Thing #7

I signed up for Pinterest a couple of years ago and, like many others, have spent countless pleasant hours creating boards, pinning, and liking other people's pins. I find Pinterest to be a wonderful method for storing visual information. I much prefer it to clipping pictures and articles out of magazines or the newspaper. As a kid, I constructed a monthly bulletin board in my bedroom so Pinterest was made for me. I personally have 42 boards, 1,197 pins, and 1,809 likes. Those numbers actually surprise me. I would probably have said I have a dozen boards. My boards run the gamut from art to holiday ideas to a board collecting tiny house pictures.

One of the main complaints about pinning as an activity is that it's simply too easy to lose time. You start scrolling and suddenly an hour or two has passed. This isn't a criticism of the app, of course. It's actually a remark on how powerful an activity it is. The other criticism I hear is that Pinterest creates envy and depression. All those pretty pictures make people feel bad about what they don't have and don't do. I think this is a component, of course, but carefully choosing what you view and why you view it helps alleviate those feelings. It's interesting to me that "pinning" has all these emotional repercussions.

I mostly use Pinterest on my laptop, but I like having the option of the app on my phone. It functions as a backup if I have a few minutes to spend looking.