unseriousness is a trauma response.

let's get serious.

Ayrus Hill, Unsplash

When I first joined Substack last March, I think I thought of it more as a serious literary platform - an alternative independent publication for already published authors/ writers - and so it was more of a library for me to learn rather than a place I felt qualified to write in. My perspective has completely changed as it is clearer now more than ever how it wants so badly to be just like any other social media platform that has met its demise/ downfall. (this is a complete sidenote but did you know the definition of insanity is attempting the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?) So that being said, I strangely feel free. I feel like I can truly use this space more as a journal (which mine are always filled more or less with streams of consciousness or quotes, or the internet’s favorite word, musings I put under different subject titles) rather than an essay or article I’d think a publishing platform would take seriously. Which coincidentally leads me to my first meandering: our current age of unseriousness.

I’d like to begin by saying if you have not read Ted Gioia’s post titled, Is There a Crisis of Seriousness or ayan artan’s, In Defense of Pretension go and do that now - they certainly have sharper, more refined voices than I currently possess and I highly recommend their perspectives. (I think seriousness is a prerequisite for pretension.)

From Gioia’s Article:

The undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete,” [Sontag] declared, “with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries.” In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product… The public accepts this as a matter of course. They hardly expect anything to be real nowadays.

Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable. You have to give Susan Sontag some credit, the inflection point in accelerating fakeness happened almost exactly when she complained about the collapse in seriousness in the mid-1990s.

Technology was setting the agenda for creativity. Everything else—script, directing, acting, was subservient to the computer-generated imagery. But 1996 was just the beginning of cinema as a digital spectacle. With each passing year, the artificial digital component has increased, and the real human element decreased.

And from ayan:

everywhere you look, resentment towards anything that would allow us to exercise our minds or build us up as people capable of critical thinking is growing.

capitalism has turned us into selfish, contradictory beings. why do we see the internet grouse at fiction readers, pointing to self-help books by men in grey business suits as the only reading that ‘counts’? this war being waged has specific victims in mind.

it’s why subjects like tech do not have the same vitriol aimed at them; these tech execs are learned in a way that the capitalist can place value on.

art is the curing of callousness. we have doctors who heal our bodies, psychiatrists who are tasked with healing our minds. it is information, books, paintings, films that can heal our souls.

Aftersun, Shotdeck

You can spend all the millions you want on a press tour, have Q & A’s with the most thoughtful, authentic answers and wear costume after costume on a slew of stretched-out carpet but nothing will be as “viral” or gain an “audience response” faster than someone creating a meme of the actor’s weeping face or a face in anguish or devastation or whatever overtly human human emotion you can think of that instead of connecting us to our own humanity quickly takes us out of reality and into triteness - into an era of complete and utter unseriousness.

The age of unseriousness causes people to look at everything without seeing anything. It is the society of spectacle which is an anti–art stance to viewing the world. “To be an artist means to never avert one’s eyes.” (Akira Kurosawa)

let’s get serious, let’s be real, are we really only here for a good time?

An invisible, yet undeniable, line is being drawn in the sand between those who take our present reality seriously and those who consistently choose to numb themselves in a life of distraction. Now this present reality for some is absolutely understandable as we are living in an age of seeming powerlessness amplified by a lack of societal vision - we have no collective view as a nation of where we want to go - and hopelessness, or futurelessness, leads to unseriousness behavior. If you do not have any thing to build upon or look forward to - of course you’re going to choose to mindlessly scroll or shop your days away. America readily accepted consumerism as an identity because things distract us from our real pain. And America’s collective pain is unbearable for any one individual to hold space for. We choose to dull our senses when we have the tools to enlighten ourselves because we are unable to make sense of our present reality - or see a way out of it. “They train algorithms to close minds.” (Corey Smith) but we currently live in a society who wants their mind closed. It’s easier than the grueling work of healing and enlightenment - which art inevitably brings.

We as people naturally seek for someone to help us make sense of the world around us because either we lack the willpower or energy to seek it out ourselves. And so when someone comes along and offers us both a vision for life that resonates within us and a community of others already a part of that particular narrative, it becomes almost impossible to resist. This is religion, this is country, this is meme culture.

The reason technology in its present form isn’t sustainable and is downright self-destructive (how can you keep expanding your dominion over a world if there is no world?) is because, in it, there is no future, only now. Futureless people buy more, need more distraction, need more ways to cope. We are no longer a nation but the commodification of one. We are no longer citizens but consumers of not our own dreams or desires but of the pseudo-dreams and desires created by the necessity to perpetuate the illusion of progress and an overarching narrative required to keep a nation, a nation. But each and everyday this narrative is crumbling more and more before our eyes and beneath our feet. Instead of unifying us, this narrative has sown division, hate, and the devaluation of human life - and they shaped technology around our disconnect as if that was all technology could be.

I don’t think being serious equates to a lack of fun or joy in life - I think it’s living, thinking, creating in context. It’s having a real understanding of how things are and how we got here so that our art then becomes a more authentic and potent expression of hope and future. In our current dopamine hit culture - a constant high has to be upheld in order to prevent withdrawals. Seriousness takes away the “feel good” nature we have become so accustomed to and we mistake the lack of euphoria or at the very least distraction for something bad. But sobering thoughts, or a sobriety of the senses, isn’t negative - in fact it is the opposite - a launching pad for a deeper, richer life.

We have become a society of the quantifiable - that which we can obtain or qualify with logic, reason, or numerical value. But art operates in the unquantifiable - that intangible light bursting within. In fact it is in the business of the unquantifiable. What Herzong called “ecstatic truth.”

Of course we cannot disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which truth emerges. -Werner Herzog

(Forgive me for some reason I did not cite this excerpt in my notes and I cannot find where I found it but it needed to be quoted. I will cite later once I find where I read this!)

“Postmodernism is coming to its inevitable conclusion. It will be remembered as a movement / era that provided a future generation with nothing serious. It will be remembered as a philosophy that turned away from truth and beauty. It is obviously a movement that came from a time when it made sense to reject modernism’s failures. But it also threw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m going to discuss this from my perspective as a writer and artist (rather than from a political one).

Societies can’t embrace a philosophical view that rejects objective reality or truth. This will never lead us in the right direction. Following this path begets a culture that continuously produces work that seems trendy and striking but within a few years reveals as lacking in…well…truth. Truth is what sustains a story or a work of art over time. Future human beings will not recognize the world we live in now but they will recognize universal truth.

Postmodernism has created the loop we’re stuck in currently in western culture. We are basically hitting our heads again and again against a wall that we refuse to acknowledge. We can’t move beyond it or towards something sustainable.

We’re now treating the arts and entertainment in a way that is unserious and has been normalized as such. It’s a very bad thing to do. Hardly anything from this era will be taken seriously over the next hundred years.”

This person’s take on postmodernism, leads to my next observation, American unseriousness led to our tastelessness. America has confused its insatiable appetite for taste - and they are far from the same thing. There is no longer such a thing as American craftsmanship. We became an authority in digital media and entertainment through fear, manipulation, and the wealth of a few wanting to control a global narrative and even that is crumbling. (As Laurent François points out, “the illusion of a totally Americanized web masks a more complex reality. Networks evolve based on their users. In many regions, local platforms surpass American giants.”) America has lost its taste because it is no longer hungry for anything except the illusion that it is full- of appearing to the world as full. It advertises itself as a post-utopia while simultaneously still seeking to add new territory and spaces to its “destiny” showing the world that full and satisfied are far from the same thing. Because that is what unserious consumption leads to - an overstuffing of everything and zero satisfaction.

As a storyteller and artist, I’m not talking from an Americanized mind, I’m talking from a humanized heart. Art is a threat to the current narrative because it is built off self-sacrifice, not self-interest. And we are not just at a point where we have to save the world from disaster - we have to save ourselves from ourselves. And that starts with getting serious.

Ending with another quote from Ted Gioia:

“These serious people are the real deal, and don’t have time for fluff. They are already detaching themselves from the businesses and institutions that dish out cotton candy culture.

They will be the new influencers—but don’t expect them to use that degraded word. From their perspective, they will be replacing influencer culture with something much, much stronger.

Or better yet, let’s call them leaders—because that’s what they will be. And that’s such a better word than influencer.

These tough-minded individuals will eventually set the tone for more serious engagement throughout society. This is inevitable—and betting against it is a sucker’s wager.”

Annie Spratt, Unsplash