Are You Cynical or Earnest?

As we consider self-narratives around the things we believe and our conversion stories, few things are as helpful as being able to distinguish between earnest and ironic narratives. If you’re wondering why there is so much nostalgia for the 90s and why Zoomers and teenagers seem increasingly existentially fraught, ‘irony and earnestness’ help to name the mood of our generations and cultural moments.

Narrative-identity

I first encountered Dan MacAdams's work earlier this summer. MacAdams is a renowned psychologist who researches self-narratives, autobiographical memory, and other related themes. His work on personality makes popular instantiations such as Meyers-Briggs and the Enneagram look like trivial games. 

In a paper that recounts the mistakes made and lessons learned through his career, MacAdams details what he calls “the redemptive narrative.” Through 30 years of research, he found that highly generative adults, those who are naturally concerned for and committed to the well-being of future generations and other prosocial behaviors, tend to tell their personal narratives in redemptive ways. “Their stories often begin with childhood scenes that juxtapose two contrasting themes: (1) I enjoyed an advantage early in life (was lucky, fortunate, chosen for distinction) and (2) I witnessed suffering, pain, oppression, or the like in the lives of people around me, or in the world in general.”

In other words, higher-functioning adults generally see themselves as “the gifted protagonist who journeys forth into a dangerous world.” 

If one does not have a redemptive narrative about their own life, one tends to be pessimistic and shirk various forms of prosocial behavior. But as MacAdams discovered, not all redemptive narratives are the same. In his book, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, MacAdams “examined the cultural origins of redemptive life stories in American history and heritage, American autobiographies and myths, Hollywood movies, Sunday sermons, American self-help books, and many other sources.”

As Americans, when we come of age our clear social ideology and developed values tend to earnestly revolve around the American dream. “I eventually came to see the redemptive self as a master cultural narrative in American society. It is a story about how to live a good life at midlife in America [emphasis mine], a story that many Americans recognize and aspire to…. I came to see culture as providing the psycho-literary menu for narrative identity.”

Lest we succumb to apathy and despair, we need something to hope for—a narrative to endure suffering and even some of the mundane and litigious aspects of life. 

Hope is vital to human existence. But McAdams’s work highlights that Americans have become accustomed to needing a bit more furnishing in their redemptive narratives. We don’t merely hope to grow from our hardships, we want to get the girl, the promotion, and the amenities of a bourgeois lifestyle. However, what happens when we grow up and we are not so handsomely rewarded? What happens when our earnest and sincere narratives fail us?

Irony v. Earnestness

Whether we were raised with middle-class expectations or the values of strong religious communities, Americans have largely been raised in earnest and sincere environments. We believe in the pursuit of happiness and the ability to obtain happiness through grit, determination, and a bit of luck. 

Commentators and philosophers have long pointed out the juxtaposition between these earnest narratives and their ironic parodies. 

Someone or something is earnest if it is straightforward. It doesn’t wink at you when it tells you a story. One of the most poignant examples of earnestness is, as Thomas Flight pointed out, Top Gun: Maverick, where one can see a group of pilots singing “Great Balls of Fire,” playing football on the beach, and Tom Cruise standing in front of a giant American flag, saying, “Show me what you got”—all with complete sincerity.

On the other hand, someone or something is ironic if it snarks at prevailing stories, tropes, and conventions. For every person who appreciates the sentimentality of something like “when you wish upon a star,” the ironic mood rolls its eyes. The aura of irony is that of a shabby hipster, dragging a cigarette and disavowing the American dream as a fake, meritocratic system that privileges a few.

The 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony in Paris was decidedly ironic in its depictions of the Last Supper and the decapitated Marie Antoinette. In fact, the French Revolution and its descendants are one of modernity’s primary inspirations for irony. As R. Jay Magill Jr. wrote in his essay, We've Been Arguing About Irony vs. Sincerity for Millennia:

While there are earnest and ironic anecdotes in any era, culture tends to ebb and flow between these stations. With that in mind, do you think irony or earnestness has increased in the last 20 years?

Albeit, these are self-selected samples. I am making a subjective comparison largely based on current “vibes” and my own observations. But I do believe our age has increasingly embraced ironic and cynical narratives over “redemptive” ones—not just in media—but in every facet of life. What’s more, I see irony and cynicism no longer merely being adopted by 17-year-olds going through their rebellious phase. It seems to be bleeding back into the moods of younger and younger kids as well. 

Naive Despair 

With the rise of social media, you may have noticed that earnest and encouraging content does not reach virality as often as negative content or distracting mind-numbing entertainment. In journalism, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ “Even controlling for the same news story, framing [stories] more negatively increases engagement,” says Claire E. Robertson, co-author of the paper Negativity drives online news consumption. And whether we are liberal or conservative, we are addicted to bad news—we scroll past good news and click on the sensational. 

As is often the case, younger generations are leading the ironic charge against the superficial slogans and narratives they were raised with. But ours is the first generation to have this dynamic refracted through digital media and its algorithms and platforms. 

Even though it’s been shown that middle-class millennials will be financially better off than their boomer parents, Americans are pessimistic about the future. The pathology of Gen Z and many younger millennials believe cynicism is a clear-eyed assessment of reality. Some applaud this cynicism—they see our world of wars, school shootings, and climate crisis as impossibly difficult. Others are skeptical of this kind of alarmism, sharing good and nuanced reasons not to affirm catastrophic reads on the world while still taking existential problems seriously.

Even still, “irony is the ethos of our age.” On the spectrum of cynical to superficial, I would go further and say we not only tend towards cynicism, but despair. 

According to a recent CDC study, American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent.” “This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded,” wrote Derek Thompson.

To be sure, Millennials and Zoomers have good reason to question prevailing redemptive narratives. As my friend Brett McCracken wrote,

And contrary to the American redemptive narrative that earnestly tells us an upper-middle-class lifestyle is waiting for us on the other side of our struggles, such outcomes are rarely so simple. As the memes say,

Millennials and Zoomers may have good reasons to embrace irony and cynicism, but we might ask ourselves, how far should we let our cultural mood shape us? How far should we let pessimism impact our personal decisions? Do we have more reasons to give ourselves over to irony and cynicism and despair than previous generations? 

I don’t believe we do. 

As Ross Douthat pointed out last year, “I think that the mood of pessimism, existential stakes, etc., that younger people are sort of marinating in is not self-created. It is created by older people, mediated through the technology of the internet….” Irony, cynicism, and doomscrolling are not the only culprits for our despair, but they are aiding our fatalistic beliefs.

I don’t want to try to convince anyone to just be more earnest and accept ideologies and prevailing narratives uncritically. But I do believe that younger generations need to think again about letting popular assessments of culture dictate how we conduct the most basic and humane parts of our lives.

If we cannot time the market perfectly, what chances do we have at perfectly timing when to get married, have kids, move closer to family, or commit to being a part of a local institution? While everyone’s timing and involvement in these things will vary, the more foreboding our cynicism and pessimism, the more we will perceive such generative and humane activities as too risky and irresponsible.

But we are not merely hopeless, passive consumers. We are no more doomed than any generation before us. We have real agency, not because we are Americans living at the right time in the right market, but because we are humans. 

Yes, we may have to reimagine what it means to live a good life in America—we may have to free ourselves from certain expectations—but despite our challenges and tragedies and all of our #GenerationalTraumas, when one considers the general quality of life in the 21st Century in the West, there is almost no better time in human history to start a family.

We may resonate with the lyrics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” more than we resonate with dreams to go to the moon, but, irony of ironies, that might be a narrative worth criticizing.