One of the most mystifying behaviors I see online is accusing people of being performative in their reading, performative in their self-cultivation, performative in their intellectual endeavors. The idea seems to be that if you actually like reading philosophy and literature in your spare time, you’re faking it? Because only scrolling Tiktoks and watching reality TV is deemed sufficiently authentic?

Here’s Brady Brickner-Wood, in The New Yorker, on the perceived threat of performative reading:

Performative reading has firmly implanted itself into the popular imagination, becoming a meme for a generation of people who, by all accounts, aren’t reading a whole lot of books. On TikTok and Instagram, users post short-form videos to satirize the affectations of the performative reader, who is usually male: a twentysomething guy in an oversized sweater vest, reading two hardcovers at once while descending an escalator…

Performative reading has emerged as a suspicious activity not because reading books is suspect but because being beheld reading a book is understood to be yet another way for one to market himself, to portray to the world that he is indeed deeper and more expansive than his craven need for attention—demonstrated by reading a difficult book in public—suggests.

When did life become a land mine of possible performative gestures? There’s activism and performative activism, masculinity and performative masculinity, positivity and performative positivity—et cetera, ad nauseam. Are these neologisms diagnosing modern phenomena or illuminating preëxisting cultural realities? If all human activity can be measured on a spectrum of authenticity and performativity, what metrics can we use to weed out the genuine from the fabricated? Will we just know? And why do we care? If our culture of liberal individualism demands anything of us, it is to be, above all else, authentic. To be seen as a poseur or a phony—a person who affects rather than is—violates some nebulous code of acceptable self-cultivation…If everything is potentially performative, how will we ever work up the courage to step outside of our sphere of normal, to risk being earnest and cringe, and experience something transformative?

I personally find the supposed threat of performative reading to be…pretty unthreatening, honestly. You don’t gain that much status or acclaim for claiming to read books; the value is mostly in actually reading them, actually having a conversation about them, actually letting your life be shaped by the ideas in books. If anything, I think more people should feel pressured to pretend to read books (and maybe, then, genuinely read them as well). The alternative—a society where we abandon the written word wholesale, and all the historical and conceptual richness we can get only from reading—is one we’re already hurtling towards. I really think the world would be better if every celebrity was as well-read as Dua Lipa, just to give one example, and as invested in championing writers like Helen Garner and Percival Everett.

You can read the rest of the essay here: newyorker.com/culture/t… (and thank you ryan for sending this to me!)