Goodness could use a better marketing department. Somehow, cool has always tracked edgy, and been more correlated with bad behavior than good. And with a seeming disenchantment with heros and “moralizing”, this has gotten more so. I often read studies like this one, and think, what could be done to make non-performative goodness cool and high status?

I am starting my advertising campaign by taking out a full page ad for the virtues of earnestness.

Earnestness is having a tiny Renaissance in certain obscure corners of the internet, with Visakan Veerasamy and Henrik Karlsson two of its most eloquent champions.

People make fun of other people for being earnest. Sometimes this is warranted. People who are still earnest, despite being laughed at, tend to have a level of social obliviousness, or lack of self consciousness, that is both a strength and a weakness. Sometimes, also, earnestness is a product of naïveté, and people are not being laughed at for being earnest, but for being (in the critics’ eyes) so confidently wrong. But being laughed at tends to make people close up, and either not do the thing they get ridiculed for, or only do it in private.

Another word for closed-upness? Cynicism. With all apologies to Diogenes, who was pretty rad, lower-case cynicism is just lame.

Brett McKay wrote a fairly tolerable post skewering cynicism as a life philosophy. I don’t usually link to AOM, mostly because of the name. It sounds cringe, or like some manosphere thing. Also, it’s conservative, and Christian. So uncool in the SF internet filter bubble! But you know what? I have been reading AOM since 2008-ish. It’s the only “men’s lifestyle” blog I follow. And I’m going to take my own advice and be cringe. I don’t agree with all of it, but I think AOM is one of the more consistently thoughtful and sane self-help and life skills blogs.

Apart from the theory about people getting hurt and then retreating into their shell, Brett says that the antidote to cynicism is love. And earnestness is, essentially, loving something enough – even if it’s just an unpopular hobby – that they’re willing to sacrifice status (ie, comfort) for it.

Earnestness is most powerful when combined with “seriousness”: being earnest and sticking your neck out for things that matter.

In The Moat of Low Status and Crossing the Cringe Minefield, Sasha Chapin and Cate Hall argue that mastery almost always requires a period of being painfully (and often, publicly) inept. Dan Luu has written insightful insightfully on the same theme in Willingness to Look Stupid. (SMTM’s post on The Scientific Virtues harps on this, too.) Cate Hall also mentioned somewhere that there’s a reason the symbol for love includes an arrow. I’d always thought that was so dumb. But viewed through the frame of Brett’s post, it kind of makes sense!

Cringe is another concept that badly needs skewering. There is some signal in cringe. Shameless self-promotion is cringe and rightfully so. So is talking too loud on the phone in public. So far so good. The problem is that cringe has more to do with what’s currently in vogue and what’s outmoded than with what’s objectively good or bad. Skeuomorphic design is outmoded and possibly cringe, despite having some objective UX advantages over flat design and material design. Being able to tell that a button is a button has utility, no matter what the taste-makers think.

The other problem is that the people who are really cringe don’t even know it, while basically well-intentioned, self-conscious pushovers limit their degrees of freedom due to excessive social sensitivity and fear of being cringe. And a third problem is that cringe is a construct that has a lot to do with what we think other people think (about us), as a result of what we think about some third thing. People tend to be terrible at predicting what other people think and feel, yet we shape our lives around our projections of other people’s projections. It’s silly. Half the time, they probably aren’t thinking about us in the first place: they’re too busy thinking about Trump and themselves (and if they like us, what we think of them and what we think they think about us.)

Earnestness as a default mode has several advantages in addition to being uncynical and immune to cringe consciousness.

It seems to be correlated with humility, openness, and positivity. Cynicism assumes it knows what’s possible and what’s not, and then aims low and snickers at anyone who doesn’t. But predicting the future, by writing off the possibility that it could be different than the past, is kind of arrogant. Profitable for an investor, maybe, but not for an inventor.

Criticising is much easier than building, but building is more valuable. Earnestness is a builder’s attitude.

And sometimes, even when paired with “unrealistic” ideas and optimism, that attitude is just what’s needed to change the world.

When the situation is hopeless, our only hope is earnest people who don’t know, or refuse to accept, that the situation is hopeless — and therefor, try.

I would like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Ray Bradbury. I teared up just looking for a photo of the guy to use as a post image. This quote has stayed with me:

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.