On being entirely yourself
One of the things I thought about quite often when I first had the impulse to start sharing my writing was if someone would actually read it. Why would anyone want to take the time to read anything I wrote? Would I really be doing the world a favor by sharing the few thoughts I managed to get down on paper?
Different versions of that thought have been keeping me a closeted writer over the years. I really enjoy writing, and in my head I’m pretty decent at it, but I’m terrified of making any of it public and finding out it’s useful to no one. I have this fear of being laughed at by a faceless crowd living in my head for being naive enough to share my writing and believing it would actually be relevant and make a difference in the world.
So, to avoid facing that fear, I’d rather not share any of it and keep writing just for myself instead. That might have felt safer in the short term, but I’m sure it has robbed me of the chance of reaching others and having meaningful exchanges with interesting people. That’s a high price to pay, if you ask me.
I’ve been constantly doing some form of writing for the last 20 years. Back in high school, I published a couple of short stories on my tumblr (and secretly felt slightly ashamed of them for not being “good enough”); I have taken a number of creative writing classes and workshops on a variety of topics; I even had a (rather unsuccessful) go at the NaNoWriMo challenge once; and, perhaps more importantly, I’ve used writing to help me process a huge part of my thoughts and emotions during critical junctures in my life. Writing is my main source of clarity.
So, when faced with the idea of sharing what I write, why do I still have to think about it being useful to others? Why can’t I just… write?
Is writing still relevant?
I recently watched a short clip of David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, being interviewed by Charlie Ross. Wallace, widely regarded as one of the most innovative and influential writers of American fiction, sat down with Ross and two other contemporary authors to discuss “the future of American fiction in the information age.” The interview revolved around the question of whether fiction was still relevant in an age in which young audiences were becoming increasingly distracted by more effortless and more instantaneous forms of entertainment.
Now, one thing is me, a closeted writer who has never dared to publicly share anything, wondering if anyone would care if I did. A very different thing, though, is a bunch of well-established writers seriously discussing the question of whether what they’re extremely good at, what they love to do, and what pays their bills, namely writing complicated, beautiful works of fiction, was still relevant in face of their audiences starting to pay more attention to more acessible forms of entertainment. This was back in 1996.
Wallace had an interesting hypothesis on the dwindling interest in fiction novels at the time:
The generation that I consider myself a part of was raised on television. Which means that at least I was raised to view television as my main artistic snorkel to the universe.
I think television, which is a commercial art that’s a lot of fun and that requires very little of the recipient of the art, affects what people are looking for in various kinds of art.
—David Foster Wallace
So, television was affecting what people were looking for in other forms of art, particularly in books and fiction novels. But how exactly?
Wallace continues:
I think commercial entertainment, its efficiency, its sheer ability to deliver pleasure in large doses, changes people’s relationship to art and entertainment. It changes what an audience is looking for, and I would argue it changes us in deeper ways than that.
—David Foster Wallace
According to Wallace, the highly accesible, highly pleasurable nature of television changed how people related to art in general. He argued that an audience that is trained to exert very little effort to receive high doses of pleasure starts looking for similar traits in other forms of art and entertainment. When considering the effort and the time investment required to get the same amount of pleasure, a book can’t beat television.
Everything is television
I used to watch a good amount of TV growing up, but TV, at least the way it was back in 1996, has fallen out of fashion. Today, the form of entertainment I engage the most with sits in my pocket: my phone and social media.
Social media and TV might look very different at first glance. But on a very insightful piece, writer, podcaster, and author Derek Thompson proposes a rather interesting premise: everything that is not already television is turning into television.
From Thompson’s article:
Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.
[…]
When I say “everything is turning into television,” what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.
—Derek Thompson
Suddenly, I became painfully aware of my own media consumption patterns and how they have evolved over the years. Sure, at first I used Facebook and Instagram to keep in touch with friends and family (or at least that was the excuse). But now, the kind of entertainment I look for on these platforms is exactly that episodic stream of video. Because I enjoy it. I like funny clips and I like ideas packed in compact formats ready to share. They’re easy to consume, they require absolutely no effort from me, and they’re always there. It’s addicting.
But my relationship to social media has not only changed what I look for in the forms of entertainment I consume. To put it in Wallace’s terms, social media’s sheer ability to deliver pleasure has also changed how I relate to art in general, including my own writing. No wonder why I unconsciously feel that writing is less relevant than other forms of expression. How could I ever develop the conviction that what I write has any relevance in the world when even I would rather spend the next two hours giving my brain a never-ending dose of dopamine by consuming short video after short video after short video?
And as Wallace predicted, the addiction has also changed me in deeper ways than that. I notice it in how I design my life according to the ideas I see on my feed; in how what I value increasingly matches what is being advertised there; in how I find it increasingly difficult to sustain my attention span when doing cognitive work; or even in how I see and understand myself in the world.
I realized that the internal question I’ve been dealing with all these years was not “will anybody read what I write?” but rather “am I willing to to interact with the world in my own terms other than just consuming endless streams of video?” My (unconscious) answer until now was “No, I’m not. I’d rather keep watching, just like everybody else.”
A rebellious act
I refuse to allow a single form of media constrain my perspective on what it’s like to be alive.
In this sense, writing is a rebellious act. Not a rebellion against anything out there, but rather a rebellion against myself, against my own constrained thinking, against the worldview that I’ve forged aided by my interaction with social media. Choosing to engage with the world in my own terms feels like breaking free from my own mental prison.
But breaking free towards what? Wallace gives me a hint in yet another interview:
I suddenly realized that the point of being post-modern, or being avant garde or whatever wasn’t following a certain kind of tradition, that all that stuff is BS imposed by critics and followers afterwards.
What really great artists do is: they’re entirely themselves.
They’ve got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
—David Foster Wallace
The thought of being entirely myself gives me the hope and the strength to ignore the voice inside my head telling me that television is still more entertaining.
It’s crazy that we live in a world with so much noise that we have to fight back to be able to listen to ourselves. It’s even crazier to think that walking a path that might lead to being entirely myself has to be an act of rebellion.
Writing feels like the entrance door to that path. I don’t know where it will lead me, but I want to stop walking past it. I’ve done that for long enough already.
References
Future of American Fiction, Charlie Rose, air date May 17, 1996
https://charlierose.com/videos/15361
David Foster Wallace, Charlie Rose, air date Mar 27, 1997
https://charlierose.com/videos/23311
Derek Thompson, Everything is Television. Oct 10, 2025.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television
