Things to stop doing:

• Stop blaming everyone else for your misfortune. Guilty or not, your resentment has no effect on their lives, and does not enrich your own. “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for someone else to die.”
• Stop trying to disabuse people of their suffering. They love it more than anything else.
• Stop watching so much {insert media here}. It bores me to no end to hear people talk about their most recent streaming service show, going on about it like it somehow enriched their lives. It’s one thing to enjoy entertainment; it’s entirely another to live for it.
• Stop posting so many boring photos. This isn’t about the technical quality of your images, but about their editorial narrative and their originality. Two years ago everyone … e v e r y o n e … was posting a vertical of their kids in front of their house, about to depart for their first day of X grade of the school year. Wow. It would take a scientific device of some sort to measure how little I care about photos like these.
• BOOP! My sister informed me that the last bullet point was invalid because I wrote it from the perspective of  a disinterested/disgruntled photographer, and I should make allowance for people enjoying their own children. But! As a professional photographer, I can say with great certainty that when you follow the latest hot item or trend, your photographs will mirror those events at the expense of the real, genuine expressions you could have made ……. what I meant to express is that when you copy what you saw on the nearest social media page, you fundamentally dilute and delete real content and replace it with someone else’s idea of that content. You change from photographer to stenographer. “These are my children posing as someone else’s children.”

• Stop eating like a four year old. Candy and Pepsi aren’t food.
• Stop adding sh!t to food to make it taste “better.” It’s already food, and the less you do to it, the better it will be for you.
• Stop bringing bad food into your house, especially if you pretend it’s for someone else. “Well, the kids love these Doughnettes, but I might have a few too,” is a sentence from a bad parent. A good parent says, “Here are some apples if you want a snack,” and ignores the whininess that follows, often with, “You’ll eat what I bring home or go hungry.”
• Stop saying that a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is to keep out terrorists or criminals. Since it is inherently indiscriminate, it’s purpose is to keep out brown people. No? There are 1,053,945 Muslims in Canada, but no one is suggesting building a wall there. Why don’t you just admit you hate non-white-people?

I have many more things to list about what not to do, but I thought I’d take a breath. Whew.