Jonathan Franzen's Essay: Liking Is For Cowards

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Essay about ’Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts’

The society today is extremely affected by social media and the constantly evolving technology. People are becoming increasingly narcissistic, changing themselves online solely get more ‘likes’. Our behaviour on social media is to a great extent risk free, where loving in the real world is full of risks. In his speech ‘Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts’, the American novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen addresses these risk free narcissistic tendencies, asking whether the risks of love in real life are really worth it.

Franzen starts out his speech by sharing a personal experience, getting a new model of his old BlackBerry phone and thus replacing the old one. By doing this,
“The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking” (p. 3 l. 196). People are scared to be loved because they are afraid that their true personalities will be rejected, and instead they chose to ignore real love and stay behind a facade. He says: “To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived” (p. 3 l. 206). In order to actually live life, you must take risks and love. People can never know what happens when they throw their love on something or someone, and they might end up getting hurt. But life is about risks, and as he says: “Who knows what might happened to you then?” (p. 5 l.
He makes sure to appeal to the audience by using logos when making argumenting, and using pathos to connect with the audience and persuade them, to get his message through. However, he only talks about the negative aspects of technological advancement and social media. For example, he mentions the social media platform Facebook as a negative thing, where ‘liking’ goes “From a feeling to an assertion of consumer” (p. 2 l. 82). But Facebook is not only a narcissistic platform where we stage our lives for the outside world, but also a place to keep in touch with people you do not see as often. Moreover, social media in general creates possibilities to expand your knowledge on different topics and knowing what happens around the world. Thus, the speech lacks general argumentation of pros and cons to really make it successful, but as such it is not a complete fail

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