As a writer, it is important to be able to distinguish the feeling of being obsolescent from the feeling of being silenced.

Both experiences are painful. But if your leg is bleeding, it doesn't help to bandage your arm.

I understand how some writers could confuse these feelings. To become obsolescent isn't, in fact, to be silenced, but it perhaps feels like being silenced by time. Once you were at the front of ideas; now you lag. Once you were in touch with people's realities; now you're not.

Many writers who feel censored now are being censored by nothing more than the expansion of the discussion.

Others getting to speak isn't, in fact, censorship. But, just as equality can feel like oppression to the powerful, criticism can feel like censorship to the platformed.

What I would love to read is one of the writers who has had these feelings digging deeper and coming out on the other side with an essay about the struggle with losing ground in an age of change. What is it like to witness yourself surrendering relevance? It would be moving.

This isn't about a punitive, exclusionary new orthodoxy. This is about societies becoming more aware of the experience and voices of so many people who have never been heard. And this will naturally be disorienting to people who struggle to change with the rest of the society.

I think "cancel culture" becomes a refuge because it's harder to say: I go to events, read magazines, watch TV, and I'm scared that I don't get it, can't keep up. It will happen to all of us. It can happen to you at any age. But we cannot afford to confuse this with cancellation.

When many, many people are telling you about a new reality you don't see, you have a choice: insist to them that, because you don't see it, it can't be real, even declare the new reality oppressive.

Or become curious about what you don't see. It's a wonderful time to be curious.

In this sense, some of the fretting about "cancel culture" can be understood in parallel to the racial resentment of Trump supporters: an ideology of staying on top disguised, even to the bearer, as an ideology of victimhood.

But having to share is not oppression.