Headline: Nothing Belongs to You
I clicked on this headline because it was a topic I was trying to understand more about. For the longest time I’ve had a vague understanding of Buddhism and how people must feel better thinking things like this, but I felt like I was missing something along the way. I was on Pinterest browsing my homepage and I saw some Buddhist quote which presented me with a bunch of similar results after I clicked on it, where I saw the statement “nothing and no one belongs to you”. I grasped the concept, that people are better off not feeling like they own anything because what they experience is only a fleeting feeling in time- but I wanted to understand it thoroughly enough to implement that understanding into my life. So I searched the same quote, “nothing and no one belongs to you” and this was the second result, a 10 minute long article seemingly breaking down the idea. I clicked this one in specific because it had the quote within the title and the article preview displayed some text that fit how I understood this concept. I likely wouldn’t have clicked on the article if that quote wasn’t in the headline even if the preview said the same thing, because I wouldn’t have known if the point of the article was even about this concept. However, because the preview showed that and the headline was simply what I was trying to understand I decided to give it a try. Taking a step back to see the whole process, I had been passively interested in a concept I had heard about which I was reminded of online, I searched the text that I read and this article detailing it was one of the top results for that query. With this scenario in mind, you can see the importance of a headline for a casual question context- something most people do at least once a day. If this headline wasn’t direct enough about the quote, I was trying to understand any viewer in my situation would scroll past it. This demonstrates how quickly you need to grab someone’s attention, the most common search queries for the average person happen without them even putting thought into specifics about the headline, its whatever can get them to their answer as quickly as possible.
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