The Insinceres
Requests for sincerity and earnestness are so commonplace they’ve become bullshit themselves. I think everybody I know but the cynics are looking for it.
Odd that we’ve all agreed we want sincerity but can’t find it anywhere.
Perhaps this is because sincerity is a complex affair. It requires us not only to act and speak honestly, but to constantly examine our words and actions, to seek out insincerity and figure out ways around it. If to be earnest is to say what you think and feel, then the second you stop thinking and feeling about your every word you have ceased to be earnest.
It’s also difficult because earnest is never popular. Machiavelli said a long time ago that it’s better to pretend to be friendly than to actually be friendly. The same applies to the code of cool: It allows for kindness so long as all parties involved have mastered the many subtleties involved with basically everything cool. Slip up and cool will kindly and loudly rebuke you, for the sake of helping you be less pathetic.
We all want to be cool. We also all want to be earnest, as long as it doesn’t get us laughed at or force us to be friends with smelly fat people.
The other problem with sincerity, or earnestness, is that so many people assume that the opposite of being sincere is being nonjudgmental. If we’re seeking sincerity because we’re offended by putdowns and negativity, the solution is to proclaim everything equal and love it all the same. That’s an issue also, because nothing is equal to anything else. Pretending that it is avoids the real problems and leads to cynicism.
Most people I know oscillate between the two positions. Prejudices amass and everything is judged, first with some thought, then with irritation. When things get too stressful there’s a breakdown, a resolution to be fair and equal to all; then the pattern repeats and new prejudices appear, and any hope for sincerity is lost.
Put bluntly: This is a cycle that fascinates me, because I hate it. It reduces people to repetitive, generic actions that largely go nowhere. We all hit a point where we are satisfied with what we’ve become, and stop growing, then keep ourselves within those confines. We decide we like certain things, but that others aren’t for us, regardless of their merits. Development slows.
The people that don’t fit somewhere within this cycle are the ones I get close to. People with open minds and extraordinary patience, curious people, who want to learn everything and anything. People who are different this week than they were last, and noticeably, logically so.
You find it most in artists and in scientists. That’s not surprising: Any field that sneers at the already-known is bound to attract those looking for growth. What I find interesting, however, is that we frequently think of artists and scientists for their talent. We assume they must be both bright and hard-working. We never ask, however, if artists and scientists are more sincere, and I believe they certainly are.
Even artists who are notoriously cynical approach their work with surprising earnestness. The music of Frank Zappa, who notoriously disliked censorship and society and a great deal of music, takes a childlike delight in being unpredictable and difficult and above all fun. Jon Stewart, who dismantles politics and the media every night, tells jokes that revel in being both clever and immature.
The person whose work I most identify with, however, is Andy Kaufman, the surreal comedian who was always playing a character, even when he was being himself. There’s a strange dualism to Kaufman: He always revealed himself as a vulnerable person, welled up with tears during his acts — and yet he was always somebody else, not Andy Kaufman.
When one of Kaufman’s early characters became well-known, he would refuse to perform it in front of audiences. When some persisted, he would abandon his act and read The Great Gatsby to them for lengthy periods of time. There’s a simplistic frustration to that I identify with. He didn’t want to perform a routine everybody knew the punchline to, laughed in recognition. He wanted to be fresh and original. His words:
Gut laughter is where you don’t have a choice, you’ve got to laugh. Gut laughter doesn’t come from the intellect. And it’s much harder for me to evoke now, because I’m known.
I feel the same frustration to the routine. Everybody does, to varying degrees. But then we turn around and accept it, because it’s not as difficult to produce on demand. If we refuse routine for our passions, we accept it for everything else because we simply can’t be bothered. Rare is the person who treats everything like a passion. (Andy Kaufman once didn’t show up for filming because he’d decided he wanted to know what it was like panhandling on the streets.)
I want sincerity. Talent and intellect bores me. There are millions of brilliant, talented people; we don’t care about them because much as we’d protest otherwise, it’s commonplace. When we write those people off, we don’t call them stupid: We call them derivative, or generic. The entire hipster genre exists because a mass of bright people decided on a few interests, developed them, made a splash, and then stopped developing, content to stay within a few basic parameters. They will be replaced not by originality but by another limited set of interests.
These people are smart, frequently attractive, frequently write good music, but taken as a whole they become mushy. They get sneered at, not because they’re stupid, but because they’re not original. Why aren’t they original? It’s not because they’re mindless sheep, like some of us assholes are fond of saying. There are merits to what they like. But as these individuals have all grown and discovered good things, they’ve stopped growing, long enough to be categorized.
A few people have written me about this who are looking for what I’m looking for: A certain, noncategorizable aspect in people that’s difficult and rare. Every single person who’s written me like this has been involved in some sort of theatre, which initially surprised me but not anymore. Being involved in theatre to any extent means realizing that most of the ways we define ourselves are unnecessarily limited, and further learning how to assume any number of arbitrary definitions on a whim. It’s difficult to practice being other people without realizing your own limitations, and wanting to change.
The various people who wrote me defined the problem in a number of ways. They called it apathy, lack of curiosity. I prefer to think of it as insincerity. Though it starts with being lazy and tired, the problem really starts when people begin defining their world with these lazy half-thoughts, rather than fighting to stay earnest. It’s also why so many people who are not apathetic, who have strongly-held beliefs, still manage to be frustrating. It’s possible to strongly believe in something without thinking much about it. So lacking apathy is not in and of itself a solution. I can’t think of many sincere people, on the other hand, who provoke the same frustration.
What’s the solution? It’s not enough to say the word “sincerity”; we all say it and it is not enough. What does it mean to be sincere?
I think the answer is to be more constantly engaged: Not accepting, per se, and not dismissive, but ready to think about things rather than dismissing them. Rather than shooting down opinions and judging based on them, discussing them and arguing them and striving for a consensus. These are the conversations I enjoy the most: When I can explain what I love to people that don’t love the same, and when I can hear about not just what they love but why they love it. Fond memories of late nights, hours and hours spent talking about everything friends and I could think to talk about, never reaching a conclusion but rather coming to multiple realizations in the flow of it all.
It’s not small talk, no; it’s protruded and extensive and it never really ends. It’s dialogue, whether dialogue through talking or through art or through whatever else, that you get absorbed in and feel vulnerable to, because the only way to get in it is to open yourself as a person, weaknesses and all, and let yourself be struck. I know people who have never cried watching a movie. I know people who have cried watching a movie but are convinced they could never come to tears talking to another person. They are unwilling.
The small talk I do find compelling — this is a wild extension and I hope it doesn’t sound stupid — is the conversation that’s more of a duel than a conversation. Not surprisingly, theatre people revel in this. A mixture of wit and improvisation and allusion and physical comedy and, yes, multiple characters, each forcing everybody else to come up with something new and original to throw it all off balance again…
There is an art to it all, one that requires practice and mastery. I discovered it when I was fifteen and it’s what I look for in people when we’re not talking in depth. It forces me to think, almost to strategize. When I don’t find it talking to people becomes unbearable. It’s why I can’t stand most parties. Once ten minutes of conversation has passed I find myself speaking in accents, or faking elaborate coughing fits, not for attention but to force people to think.
It rarely works. I’ve developed a reputation among those people for being quirky and bizarre and I hate it, because it suggests those people haven’t spent a second thinking why somebody might do such things. It’s the same reaction given to Kaufman, which he hated. If you’re not doing to do something interesting or worthwhile then why bother? But when I attempt to explain this I’m told it’s not worth time. Then people are surprised when the people whose talent I enjoy the most are the people I most like talking to. There’s a direct correlation between one and the other, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they both require earnestness. What matters is having cared enough to think about what’s important.
There’s one final insincere thought that I think ties this altogether, and that’s this idea that you do things to achieve some nebulous goal. Don’t read a book to become ambiguously “smarter”. Don’t write a song so that you become ambiguously “popular”. If you don’t know specifically what you’re trying to do with something, you’re doing it by rote rather than doing it entirely consciously. Once you’ve decided that you only do something to achieve something else, once you’ve established that relationship between two things, then you’re not really focusing on either thing, and you’re going about both with a measure of insincerity.
Not quite as easy as just telling the world you’d like to meet more sincere people, I’m afraid; but perhaps if we realize our own faults and try to become sincere, we’ll learn that sincere people are easier to spot. I’m not entirely certain, though. This is my first attempt too.
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