Who am I speaking to when I talk about books?
Who am I speaking to when I talk about books?
Lately, I’ve been worrying that my content feels older than me, even though I’m only twenty-five. It’s not something anyone has said directly, but it’s a feeling that lingers whenever I scroll through my own page and hesitate to stay there too long.
There’s a constant conversation online about Gen Z. How they speak, what they care about, how quickly they move, how fluently they understand trends and language. And even though I’m technically close to that age group, I often feel like I’m watching from the outside. I don’t naturally use the slang. I don’t always understand the references. I respect the openness and the confidence, but I don’t always know how to mirror it.
Somewhere along the way, that gap turned into self-judgement. I started calling my own work “old people content,” as if depth or slowness were flaws. As if not keeping up meant falling behind. There are days I don’t revisit my posts at all, not because I dislike what I wrote, but because of a quiet content shame. The fear that it sounds uncool, outdated, or too serious for the internet I’m supposed to belong to.
What confuses me is that the people who actually respond to my work aren’t limited to one age group. I reach readers who are eighteen and those who are well into their thirties and forties. People who want to talk about books slowly, personally, without reducing them to trends. Still, I keep telling myself that the “right” audience is younger, more active, more online, even when the evidence says otherwise.
I think part of this comes from how platforms frame relevance. They make it feel generational, as if every voice needs a demographic label. But books have never worked like that. A fourteen-year-old and a sixty-year-old can be moved by the same story for completely different reasons, and neither experience is more valid than the other. Reading has always been a cross-generational conversation, even if the internet keeps trying to narrow it.
There’s also the fear of being misunderstood. Of being seen as someone who talks about books only because she’s paid to do so. As if sincerity disappears the moment money enters the picture. That fear makes me overthink how I present myself, how I sound, how I’m perceived, until the act of sharing starts feeling cautious instead of curious.
What I keep coming back to is this: I never started talking about books to influence people. I wanted connection. I wanted someone to read what I wrote and think, I felt that too, or maybe I should pick this up and we can talk about it. I wanted conversation, not authority.
Maybe my mistake has been trying to sound younger instead of sounding like myself. Trying to appeal to an audience I don’t fully inhabit while quietly ignoring the readers who already listen. Maybe the work doesn’t need to be exciting in the way the internet defines excitement. Maybe it just needs to be honest enough to invite someone in.
I don’t know yet who my content is for in the way algorithms want me to know. I only know that I want to talk about books in a way that feels real to me, whether the person reading is fourteen or sixty. For now, that feels like a better place to stand than chasing a version of relevance that keeps moving.