Wordy Games of Confidence and Connection

16 Feb, 2025

I’m never sure when I start writing what the end result will be. But I’m operating at present with a heightened sense of aimlessness or trepidation, because I’m not at all sure how I feel about the topic at hand. I suppose, then, what follows will be a true essay—as Brian Dillon says, “a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure.”¹

Quico Toro’s “The Case for Drinking” showed up in my inbox not quite a week ago; his stuff appears with the work of other Persuasion authors, and usually, I’m not really certain how I feel about most of it, which is why I subscribed to the newsletter in the first place.² Here, Toro is apparently responding to a colleague’s prior plea to “make Dry January permanent,” first by boiling Vivek Murthy’s encouragement to put cancer warning labels on alcohol down to the Biden administration’s “killjoy reputation that would eventually doom it.”³ Toro admits that too much booze is a Bad Thing, but then goes after the surgeon general’s desire to make people aware of liquor’s long-term health risks by contrasting systematic investigation with biblical drinking stories and ancient people’s tendencies to produce some form of fermented drink. Well—OK, I guess you can put science, mythology, and tradition together and see what conclusions they come up with, and that sort of back and forth is so common it’s probably not even worth commenting on by now. But where it starts to get a little bizarre—and bizarre because I don’t think Toro felt he was grasping at any available straw to make his case—is when the author insists upon the need for alcohol to combat our present epidemic of loneliness. Step away from your screens (right, I’m on board so far) and get down to the bar so you can reduce your social inhibitions (eh, maybe not). As a result, you’ll somehow come out on the other side of the experience no longer feeling alone. This, instead of the more usual retroactive shame at having talked far too loud, hugged a lot of amused or irritated strangers who remained strangers, or wound up in one of those stranger’s apartments and then made the bleak trudge back to your own abode, where you continue to feel lonely.

Given how so many of us have long preferred to believe in quick fixes, it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that Toro elevates alcohol’s short circuit to conversation above the slow-going, probably more effective and lasting modes of chipping away at—not aiming a sandblaster at—loneliness that joining a club or organization, taking a class, or even going to town hall or neighborhood meetings will lead to. There was something in this post like an indignant desire for the institution of a real-world Cheers at its best, although even in that pub-based show where “everybody knows your name,” very few of the characters appeared all that happy with their lives, or even with each other, and only rarely did anything happen between them outside of the bar.⁴ That, it seemed, was sort of the point that kept the show going.

Right: so there’s the oddity of the argument itself. But, even though I may very well be unjust in my speculations, I also get the sense, based on this and other Toro articles, that even if I agreed with a point or even a whole argument of his, I would not want to start a live conversation, in the bar or anywhere else, with the author or many of his colleagues. I suspect that “conversation” with this crowd should really go under the name of “debate” or “talking at.” Something approached from the start as a conflict you enter in order to win, not to explore or learn or even just pass the time, much less use as a vehicle to free anyone from loneliness.

Although a step above mere point-scoring, the word exchange in these newsletters provides a not-unfamiliar sense of the tit-for-tat that public discourse has become in the digital age. Part of that discourse seems to embrace the belief, as Donato Loia puts it, that “Confidence is the message.”⁵ He’s focused in particular on the obnoxious forms of career aspiration our LinkedInny positivity takes, and even more particularly within the academic humanities. But when Loia alleges that “In academia, to have doubts is possible and at times even considered a sign of maturity and wisdom. Hesitation, however, is not,” or that in this same realm, “fake doubts are better than real hesitation,” he’s pinpointed the discomfort that ensues when I’m faced with Toro’s and others’ work—and with much of the digital newsletter form.⁶

That accusation against newsletters is far too general—but one of the many reasons I left Substack was that, even though I wasn’t there to attempt a side hustle or replicate someone else’s rise to internet fame, something about the platform was creeping up on me, pushing me to make definitive statements, when all I wanted to be doing was exploring—essaying ideas and situations with written words. Maybe it’s because newsletters are taking the place of more traditional media that have become innocuous at best, but it feels as if the proliferation of digital newsletters, what I guess I’d call Substackism, involves an attempt to eliminate the expectations Dillon asserts are contained in essay writing. There’s not quite the space or tolerance in this arena for leaving something unsaid, unanswered, maybe even unquestioned. The risk of total failure, of course, isn’t even in the cards.

I’ve been trying to identify what makes a newsletter not a blog, and I think what I’m essaying as we speak (or read) is getting me there. There’s the difference in polish, yes—the former tends to be more consciously crafted, less spontaneous than the latter, and that fact can’t but be related to the different degrees of openness each medium very broadly contains or encourages. Is either of these media suitable for the essay? I get the sense that an essay, given its inherently curious and investigatory nature, can make use of any platform for its purposes, especially as most forms of media are continuously changing, and at a pretty rapid pace. How and whether our felt need for confidence and closure affects any of these forms will certainly remain a valid question—and like so much else about our general existence, we’ll need to talk with, not at, each other to approach it with something like clarity.

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