“If you have an essential energy, or a desire, even if it’s a little bit of a weird desire, I feel like, as somebody who’s almost 60, part of your job as a young person is to burn through that desire. Don’t look askance at it. If you want to be famous, alright, that’s how you were made — go for it. Whatever your desire is, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, I think the idea is to burn through it quickly, cause then you find out what’s on the other side of it….
You can deny those essential energies, in which case they just fester your whole life and you’re frustrated, or you can say, “yea, I really want to be this.” And the quicker you do it — which means, if you’re gonna be something, be a good one — then I think you have the possibility of arriving at another place, where you’re like, “oh yea, actually, I don’t want fame, I want to be known for doing something good.” And you might burn through that into some other…. Throw down, a little bit.
…If you don’t take care of that stuff, then you’re not going to be fully present for the people who need you later. Even if you try and fail, you’re still gonna be free of that burden a little bit. So I think it can be a form of, I don’t know what you’d call it, sort of kindness to your future self, to go for it. If you want to go for it, go for it.”
—Tavi Gevinson interviews George Saunders on the Rookie podcast, “The Split Second of Intuition,” May 16, 2017
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