The Kid’s Hate Racists, Zionists , & Sincerity

The rise of insincerity and irony online is getting out of hand. We need to talk about it.

This past week I was scrolling on Reddit when I stumbled on a discussion about a recently deleted Tumblr post from Ethel Cain where she discussed the lack of sincerity online. She wrote in part, 

nobody takes anything fucking seriously anymore. it makes me feel so crazy and annoyed because i am constantly bombarded by jokes constantly. it’s not even just me, i see it with literally every artist across multiple genres and mediums. and listen, i LOVE to laugh and i love funny shit but like. we are in an irony epidemic. there is such a loss of sincerity and everything has to be a joke at all times.

Upon reading this one of the first things that I thought of was one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands. “Sincerity is Scary” by the 1975. I still remember my first time hearing it and replaying it over and over and over again. Stellar production aside, one of the things that made me fall in love with the song was its lyricism. The 1975 are insanely smart lyricists so it’s no surprise that when the topic of sincerity came up the band were able to make a deeply insightful statement on the manner. I want to look at some lyrics from the song and discuss how many people’s unlimited Internet access as a youth led to social media being a space of irony and insincerity. 

And irony's okay, I suppose

Culture is to blame

You try and mask your pain in the most postmodern way

You lack substance when you say

Something like, "Oh, what a shame"

I look at these lyrics as the band exploring how irony online led to many not taking anything, even their own emotions seriously. As a 24 year old who grew up primarily on the Internet this idea is one that I’m extremely familiar with. 

The internet for me and pretty much everyone else my age started off with the intention of being another form of entertainment. It’s what you went on to play online games or watch videos on YouTube. Then we got introduced to social media. For many Twitter was the one that broke their social media cherry. For others including myself, Instagram was our first. We’d go on these platforms and use them similarly to how we used the Internet before, pleasure and entertainment. It was for retweeting tweets from One Direction fan accounts or posting heavily filtered pictures we took in front of the school cafeteria. Sometimes we’d literally post pictures that said “tbh/ rate” where if your friend liked the picture you’d make an honest statement about them and then if that wasn’t harsh enough you’d rate them like you were on an episode of a MTV reality show. I say this because from the start we didn’t take social media seriously. They were platforms we used to say and do things we’d never say or do in real life. Would you seriously ever go up to your friend and say “be honest and rate me out of ten”? Therefore, it’s no surprise whatsoever that people online don’t take their online personas seriously. They still take what they say online as flippant as a tbh/ rate post or a tweet ten years ago with fifty thousand retweets that just said “I love @bread cuz it makes me feel warm inside” with a picture of a fat cat. 

Whether we like it or not, social media is a much different environment that requires us to take others and ourselves more seriously. We aren’t these twelve year olds anymore with (unfortunately) unlimited Internet access. Social media’s become a place that’s changed everything about our entire lives from what’s trendy to wear or eat or how one votes in the presidential election. And I hope that last part emphasizes how important social media’s become and how important it is to change the way we currently look at it. 

Many of us have been online and on social media for more than half of our lives. There’s no more “online time” that’s restricted to two hours in the evening. We’re on these apps so much that our online personas have blended into our real life one. While many of us started off our social media accounts not even using our actual names now we do and so much more. We’ll post about our birthdays, anniversaries, job promotions, our loved ones funerals. We’ll post pictures and videos in our darkest times because we know it’ll get attention from that one friend that always checks up on us. We share so much about our offline selves online that there isn’t even a distinct separation anymore.

This blending of personas in my opinion has a direct correlation with the mental health crisis that many young adults, specifically men deal with. It’s why you have so many young men who don’t know how to express genuine emotions without relying on dark or blue humor. It’s why you see so many “jokes” about Diddy and baby oil or Epstein and private jets. Feeling genuine sadness on the manner requires these men to express sadness in their real lives and for many that’s something they simply don’t do in fear of looking soft. This connects perfectly to the line “You try and mask your pain in the most postmodern way” from “Sincerity is Scary” as what many of these young men are doing at the end of the day is using these horrible jokes as a mask over genuine emotions.

I hope that me saying we should be more sincere online and shouldn’t always rely on humor doesn’t make it seem like I'm this anti-comedy SJW snowflake. I also don’t think there shouldn't be irony online either as I think both humor and irony are both human characteristics that we all use offline as well. What I’m saying is that we need to make room for our online selves to be as sincere and human as our offline self. 

By being more sincere and human online we can achieve a better understanding of one another. By making everything a joke online what we’re doing at the end of the day is avoiding being an actual human. Many of us, and I’ll admit even myself at times, use our online personas to avoid the complexities of language and emotion that make us human in the first place. We use humor as a defense mechanism. As a way to say I’m gonna make this crass joke because I don’t want to express these strong emotions my online self has to feel. Being a human and having human emotions is exhausting and terrifying so online we act exactly like how we wish we could feel in the real world. Online we're brash, we’re insincere, we make jokes at the worst time. All to avoid expressing how we actually feel. By facing these insecurities we have about being human online we’ll be able to connect in ways that in my opinion haven't been done online before. I hope that those reading understand the damage that’s caused from the gross amount of insincerity and irony online and make changes to the way they conduct themselves. I know I’m going to try.