling formality and ritual of ancient court life. She jotted down her observations and opinions in a snooty and funny miscellany or “zuihitsu” (ZOO-ee-hee-tsu), where she “followed the [writing] brush” to see where her thoughts would take her. Physically she could not go far at all as a woman of that era, hidden behind standing screens and yards of hair and layers of brocaded silk robes with her empress and the other cloistered ladies. With her brush and paper she could also travel back in time to delightful memories of the empress she served who died in childbirth, “as a way of salvaging Empress Teishi’s sad tale for posterity….As we read, we are always deep inside the moment of experience that comes to us off the page” (writes translator Meredith McKinney) with her lists of “Things that make the heart beat faster”, “Refined and elegant things”, “Games”, ‘Insects”, “Infuriating things” and “Embarrassing things”.

Birds I Like to Watch in My Backyard:

• Downy woodpecker
• Chickadee-dee-dee
• House finch
• Northern flicker
• Magpies when they’re forced to bail out of my tricked-out, upside-down, “clingers only” suet feeder

A list can help structure an argument or a love poem (“Let me count the ways…”), and counting your blessings sounds clichéd but really can help with perspective. The question is, do they limit imagination with the illusion of completeness, or inspire us to add our own items, lengthen the column, or create a counter-list?