The importance of being earnest...?

On the tug-of-war between sincerity and irony

I’ve been thinking about earnestness recently—specifically, about the fact that I do my level best to avoid it. Over-earnestness, by which I mean taking yourself extremely seriously, believing in something unquestioningly, and/or being unable to poke fun at yourself or your passion, seems to me eye-roll-inducing, embarrassing, cringe. In short: a terrible faux pas.

There are some who get away with it, in my opinion, but only those possessed of a very particular kind of genius. Lin-Manuel Miranda has been accused of theatre-kid corniness, but I am happy to forgive this in the man who wrote In the Heights. See also: Jeff Buckley in this 1994 interview, flopping around nonchalantly on a couch, barely smiling, never cracking a joke, saying things like: ‘I don’t even know what it is, this flesh thing, this earth thing… Sometimes I think it’s just a dream that your soul had in order to reach out to people.’ It would be excruciating, except that he was brilliant, and his brilliance seems to me to depend, in part, on this same sincere, unironic worldview. If the price of Grace (one of my favourite albums of all time) is a little po-facedness in its creator, that seems to me like a fair exchange.

In anyone else I would find this kind of talk intolerable. I am aware, however, that an intolerance for deep sincerity is not necessarily a good thing. It can border on cynicism, on disdain, on snark. In 2022 the novelist Yomi Adegoke wrote an article for British Vogue in defence of her own natural tendency towards earnestness. ‘There’s something to be said for those of us who remain immune to the will of the increasingly irony-poisoned internet, where meanness masquerading as edginess reigns,’ she wrote. Hard to argue with this, I think.

But there is also a long and admirable tradition of ironic humour that predates internet snark. For me, the ultimate figurehead of this tradition is Jane Austen, whom I adore. The flip side of my devotion to Jane, I believe, is my indifference to the Brontës. I enjoy comedies of manners that deflate pomposity and make pithy observations with a knowing half-smile and one eyebrow raised; I do not enjoy pathetic fallacy, declarations of vengeance or people beating their breasts in a storm on the moors. My being a ‘Jane Austen person’ seems like the encapsulation of my fondness for wry humour, dry humour, self-deprecating humour, parody, satire, sarcasm, irony. I appreciate this in the things I read and the people I interact with, and I strive for it, often, in the things I write. Observational humour and the sending up of contemporary social mores was my primary goal when I wrote my first novel.

I like this about myself, and I don’t want to lose it. It’s good, I think, to hold things lightly. But I also feel, increasingly, that there are certain areas of life where it holds me back. One of my main issues with over-earnestness is that it’s just kind of embarrassing. But aversion to embarrassment is not necessarily a good thing either. It can strait-jacket you, keep you buttoned up. In my recent singing lessons, for example, I was struggling to really let go into singing: to open my mouth wide, to adopt a Freddie Mercury power stance or the sincere facial expression that would help me pronounce my vowels, to perform. The internal eye that observes and regulates my behaviour wanted to dampen everything down so that it was less cringe, less easily parodied.

I also believe that one of the most powerful and meaningful things that can happen to us as humans the experience of awe. And the ground zero of awe is sincerity. It is simply not possible to experience awe ironically.

When I took magic mushrooms eighteen months ago (apologies to anyone sick of me dining out on this episode in my life, but it really did give me a lot to think about), the whole trip felt like a gradual crescendo into the wonders of earnestness. First I had a powerful realisation that an underlying theme of my life is an inability to let go of my self-consciousness, which made me very sad. Then I felt that same self-consciousness beginning to dissolve. Finally, at the peak of the trip, I transcended my self altogether and experienced awe in its purest form. I sat sobbing, hands clasped like I was praying, feeling myself in the presence of something divine, as if I’d burst out of my own brain and into the great beyond. This would not have been possible if I had retained any vestiges of my usual self-awareness. And now that my self-awareness is back, I find it difficult to talk about this quasi-religious experience without a little voice in my head saying: careful you don’t come over too cringe.

But I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to lose all inhibitions, to experience the falling away of the regulatory guard-rails I erect around my own behaviour. It felt amazing. It felt authentic. It felt true. And part of me regrets the fact that I seem to require class A drugs to experience deep, unselfconscious, uninflected sincerity. Once upon a time, if I visited a cathedral and saw people kneeling to pray, I’d feel condescendingly towards them, like: sure, okay, you do you. These days I’m more likely to feel envious. Whether or not I believe that there is anything out there to pray to seems unimportant; what I envy is the ability to kneel like that, in full view of other people, without feeling like a total chump. That ability lose yourself, to expose your innermost yearnings and vulnerabilities without caring what people think of you—without thinking wow, this is embarrassing—would be a kind of freedom.

Because if earnestness is a letting go, irony is a holding back. When you see something through the lens of irony, you’re always keeping yourself at one remove. You are always an observer, even when you’re also a participant. And turning that same ironic eye on yourself is a defence mechanism. Self-deprecating humour, much as I admire it, is also a means of self-protection. If you’re always the first to laugh at yourself, you’ll never be the butt of someone else’s joke. Even as I prize all the characteristics encapsulated by ‘Jane Austenism’, I can see that sometimes, they are a form of fear.

Recently I tried to overcome my fear of earnestness. I’ve long been interested in meditation, as I’ve written about before, and lately I’ve been doing a lot of singing, as I’ve also written about before, and it had occurred to me that chanting mantras might sit in the Venn diagram between singing and meditating. It’s something you can do at my local Buddhist centre, where I sometimes go to practice more conventional / socially acceptable forms of meditation, and so, one week in January, I tapped into my deepest reserves of earnestness and went to the mantra class. It involved sitting on a cushion and singing words I didn’t understand, set to a very simple tune. It was a bit like the big ‘om’ at the end of a yoga class, but with a few more words and a few more notes, and spread out over the course of an hour.

During the hour, people more at ease with religious sincerity got up to light candles and prostrate themselves before the Buddha. This was not for me, but I was glad they were doing it because I was enjoying the flickering candlelight in the dim room. I also enjoyed singing the same thing over and over, and not just because it was a good way to practice my singing technique. I enjoyed the tingling in my limbs and head when we stopped singing and sat in silence, and afterwards, I felt like it might possibly have been the most successful attempt at meditation I had ever made.

I went every week for about four weeks, and it was great. Then I went to a session that wasn’t quite such a success. There was a woman covering for the usual facilitator. She knew plenty of mantras, but she didn’t sing them very tunefully, so it was hard to know exactly which notes were the right ones. Everyone just sort of… guessed. At least one person singing was certifiably tone deaf, and someone else was singing at a comically high volume, making it impossible for the voices to blend. The result was a morass of vocal sludge that did not deserve to be taken seriously. But obviously, no one laughed. All I could think was how ripe for parody it all was: how much I wanted to parody it. I sat there thinking not about the mantras, but about how I could represent the situation, whether in writing or in conversation, in a way that would make others laugh. When I got home, I started writing something that I hope might do exactly that.

It’s not a coincidence that I didn’t mention the mantra chanting on Substack—even though it was highly relevant to topic of my last essay—until I could make it clear to all and sundry that I’m not taking it too seriously. That I’m not too earnest about it. That I’m not one to do anything cringe, and that if I were to do anything cringe, I would be doing so in full, ironic awareness of the fact. And even though I can see that this is a form of fear, I’m also pleased about it. Part of me is disappointed that my best hope of experiencing some authentic, drug-free sincerity got scuppered. But it’s also a relief to know that when I stray into the realm of Brontëism, Austenism is never too far away, waiting in the wings to make sure I still know how to laugh.

I’m not too keen on reductionist definitions of ‘national character’, but I do wonder if my feelings about earnestness and irony have anything to do with being British. I’m aware that many, if not the majority, of my subscribers are in the US, and I’m interested to think about the degree to which this kind of distinction is cultural. I suspect that aversion to earnestness is probably more prevalent in the UK and on the east coast of the US, but what do I know, really. I’d love to hear what you think.

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In other news, I wrote a piece about my experience of spending a month in Quebec City last summer, writing and wandering, and it’s available to read here. Enjoy the *embarrassing* picture of me clutching some wet socks.