The importance of being earnest
For many, it's easier choosing ironic detachment from real local issues than admitting to being invested, uncertain, and even nervous about them. (And, hey, we use our fair share of sarcasm, too!) But Substack's Catherine Shannon warns against numbly viewing all of life—not just politics, but every meaningful endeavor—as a ridiculous joke.
It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your boyfriend brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice. Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers. Maybe you take it a step further: “Actually, flowers are really basic and lame. Only basic girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.”
If this goes on for long enough—even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—yo will see them as a kind of joke. Flowers are now a bit. It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your “receptors for flowers” for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.
I’m deeply troubled by the fact that I see this happening at a massive scale, all around us. Except the problem is not a lack of bouquets, of course. It’s a lack of meaning.
Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all. ...
[S]o many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke. ...
People are struggling: most people simply cannot cope without substances like marijuana, alcohol, drugs, and SSRIs. People are lonely: they have fewer friends and live far from their families. Dating seems impossible. Men and women in the prime of their lives are struggling to meet even one potential partner who shares their values and vision for a relationship. ...
To top it all off, we can’t have meaningful conversations about any of this stuff because everyone runs their thoughts through their own kind of personal HR filter. People are self-reporting their thought crimes to themselves. I’m literally doing that right now. I’m sure I’ve theoretically “offended” all sorts of people in the last paragraph alone. ... Something is deeply wrong. We all know it. We all feel it. ...
How do you protect yourself in such a world?
You simply don’t allow yourself to experience it.
Think back to the flower metaphor. This is where we don’t receive flowers, but we cope. Same thing here. We look around the world, struggle to see the meaning in its chaos, and unconsciously tell ourselves that finding meaning isn’t that important. If I can’t pursue my own fulfillment, at least I can pursue my own pleasure. This is a somewhat reasonable reaction to the present circumstances. It feels straightforward enough—it’s binary, measurable, and everyone else is doing it. This is how the numbness starts.
And perhaps this route is even better—maybe even cool. Being ironically detached from life is endlessly glamorized in our culture. There’s a certain status in pretending nothing affects you and you don’t care. ...
It’s easy to laugh at other people, mock them, throw your head back, be a critic. Standing for nothing has the obvious appeal of making you impossible to pin down. There’s something very chic about smoking a cigarette outside a bar and being all like whatever. You’re playing a game of hide-and-seek with life, and you’re hiding. ...
We think we’re building a [protective wall between oneself and the world], but we’re really hollowing ourselves out from the inside. Eventually, without really noticing it, there will be nothing left for the wall to defend. There will be no one to find. ...
It would be great if we started just telling the truth—to ourselves and each other. The truth is good. (I mean the truth, by the way. Not “our truth.” The truth, the real truth, does not have to market itself as “authentic,” like an influencer does, it simply is.) …
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive. Things are never so fundamentally broken that we cannot move just a bit closer towards our goals and try again and again to live up to our values. ...
Once we figure out all that stuff—the big goals, the transcendent values—we should take responsibility for them. Standing for something is hard because what you’re implicitly saying is, “I don’t necessarily stand for all those other things over there.” [So] be prepared to calmly and rationally explain them. Criticize the world all you want, but do the hard work of building something better to take its place.
Read the whole thing here.
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