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Regina Musicaro's avatar

I’ve been loving reading your pieces. Your autobiographical writing is beautiful. I especially enjoyed the one about church and baseball. I also admire the ability of writers to put themselves out there. I write a lot but I haven’t had the courage to try to publish because people on the internet are so quick to be critical or contrarian. But to get back to the topic…the word “awe” feels misleading. Awe is an inner experience that makes us feel small but in a good way. It gives us perspective on our mortality and reference for the mysteries of life and existence. Overworking is a behavior that is usually tied to feelings of insecurity and striving for external validation. Sometimes this overworking is because we want to feel big and important from acknowledgment and accolades. The state of awe and the behaviors of overworking don’t match. It feels like vocational awe is really pointing to an economy that takes people who once had awe and asks them to engage in endlessly meaningless tasks like hours of checking and responding to emails so they can achieve some external legitimacy. If we truly felt awe, we would be more still and slow down and evaluate the meaning and importance of our tasks.

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Sherman Alexie's avatar

Oh, wow, Joshua, I'm reeling with this. I was the young writer whose education was utterly grounded in the concept of greatness, whether in trying to write great books (and failing except for maybe 500 pages of the hundreds of thousands I've published) or in seeking out and reading the greats (of which there are more than enough to occupy my entire life). And, frankly, I don't see much of this push for greatness in contemporary fiction. In fact, there's active hostility toward the concept, especially because it's usually associated with white male writers. But then I think of Emily Dickinson, who could very well be the greatest poet in human history, who devoted herself so completely to her work, writing hundreds of poems, while publishing only a handful in her life. Did she suffer because of her greatness? Did she consciously pursue greatness? Was she lonely? Did she sacrifice for that greatness? I think she did.

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