Recently, it feels like almost everything is “performative,” or done just for other people to see you in a specific, curated light. Acting a certain way or going to a certain place is all just to give off a certain vibe. Nothing feels real anymore. As the sociologist Erving Goffman puts in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, “[To] the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” We see these performances as insincere, not necessarily depictions of the real person but just a facade of how they want to be perceived.
But it has gotten to the point where basic actions can be seen as performative. Terms like “chic,” “demure,” and “performative” have become umbrella terms that disregard their original meanings and are assigned to things that have only a loose connection to the word. The recent viral TikTok saying “turns out toast is chic now” is a prime example. Reading has suffered from this too.
Now, I see how reading could be viewed as somewhat performative: when you read (in public), there is a small part of you that wants other people to see you reading and to sense an aura of intelligence and thoughtfulness. But I argue that the benefits of reading far outweigh the perceived “performativeness.” Reading is one of the best ways to actually learn, and even if you try to seem smart by reading a book, it is impossible not to actually take something from that book just by the act of reading the ink on the page. Frankly, the only way I could see reading as performative is if you had a strawberry matcha, baby tee, and wired earbuds as well.
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