14 Comments

Excellent article! I am 65 years old and used to have a sports blog with thousands of subscribers and I finally got tired and gave it up. It does get to a point where it controls your thoughts, energy and time.

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Wow this is so powerful. Thank you so much Ali.

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I'm not even sure how I ended up clicking on the link for this article, but I'm so glad I did. This hits at the heart of a massive cultural problem that is ruining lives. The comparison to "Friday Night Lights" is very appropriate and also alarming when you think about it. Thank you for writing this piece. I'll be thinking on this all week and probably reading it several more times.

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Excellent! Youth, through no fault of their own, have no perspective or wisdom about the ways of the world. It’s impossible for them to know that one event will tarnish their lives permanently. We lie because we love our culture of winning and sacrifice them and their joy of just playing. We can stop this.

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I host a podcast where I interview video creators about their stories building their own online audiences. And the concept of microfame is something that I find myself constantly exploring with each one of them lately.

I'm always fascinated by their responses whenever i bring up the topic. Some of them have reached a point where they've become desensitized to it. The fact that that they can reach thousands of people doesn't feel like anything unusual or special to them. Others, meanwhile, feel the weight of it and ponder the good and the bad on a regular a basis.

There's definitely a cost to having such kind of fame that perhaps not enough of us are taking the time to reflect upon. We're so caught up in in trying to build the audience that we're not really thinking about the risks. Glad to find your post and see that you're one of the people who is.

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This is a great piece of writing, I am going to recommend the my 2 x teenagers read it. There are more than a few adults I know that should but won't read it.

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This is so, so good, Ali. It's a topic that's been on my mind more and more lately, as I write for my own newsletter. It's funny, in a way, I find myself gravitating more toward fiction in my own personal reading lately, as I can see now (after writing a newsletter and sharing parts of myself for the past few years) how exploring a topic in a fictional world can be safer -- you can create a world that you don't have to be a part of, you don't have to use yourself or become a character. There's something to that, I'm thinking, more and more lately.

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This is a brilliant articulation of a phenomenon most of us can barely yet describe. The whole way we 'know' has changed. The foundations of knowing have shifted in half a generation. The analogy here is poignant and revealing. Thank you.

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These are good words, Ali. Thanks for putting them out there! :)

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Thank you for writing this. Your blog post was recommended to me today during our MasterMind session by one of my colleagues. Well written, thought-provoking and timely. You have a new subscriber. The piece made me think of a clip from my favourite film "A Man for All Seasons" which has a 16th C version of the same theme in a scene between Thomas More Paul Scofield) and Richard Rich (John Hurt): https://youtu.be/K3-e7mtDcAs. Looking forward to reading more.

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Most excellent piece! I'm forwarding this to so, so many people of all ages. Makes me want to give up social media entirely. This was so insightful. Thanks for sharing.

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Excellent. Thank you.

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