Jonathan Franzen's argument in Liking is for Cowards. Go for what Hurts opens with a heartfelt story about his eventual parting with his beloved Blackberry Pearl. Such a story is made for a comedic transition into his true point, but serves as a good stepping stone into the topic he wished to bring up. His analogy of replacing his old, functional, and often-faulty Blackberry Pearl with the newer Blackberry Bold is as an example of how society operates now in this world of flashy technology and mass-likability. He claims that in this age of hi-tech consumerism, we are being driven by marketing and technology to only "like" rather than to love. He makes this claim through some storytelling, personal examples, and effective pathos. Throughout his argument, the author uses the universal feelings of love, pain, and many observations of human nature to affect the audience emotionally. The author's use of pathos heightens the impact of their argument by playing off of our shallow need for likability in our lives, the pain that we expose ourselves to when we try to love something, and how we learn to live with this pain for the betterment of ourselves.

The first noticeable use of pathos in the author's argument is seen through his identifying how the consumer-based world of likability cannot co-exists with love. As he states: "There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of ... But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie" (514 CR). The author compares the lack of existence of someone fully likable with someone who can be fully loveable to begin breaking down the audience's perception of society. With this, he drives home the point that our current society is built upon this lie of likability, and that love would have no place in a world such as the techno-consumerists would have it. This claim of his is filled with pathos. By portraying this shallow sense of likability, he shows how hollow and unfeeling society has become if so focused on its own likability. Naturally, this gets a reaction of repulsion by the audience. The audience connects with the author's ideals of loving vs liking, as these are relatable feelings for any individual, especially in such an apt comparison. This evokes the audience to change these ideals held by society, and sets them up perfectly for Franzen to explain just how to do that.

The author takes a different direction in his argument when it comes to explaining downsides to living without this lie. Franzen becomes very frank with the audience in his description of the problem shedding off our society of liking in favor for exposing ourselves to love. He explains that "but to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking." (514 CR). This description uses pathos exceptionally well in its latter half. By specifically narrowing down this pain of opening oneself up as pains of loss, breakup, and death is sure to connect with the audience. There is not a single person in such a crowd that has never experienced pains such as these. The loss of someone, the breakup of a relationship, the death of a person you cared for, all of these are very real and very emotional moments that about anyone will feel if they truly live their lives for an amount of time. This connection would not be lost on any audience, and is used to further draw the audience towards the author's claim.

The author ends his argument with an anecdote of his own life. He explains that while in college, he liked the natural world: "liked" not "loved" it. As he was only looking for things to like or dislike, he settled on getting angry about environmentalism. After many years of getting angrier and angrier at a problem he felt could never be solved on his own, he eventually gave up on liking the environment. But then a funny thing happened for him. As he says, it was a long story, but he fell in love with birds. This love had started as a small, un-cool or likable thing as birdwatching, to eventually spread to his eventual getting involved with bird conservation, and once again, environmentalism. This story concluded with a little paradox that Jonathan learned at that point. He realized that even now, being so much more connected and knowledgeable of all the problems, risks, and dangers that not only his beloved birds faced and also the environment as a whole, he no longer was as angry as his college days. By finding a connection and love within the field, he no longer felt this directionless rage of his youth, but rather felt driven to try and do what little he can to help save and protect something he loves (514-515 CR). His discovery, and much of the story in all once again enhanced his claim with pathos. This anecdote was a highly personal experience of the author, and one many of the audience may have experienced in their own way. The audience was very likely to see themselves in Franzens story, either as the person who lost their passion, or the one who was rekindled like Franzen. The author's way of showing his own past mistakes and his vital recovery from them gives the audience a way to visualize in their own lives mistakes of liking over loving. Combing the pathos connection with the author in this story is magnified even more through the proper use of ethos in it as well. This anecdote showed the author's own experience and learning on this subject, and for those who did not connect with it emotionally, could at least then understand that the author had a sort of authority on this subject through his experience in it.

In the end, the author complimented his own claim by connecting with the audience's feelings of love and the rejection of just liking. Jonathan Franzen used pathos by playing off of our shallow need for likability in our lives, showing the pain that we expose ourselves to when we try to love something, and explaining how we learn to live with this pain for the betterment of ourselves. Franzen used these ideas to better connect with the audience and heighten the impact of his claim, and executed this nicely.

