Faux Woolf

Those wise, sad eyes. Virginia Woolf stared out of Facebook at me, and underneath her photograph, a poignant quotation: “There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is.”

From there, she described life as a series of small moments and asserted that love is not a fairytale. Well, true, I thought, but it troubled me because the words didn’t sound like Virginia Woolf. The phrasing felt somehow flat to me.

The quotation had no source, so I looked it up. Snopes.com brought me this:

“In August and September 2024, a number of popular social media posts attributed a quote about sadness and loneliness to Virginia Woolf, the British author known for her numerous novels, short stories and essays including “Mrs. Dalloway” and “A Room of One’s Own” . . . However, there was no concrete evidence to support claims that Woolf ever said or wrote these words.”

The Snopes article then suggested it was possible the quote appeared in an unpublished piece of Woolf’s writing, but there was also reason to suspect it was AI-generated.

Social media’s new strategy

Why? This wasn’t a student concocting a quotation in a classroom, trying to look clever. Or someone at a party reaching for the next witticism.

This is the game of social media. The companies make money from ads, and the longer people spend on a site, shifting from one thing to another, the more ads a company can sell. Companies need content for people to scroll through, and we have been very good at providing that content for free. But now companies are experimenting with bots instead, which, for minimal cost, churn out consistent, engaging posts like this faux Woolf.

Which still smells of mock turtle soup to me.

So, how should we react?

If I caught a student flinging misquotes like this, I’d gently question her source. Asking Facebook isn’t going to help, but we can look for ourselves. When a quotation like this catches your eye, look it up. If you find a source, read the text. Give the writer your attention.

Curiosity, offline

And if you look and suspect it’s made up? Well, look again. Ask yourself what caught your attention? Why did the words ring true? What would it mean for you to pay attention to your attention? This practice sidesteps the question of profit and engagement and deepens our experience of reading the world. Less scrolling might mean more opportunity for curiosity.
In his 1920s travel essays about Italy, the novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote: “There is no other way, when you are dealing with life . . . All it depends on is the amount of true, sincere, religious concentration you can bring to bear on your subject. An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.”

A decade later, French philosopher and theologian Simone Weil put it this way: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

I promise you, both quotations are real – and both authors are worth your attention.