Freedom in Obscurity

Fear of Dancing, Taylor Swift, and the Freedom of Going Unnoticed

Five years ago my cousin got married. Within a few months, she and her husband were quietly filling for divorce. Unfortunately, I knew their fate was sealed, on the night of the wedding.

At the reception, I could tell something was off. The new bride and groom, began mingling throughout the ballroom separately. She came to hang out with me and our family, and her husband with his friends.

But the strangest thing was, they didn’t share a first dance. I asked her about this, and she told me, he’s embarrassed of dancing. He doesn’t think he’s very good, and doesn’t want to look stupid in front of his friends.

As the celebration wore on, she would venture up to him, begging him to join her on the dance floor. He’d wave her off, continuing to drink and share laughs with his fraternity brothers.

From all accounts, the years they had spent together, were happy. He was always respectful of her and her family. And he clearly loved her. But on that night, I realized their relationship had one irreconcilable problem. Despite his love for her, he loved someone else more—himself.

II.

Howard Aiken—the inventor of the earliest general purpose computer—was never worried about people stealing his ideas. “If your ideas are any good” he’s quoted as saying, “you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” And yet, we think that the moment that we hit the dance floor, all eyes will be on us. The moment we hit publish, the world will take notice. That everyone with an internet connection will read, listen, and judge our every action.

We believe that when we start a new business or creative endeavor, it will be a magnificent event. That we’ll start off with applause. However, what’s far more likely is that after we hit publish, the only thing we’ll hear is the deafening sound of indifference.

There are, after all, entire industries dedicated to puncturing the wall of apathy that surrounds us.

III.

Their names are misleading. Record Labels and Book Publishers, are not actually in the business of producing records, and publishing books. Rather, their main function is to solve the enormous problem of attention. How to get it, how to keep it, and ultimately, how to break the spell of indifference.

In 2020, Taylor Swift gave us a perfect case study of these powers. In that year she produced two separate albums. The first was released traditionally, with the support of her record label. The second record was a complete surprise—with no build up, no press tour, nothing. On midnight December 11th, 2020, Evermore was shared with the world. The record was of course a hit—she is Taylor Swift after all—but it would ultimately go on to sell half as many units as Folklore, the album she released just five months prior.

Taylor Swift needs marketing. She needs teams of people, working around the clock, to make us care about her work.

Yet for some reason, we believe that the moment we put our work out into the world, everyone is going to spit out their coffee in rapt attention. The truth is far more liberating.

IV.

After serving four-years in the U.S. Coast Guard, Richard Bachman published his first novel Rage. The book “achieved obscurity almost immediately” wrote one Washington Post reporter. For another seven years, Bachman would write novels of similar result. It wasn’t until his fifth publication, Thinner, that anyone really took notice.

In 1984, the book had sold 28,000 copies. A small, but respectable sum for an up-and-coming author at the time. Later that same year, the book would sell ten times that amount when it was revealed that Richard Bachman was, in fact, Stephen King.

King manufactured this false persona for two reasons: The first was so that he could publish more frequently, in a time when the industry believed overexposure would tarnish your brand. The second was that it gave King a low-stakes playground to experiment with his craft.

J.K. Rowling did the same thing. Just seven years after the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she started writing military fiction under the name Robert Galbraith. She created her new persona because she was “yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career”. She wanted to “work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback.”

She created Galbraith, to give herself the freedom that we take for granted every day. The freedom of obscurity.

V.

We’re not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. We don’t have to go out of our way to create fake identities to liberate ourselves from expectation. That’s the beauty of being unknown.

No one is expecting you to be a great dancer at your wedding. No one is expecting your first business to be a billion dollar behemoth. No one is expecting you to be a great writer after your first article. No one, except your ego.

As the saying goes:

When you’re 20, you care what everyone thinks.

When you’re 40, you stop caring what everyone thinks.

When you’re 60, you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.

The fact that no one knows, or cares, about you means that you are free. You can explore, create, and build without expectation. You can take your time. You can take risks. You can incorporate feedback from your closest friends, family, and teachers—to become better. You can iterate, and rework, and polish. You can fall down, brush yourself off, and keep on going when the stakes are at their lowest.

You can dance like no one is watching, because they aren’t.

—Zac

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