Overrated :: Underrated

Best of Writer Vixen: Originally Posted May 2009

Courtney Martin, over at Crucial Minutiae, put me onto a terrific new blog called Overrated List. The List was inspired by a typically surly and provocative Christopher Hitchens quote in The New Yorker a few years back, in which he declared lobster, champagne, picnics and, um, anal sex “the four most overrated things in life.”

Andrew Marantz, creator of Overrated List, offers the rest of us the chance “to be smart and sassy like Christopher Hitchens, without having to sacrifice your liver or your dignity.” Marantz explains that “overrated things aren’t just bad things. Global warming and impetigo and Cleveland, for instance, would not make the cut, because they were never rated highly in the first place. In fact, most overrated things are good—just not that good, for crying out loud.”

It’s an inspired idea. Unlike Facebook’s “25 Things About Me,”—an exercise in viral narcissism more aptly titled “25 Things We All Wish You’d Kept to Yourself”—your Overrated List opens a revealing window into your world view. Part of it is the enforced brevity. With only four slots available, you have to make choices. And those choices embody telling insights about your personal value system.

The beginning was deceptively easy. For me, the number one overrated thing in life, hands down, is approval. If the only way you can get how truly, madly, deeply wonderful you are lies in securing the approval of others, then you’re wasting your precious time, focus and creative energy. Seriously. You rock. Believe it, live it.

It immediately got harder. I congratulated myself on adding revenge to my list. But on reflection, I had to admit that revenge hasn’t proven the empty experience that I anticipated it would be all those times I talked myself out of it. To be completely honest, on the rare occasion when I’ve indulged the urge it’s actually been quite satisfying. I’m not proud of it (mostly). I’m just saying that I discovered, to my own surprise, that I don’t consider revenge overrated. Homeownership on the other hand? Definitely a double-edged sword.

Next up, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Dancing With the Stars—all the TV shows (and actors) I used to like back when they were fresh and interesting. I realized that while there are many, many—oh so many—overrated shows and celebrities, Oprah is by far the big kahuna of them all. She embodies all the reasons that people like Jennifer Lopez and Ashton Kutcher are overrated, and adds many more reasons of her own. For all of her wonderful qualities, Oprah has become an object lesson in the perils of believing your own heady press. Final tally: Desperate Housewives out, Oprah in. 

One spot left. This was tricky. I seriously considered adding marriage, an idea that’s great in theory but wildly overrated in actual practice. My musings finally led me to strike it in favor of all conventional wisdom in general. In fact, I ultimately decided that conventional wisdom may, in fact, be the single most highly overrated thing on the planet. It's true: nobody really knows anything to an absolute certainty. And just because everyone chooses to agree on things that no one completely understands (economic recovery, anyone?) doesn’t make everyone right, just loud. As Lily Tomlin acidly observed, “Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.”

So here’s my final Overrated List in descending order:

1. Conventional wisdom
2. Approval
3. Oprah
4. Homeownership

In the same spirit, my Underrated List is the top four things I enjoy, which I think others fail to fully appreciate:

1. Solitude
2. Voting
3. Fast food
4. Gossip (that’s right, I said it)

But that's another article for another time. What's on your Overrated/Underrated lists?

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Twittering vixenish things @WriterVixen