Over the past two years, as so many have been starting an AI newsletter on Substack or hanging out a shingle on LinkedIn as AI keynote speakers, AI thought leaders, and AI consultants, I have been grappling with the fact that I no longer find much satisfaction in my job as an ed-tech bureaucrat. I have been exploring what might come next through writing on Substack and talking with colleagues in the ed-tech biz. At one point, I put "thought leader" on my resume, but it didn't feel like me.
When I wrote my goodbye letter last week, telling friends and colleagues that I was leaving my job, I said I was leaving to be a writer. It seems to me that in a moment when "creatives" start using cultural tools that efficiently produce averageness, inefficiently grappling with complicated ideas to writing down insights that are not average will become more culturally important, and maybe even more economically valuable. I recognize that my biases all point me to this conclusion.
This essay made me feel less alone in my hopes that being writer, not thought leader, not podcaster, not video influencer, is something worth doing and that writing books and long-form essays offers something important that other forms of culture do not.
For what it's worth, I was drawn to your work because I saw someone who was working from the position of an "explorer" rather than a "thought leader" and that distinction is meaningful to me. An explorer is someone who can help me better understand my own view by showing me things of interest, or presenting ideas I wouldn't have considered. A thought leader is trying to convince me that they're right. The thing that kills me about all those LinkedIn AI thought leaders is that we know so little about the implications of this technology. Anyone who says they know how to integrate AI into education right now is lying either to themselves or others. This is an active, ongoing question that needs much much more exploration.
I hope your point about "not average" insights becoming more important is true. That's essentially where I plant my flag in the concluding parts of my book. I do think there's audiences that crave those things, even if we've been alienated from them. What I worry about is whether or not we're going to give those values space inside of our educational institutions, and if one can actually make a living inside our economic structures doing that kind of work. This is one of the reasons I'd love to see a "rebundling" of writing where we don't have to be entrepreneurs to be able to spend time doing this "inefficient grappling."
As is often the case, your reply helps clarifies something I was reaching toward. Writing as exploration is what I aim to do and that purpose is distinct from persuasion.
On the economic structures, one hopeful half-thought that bounces around my head sometimes is that Substack might become be a place where the surplus generated by successful entrepreneurs who build a business out of engagement with print goes to others on the platform working the same territory. If, and its a big if, Substack limits it take to 10%, that leaves a lot on the table for the Henry Olivers of the world to share. People like Noah Smith or Max Read who are cranking out essays because posting often is the key to user growth, may want to hire writers at a living wage to keep things going at the pace they need, or editors to keep their quality high.
It will be interesting to see how the platform and market it makes possible develop. I don't know if the more writers that come increases the chances you'll find a reader or if there's a diluting aspect, and we're fighting over a an audience that isn't growing as quickly as the amount of writing that's being provided.
Just hopping in to say I really appreciated this point: "inefficiently grappling with complicated ideas to writing down insights that are not average will become more culturally important, and maybe even more economically valuable."
A lot of gratitude for you expressing this notion.
Such a thoughtful and nuanced post and I thank you for it. I havenโt read Coates book yet so Iโll refrain from commenting on it (as well as the interview), but this idea of โthought leaderโ is becoming pervasive and social media has certainly tipped toward honoring that over writers. Prose bytes have become the currency of whichever Information Age we are in (Iโve lost track), but Iโm not without self-recognition that I will likely restack this with a pull quote. I want people to read your entire post, yet I know that many will just read the quote, tell themselves they agree, hit โlikeโ and move on. I know that will happen because I do it too. We can only read so much in a dayโI get it. But what are we relinquishing once we determine someone is a thought leader? Do we need to be led in thought? I think there are multiple reasons why someone might want to be, and digging into that might be where we find the true mess of all of this.
Very worthwhile questions to wrestle with that resonate with me. Sometimes I do find myself outsourcing my opinion to people who have built up trust because I don't want to spend the time, or don't have the time to do the work myself. Some of that is inevitable, but when it's coming from those small bites of information, what does that do to my capacity to think for myself over time? You've got me thinking that maybe some of it is the fact that we're bombarded with so much information now, and we're expected to have thoughts about so many things, we have to outsource some of it. Maybe it's okay to just be ignorant on some things, rather than having to find a way to take a position on everything? I don't know. You've made me think!
Really enjoyed this piece. I don't know if I see a substantive difference between "thought leaders"/internet personalities and Instagram/TikTok influencers. Both categories of people measure success through money and follower counts. A writer, to my mind, finds success through excelling in their craft. (Money and readers are not unwanted, of course, but they are not the primary goal -- they should not shape and direct the art.)
An influencer/thought leader is more concerned with how *they* are perceived, whereas a writer is more interested in how their *work* is perceived. A good example of this difference (outside of your Coates observation) is the recent NY Times interview with Sally Rooney. The interviewer was clearly more interested in positioning Rooney as more of a literary "influencer" rather than what she is -- a writer -- and as a result spent more time on personal questions rather than diving into a discussion of her new book. Rooney, to her credit, was resistant to that.
Substack (like LinkedIn) is full of these aspiring thought leaders. Anyone can become one.
All you have to do is write in short, choppy sentences.
Like this.
And make authoritative statements that seem really profound.
But they're not.
Anyway. The most interesting Substacks (and the only ones I subscribe to) are from people focusing on writing, not on building their personalities.
I LOL'd at your thought leader style example. That's a good example of the Rooney interview. As the audience, I was frustrated by it because it wasn't eliciting anything interesting about what's most interesting (to me), her books! It treated her like a personality, which she isn't. She only shows up when it's time to promote a book. Coates is the same way.
I will give a bit more credit to the motives of some who qualify as thought leaders. I think MattY, D. Brooks, etc...do really want to shape thoughts, primarily the thoughts of people who are close to the levers of power. They are read by those audiences, and I think that's very meaningful to those thought leaders. This also begets money and attention, so everything is working in sync, but I think their motives are sincere in terms of pursuing "thought leadership."
One of the dangers of becoming a thought leader is that there's an expectation that you always have something to say. When I write, I sometimes have something to say, and occasionally it's interesting, but when I don't, I just don't write about the topic. Sometimes I wonder if David Brooks gets caught in his own tidy narratives because he just doesn't have all that much to say - but he can't stop talking.
Agree with this, and it very much applies to Yglesias, tooโas I find his writing on some topics really insightful, but when he steps into education policy, yikes.
It feels like there should be a distinction (at least in practice) between those who are facilitating conversation in a specific area versus "the generalists" who speak to pretty much every topicโand in doing so really water down the substance and depth they, or anyone else, can really aspire to. (Case in point, Brooks.)
I think that is all too common with people who get paid to write about their opinions. It can be increasingly painful to watch them trying to fill space week after week.
Totally agree. When one becomes a thought leader it becomes tempting to see everything as your lane, rather than sticking to topics where you have something meaningful to say. It's not that you can't expand your lane over time, but it's a process, not like throwing a switch. It's like the professional sports talking heads who are required to have "takes" on every sport all the time. But they're not truly knowledgeable about every sport they're expected to cover. We used to hear much more from beat writers who were immersed in a team or sport. The demand for content has given rise to the generalist who is happy to talk about everything, whether they know what they're talking about or not.
Wonderfully said. Thank you for this, John -- it hits home with what my wife (writer) and I (singer/songwriter) are grappling with. For the first time in the streaming and social media era, I'm giving my new record a big promotional push. (The last record I pushed hard was in 2001 -- the next two, I just promoted regionally.) My goodness, it is a disheartening experience.
I met with a publicist who has a good track record with artists a rung or three above me on the ladder of recognition. I explained my story -- I got attention and good reviews in the early 2000s when I hopped off the treadmill, got my PhD, and began a career in academia. I continued to write and release records, and now I work part-time and am ready to promote my music more widely.
Her response: "No one gives a shit. Everyone's got a story." She went on to explain that my best hopes for success would be to become....an internet personality. "Be the guy who always posts to Tiktok with a parrot on his shoulder. You'll get a following and some of those people will find your music." She openly mocked my goal of getting reviews from old-school blogs and websites as a waste of time even though that's exactly what she charges her clients for. That's just one opinion, of course, but it's shared by many other musicians and industry professionals who advice I've read online. The recommended strategies for garnering social media followers also applies to streaming: you buy followers, listeners, and playlist placements, and then brag to the world that you have 10,000 followers even when no one comes to your local shows (I know a band that does this and they are Trumpian in their dishonest promotion).
I suspect my wife will face the same things when her agent lands her new novel with a publisher. We're happy to work hard to promote our work, but we're not willing to become cartoon characters in order to succeed in this new world. I'm so proud of my new record as it's the best thing I've done and I want people to hear it, but we'll never own a parrot.
That experience you relate with the publicist is pretty grim. I considered hiring an outside publicist for my next book, but the combination of expense and fear that I wouldn't want to do the things I'd be expected to do made me back off even pursuing it. I don't know if that's a kind of fear of extending myself to achieve more success or a self-protective instinct built on past experience. It sounds like the respect you have for your own efforts makes it impossible to turn yourself into that cartoon character. We should see that as integrity, IMO.
I THINK ABOUT THIS ALL THE TIME. I tried being a kind of thought leader for awhile (how we virtually met via my blog) but it really burned me out. Then I got long covid. Or maybe I got long covid because I was already so burned out? Or maybe I just got old? Who knows. My brain does not fire on all thrusters anymore, and I cannot imagine summoning up the mental energy to both write a book AND start a podcast/Insta Book Club/Substack/TikTok/business as speaker or consultant/etc. Plus (until I can retire) be a good teacher and departmental citizen. I watched this talk by Ed Yong yesterday, and it really resonated with me. It's worth the half hour you'll spend listening. It's about trying to do good work in terrible times. "There's a voice inside of me that's saying, You should be doing more, you should be helping. You're wasting your skills, your chances. You're not seizing the moment. You'll disappear. You'll be irrelevant. But I have listened to those instincts for many, many years, and I have achieved every professional accolade that I ever could have dreamed of and more--and it completely broke me." https://youtu.be/ddy5uMdzZB8?si=WCamakoJpbPf09mD Thank you for talking about this topic, John.
Knowing you, your core orientation as "teacher" is ultimately incompatible with thought leader, at least the kind of teacher you want to be for students. Appreciate the link, I'll definitely check it out.
John, this comment gets *right to the heart* of what you're talking about. The best teachers I ever had never told me what to think; instead, they taught me how to wonder and encouraged me to decide what I thought was worth wondering about. Thank you for articulating what I haven't been able to name until now.
Youโre not a grump. โThought leaderโ makes me cringe. Way too much ego without necessarily doing the work. Go to school, do the work, make an honest contribution to something, have real life experience, and then I may be interested in what youโre thinking. These days, too many folks just want to be a โstarโ
This is an excellent piece. I feel like Thought Leader is a good description of something I need less of in my life. The Taylor Lorenz example is apt. I tried to root for her but what happened was she lied to her editors at the Washington Post. She was going to lose her job so she is now on this reinvention tour. Being a Thought Leader seems to be about never saying youโre sorry or admitting a mistake. While I agree Matt Y has had some interesting โtakesโ he also has had many bad ones which he conveniently deletes from X/Twitter. I just canโt trust people like that. And yet these types of characters are often the most successful.
I enjoyed the People link to scary Halloween stories. I can vouch for Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia although it wasnโt TOO scary. Just a fascinating look at an aspect of Mexico I knew little about.
For wimps who just want cozy Halloween stories (mostly romance), People did another list:
I love this essay. For me, in addition to raising the question "What is writing for?", you raise the corollary issue, "What is *reading* for?" Because increasingly it seems that people aren't sure. The growth of the "thought leader" is, I think, paralleled by the growth of people who don't want to be asked to read deeply. The game these days seems more about writing that *tells* us what to think rather *asking* us to think. Maybe that isn't new; in fact, I suspect that it probably isn't. But the writers that most interest me have always been the ones who are honestly trying to improve our questions.
I can't put it any better than Rainer Maria Rilke did: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Thanks for your integrity, John. I am very much not an online type of person so I mostly stay away from these "thought leader" type people but occasionally a kerfuffle bubbles up to the point that I hear about it. I really appreciate you putting these concepts into a useful framework.
Good, timely essay, John, many thanks. When I was younger, because I KNOW y'all are dying to hear about my childhood, I thought I wanted to be a thought leader, though we didn't have that phrase, and the Internet didn't exist yet in its present form. Now I understand that it's way too much work and would cut into the time I would rather use for other things, such as reading, or watching videos of Himalayan marmots (OMGWTFBBQ, the cutest things on the planet, and another reason to be grateful for the internet). Then in high school and for some years afterwards, I thought I wanted to be a writer, but, again, it turned out to be a lot more work than it seemed at first. I'm hoping that being on Substack will help me work out these unrealized (misdirected?) desires relatively painlessly. For that I have you and an old friend who is also here with her blog, to thank.
I share your outrage (Brooks!!!) and your concern. I value what you do here this week, and how much we learn from you.
Over the past two years, as so many have been starting an AI newsletter on Substack or hanging out a shingle on LinkedIn as AI keynote speakers, AI thought leaders, and AI consultants, I have been grappling with the fact that I no longer find much satisfaction in my job as an ed-tech bureaucrat. I have been exploring what might come next through writing on Substack and talking with colleagues in the ed-tech biz. At one point, I put "thought leader" on my resume, but it didn't feel like me.
When I wrote my goodbye letter last week, telling friends and colleagues that I was leaving my job, I said I was leaving to be a writer. It seems to me that in a moment when "creatives" start using cultural tools that efficiently produce averageness, inefficiently grappling with complicated ideas to writing down insights that are not average will become more culturally important, and maybe even more economically valuable. I recognize that my biases all point me to this conclusion.
This essay made me feel less alone in my hopes that being writer, not thought leader, not podcaster, not video influencer, is something worth doing and that writing books and long-form essays offers something important that other forms of culture do not.
For what it's worth, I was drawn to your work because I saw someone who was working from the position of an "explorer" rather than a "thought leader" and that distinction is meaningful to me. An explorer is someone who can help me better understand my own view by showing me things of interest, or presenting ideas I wouldn't have considered. A thought leader is trying to convince me that they're right. The thing that kills me about all those LinkedIn AI thought leaders is that we know so little about the implications of this technology. Anyone who says they know how to integrate AI into education right now is lying either to themselves or others. This is an active, ongoing question that needs much much more exploration.
I hope your point about "not average" insights becoming more important is true. That's essentially where I plant my flag in the concluding parts of my book. I do think there's audiences that crave those things, even if we've been alienated from them. What I worry about is whether or not we're going to give those values space inside of our educational institutions, and if one can actually make a living inside our economic structures doing that kind of work. This is one of the reasons I'd love to see a "rebundling" of writing where we don't have to be entrepreneurs to be able to spend time doing this "inefficient grappling."
As is often the case, your reply helps clarifies something I was reaching toward. Writing as exploration is what I aim to do and that purpose is distinct from persuasion.
On the economic structures, one hopeful half-thought that bounces around my head sometimes is that Substack might become be a place where the surplus generated by successful entrepreneurs who build a business out of engagement with print goes to others on the platform working the same territory. If, and its a big if, Substack limits it take to 10%, that leaves a lot on the table for the Henry Olivers of the world to share. People like Noah Smith or Max Read who are cranking out essays because posting often is the key to user growth, may want to hire writers at a living wage to keep things going at the pace they need, or editors to keep their quality high.
It will be interesting to see how the platform and market it makes possible develop. I don't know if the more writers that come increases the chances you'll find a reader or if there's a diluting aspect, and we're fighting over a an audience that isn't growing as quickly as the amount of writing that's being provided.
Just hopping in to say I really appreciated this point: "inefficiently grappling with complicated ideas to writing down insights that are not average will become more culturally important, and maybe even more economically valuable."
A lot of gratitude for you expressing this notion.
Such a thoughtful and nuanced post and I thank you for it. I havenโt read Coates book yet so Iโll refrain from commenting on it (as well as the interview), but this idea of โthought leaderโ is becoming pervasive and social media has certainly tipped toward honoring that over writers. Prose bytes have become the currency of whichever Information Age we are in (Iโve lost track), but Iโm not without self-recognition that I will likely restack this with a pull quote. I want people to read your entire post, yet I know that many will just read the quote, tell themselves they agree, hit โlikeโ and move on. I know that will happen because I do it too. We can only read so much in a dayโI get it. But what are we relinquishing once we determine someone is a thought leader? Do we need to be led in thought? I think there are multiple reasons why someone might want to be, and digging into that might be where we find the true mess of all of this.
Very worthwhile questions to wrestle with that resonate with me. Sometimes I do find myself outsourcing my opinion to people who have built up trust because I don't want to spend the time, or don't have the time to do the work myself. Some of that is inevitable, but when it's coming from those small bites of information, what does that do to my capacity to think for myself over time? You've got me thinking that maybe some of it is the fact that we're bombarded with so much information now, and we're expected to have thoughts about so many things, we have to outsource some of it. Maybe it's okay to just be ignorant on some things, rather than having to find a way to take a position on everything? I don't know. You've made me think!
I like the framing of โoutsourcingโโI appreciate the dialogue!
Really enjoyed this piece. I don't know if I see a substantive difference between "thought leaders"/internet personalities and Instagram/TikTok influencers. Both categories of people measure success through money and follower counts. A writer, to my mind, finds success through excelling in their craft. (Money and readers are not unwanted, of course, but they are not the primary goal -- they should not shape and direct the art.)
An influencer/thought leader is more concerned with how *they* are perceived, whereas a writer is more interested in how their *work* is perceived. A good example of this difference (outside of your Coates observation) is the recent NY Times interview with Sally Rooney. The interviewer was clearly more interested in positioning Rooney as more of a literary "influencer" rather than what she is -- a writer -- and as a result spent more time on personal questions rather than diving into a discussion of her new book. Rooney, to her credit, was resistant to that.
Substack (like LinkedIn) is full of these aspiring thought leaders. Anyone can become one.
All you have to do is write in short, choppy sentences.
Like this.
And make authoritative statements that seem really profound.
But they're not.
Anyway. The most interesting Substacks (and the only ones I subscribe to) are from people focusing on writing, not on building their personalities.
I LOL'd at your thought leader style example. That's a good example of the Rooney interview. As the audience, I was frustrated by it because it wasn't eliciting anything interesting about what's most interesting (to me), her books! It treated her like a personality, which she isn't. She only shows up when it's time to promote a book. Coates is the same way.
I will give a bit more credit to the motives of some who qualify as thought leaders. I think MattY, D. Brooks, etc...do really want to shape thoughts, primarily the thoughts of people who are close to the levers of power. They are read by those audiences, and I think that's very meaningful to those thought leaders. This also begets money and attention, so everything is working in sync, but I think their motives are sincere in terms of pursuing "thought leadership."
The Ezra Klein interview with Coates in NYT from this past Friday is a good confab between two people who clearly respect one another's thinking.
Thanks. I will have to check that out.
Thanks for the nudge. I have it queued up, but I was wondering if it made more sense to wait until I read the book.
One of the dangers of becoming a thought leader is that there's an expectation that you always have something to say. When I write, I sometimes have something to say, and occasionally it's interesting, but when I don't, I just don't write about the topic. Sometimes I wonder if David Brooks gets caught in his own tidy narratives because he just doesn't have all that much to say - but he can't stop talking.
Agree with this, and it very much applies to Yglesias, tooโas I find his writing on some topics really insightful, but when he steps into education policy, yikes.
It feels like there should be a distinction (at least in practice) between those who are facilitating conversation in a specific area versus "the generalists" who speak to pretty much every topicโand in doing so really water down the substance and depth they, or anyone else, can really aspire to. (Case in point, Brooks.)
I think that is all too common with people who get paid to write about their opinions. It can be increasingly painful to watch them trying to fill space week after week.
Totally agree. When one becomes a thought leader it becomes tempting to see everything as your lane, rather than sticking to topics where you have something meaningful to say. It's not that you can't expand your lane over time, but it's a process, not like throwing a switch. It's like the professional sports talking heads who are required to have "takes" on every sport all the time. But they're not truly knowledgeable about every sport they're expected to cover. We used to hear much more from beat writers who were immersed in a team or sport. The demand for content has given rise to the generalist who is happy to talk about everything, whether they know what they're talking about or not.
Wonderfully said. Thank you for this, John -- it hits home with what my wife (writer) and I (singer/songwriter) are grappling with. For the first time in the streaming and social media era, I'm giving my new record a big promotional push. (The last record I pushed hard was in 2001 -- the next two, I just promoted regionally.) My goodness, it is a disheartening experience.
I met with a publicist who has a good track record with artists a rung or three above me on the ladder of recognition. I explained my story -- I got attention and good reviews in the early 2000s when I hopped off the treadmill, got my PhD, and began a career in academia. I continued to write and release records, and now I work part-time and am ready to promote my music more widely.
Her response: "No one gives a shit. Everyone's got a story." She went on to explain that my best hopes for success would be to become....an internet personality. "Be the guy who always posts to Tiktok with a parrot on his shoulder. You'll get a following and some of those people will find your music." She openly mocked my goal of getting reviews from old-school blogs and websites as a waste of time even though that's exactly what she charges her clients for. That's just one opinion, of course, but it's shared by many other musicians and industry professionals who advice I've read online. The recommended strategies for garnering social media followers also applies to streaming: you buy followers, listeners, and playlist placements, and then brag to the world that you have 10,000 followers even when no one comes to your local shows (I know a band that does this and they are Trumpian in their dishonest promotion).
I suspect my wife will face the same things when her agent lands her new novel with a publisher. We're happy to work hard to promote our work, but we're not willing to become cartoon characters in order to succeed in this new world. I'm so proud of my new record as it's the best thing I've done and I want people to hear it, but we'll never own a parrot.
That experience you relate with the publicist is pretty grim. I considered hiring an outside publicist for my next book, but the combination of expense and fear that I wouldn't want to do the things I'd be expected to do made me back off even pursuing it. I don't know if that's a kind of fear of extending myself to achieve more success or a self-protective instinct built on past experience. It sounds like the respect you have for your own efforts makes it impossible to turn yourself into that cartoon character. We should see that as integrity, IMO.
I THINK ABOUT THIS ALL THE TIME. I tried being a kind of thought leader for awhile (how we virtually met via my blog) but it really burned me out. Then I got long covid. Or maybe I got long covid because I was already so burned out? Or maybe I just got old? Who knows. My brain does not fire on all thrusters anymore, and I cannot imagine summoning up the mental energy to both write a book AND start a podcast/Insta Book Club/Substack/TikTok/business as speaker or consultant/etc. Plus (until I can retire) be a good teacher and departmental citizen. I watched this talk by Ed Yong yesterday, and it really resonated with me. It's worth the half hour you'll spend listening. It's about trying to do good work in terrible times. "There's a voice inside of me that's saying, You should be doing more, you should be helping. You're wasting your skills, your chances. You're not seizing the moment. You'll disappear. You'll be irrelevant. But I have listened to those instincts for many, many years, and I have achieved every professional accolade that I ever could have dreamed of and more--and it completely broke me." https://youtu.be/ddy5uMdzZB8?si=WCamakoJpbPf09mD Thank you for talking about this topic, John.
Knowing you, your core orientation as "teacher" is ultimately incompatible with thought leader, at least the kind of teacher you want to be for students. Appreciate the link, I'll definitely check it out.
John, this comment gets *right to the heart* of what you're talking about. The best teachers I ever had never told me what to think; instead, they taught me how to wonder and encouraged me to decide what I thought was worth wondering about. Thank you for articulating what I haven't been able to name until now.
Youโre not a grump. โThought leaderโ makes me cringe. Way too much ego without necessarily doing the work. Go to school, do the work, make an honest contribution to something, have real life experience, and then I may be interested in what youโre thinking. These days, too many folks just want to be a โstarโ
This is an excellent piece. I feel like Thought Leader is a good description of something I need less of in my life. The Taylor Lorenz example is apt. I tried to root for her but what happened was she lied to her editors at the Washington Post. She was going to lose her job so she is now on this reinvention tour. Being a Thought Leader seems to be about never saying youโre sorry or admitting a mistake. While I agree Matt Y has had some interesting โtakesโ he also has had many bad ones which he conveniently deletes from X/Twitter. I just canโt trust people like that. And yet these types of characters are often the most successful.
I enjoyed the People link to scary Halloween stories. I can vouch for Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia although it wasnโt TOO scary. Just a fascinating look at an aspect of Mexico I knew little about.
For wimps who just want cozy Halloween stories (mostly romance), People did another list:
https://people.com/cozy-halloween-romance-reads-8725175
I enjoyed The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling.
I love this essay. For me, in addition to raising the question "What is writing for?", you raise the corollary issue, "What is *reading* for?" Because increasingly it seems that people aren't sure. The growth of the "thought leader" is, I think, paralleled by the growth of people who don't want to be asked to read deeply. The game these days seems more about writing that *tells* us what to think rather *asking* us to think. Maybe that isn't new; in fact, I suspect that it probably isn't. But the writers that most interest me have always been the ones who are honestly trying to improve our questions.
I can't put it any better than Rainer Maria Rilke did: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Thanks for your integrity, John. I am very much not an online type of person so I mostly stay away from these "thought leader" type people but occasionally a kerfuffle bubbles up to the point that I hear about it. I really appreciate you putting these concepts into a useful framework.
Much appreciated, John. Coming to peace with oneโs own stance on writing versus self-promotion takes many years, Iโve found.
Good, timely essay, John, many thanks. When I was younger, because I KNOW y'all are dying to hear about my childhood, I thought I wanted to be a thought leader, though we didn't have that phrase, and the Internet didn't exist yet in its present form. Now I understand that it's way too much work and would cut into the time I would rather use for other things, such as reading, or watching videos of Himalayan marmots (OMGWTFBBQ, the cutest things on the planet, and another reason to be grateful for the internet). Then in high school and for some years afterwards, I thought I wanted to be a writer, but, again, it turned out to be a lot more work than it seemed at first. I'm hoping that being on Substack will help me work out these unrealized (misdirected?) desires relatively painlessly. For that I have you and an old friend who is also here with her blog, to thank.