Whenever I read a great book, I inevitably go on to look up the author online.
It turns out, more often than not, the personality of the author that reflected in their book (or even multiple series of the books) was totally different from who they are offline.
They are pretending in neither, yet there is a visible gap between the two personas.
Here is my theory of why this is so:
Writing a book is an act of focused attention. You have to withdraw from your external world in order to create a masterpiece of 400+ pages. All the more, if your book is doing well consistently, it means it is great. What it also means is that it required much more focus and solitude to get it done.
That solitude and focus does not come for free. The author has to (and must) detach from all the distractions that are right outside their laptop vying for their attention. Especially social media, which is the emperor of the fortress of pile of things lined up to destroy human attention.
During this process, a wonderful thing happens: the author has moved on from the superficiality every one of us unconsciously becomes a prey to, and has tapped into their creative genius, the genius that lies within each one of us but remains buried deep within because we are always floating on the surface of dopamine that the social media offers at the tap of our fingers.
A beautiful side-effect of this tapping into inner intuition is also that the truest, most honest self of the author comes out in the process. Which is why their book goes on to become the masterpiece it becomes.
On the other hand, for anyone who is consistently on social media, either as a consumer or as a creator, is in a default mode of reacting. It is not something that happens consciously, but rather is the tax you have to pay in lieu of signing up on social media. No one has been able to escape from this shallow wondering and wandering around, and by any chance if you see someone posting something meaningful on social media, it happens only and only because they spend a lot of their life away from it.
Thus, my friend, one of the ways I have discovered to really continue having my respect for an author is to not go on to find them on social media. Or if I even find them, it is always good to not follow them or their journey or their social content religiously.
We fell in love with their most real part over a course of perhaps more than 3 hours of our reading the book, and now we are looking for that real part in content that is designed to capture our attention in 3 microseconds. A change in environment is bound to cause a change in human beings inhabiting it. It makes smart, wise, composed people react to online events, brings out their baser sides without them being aware of it, and most importantly, no one’s subconscious mind is fully functional and operating at its best when they are brooming their screen through their thumb.
Fall in love with the book. The art. The silence that made that art possible.
Not in love with the social media of a human. Not their unpremeditated reactions. Not the loud noise that truly buries our deep voice.