The Importance of Not Being Earnest

Humor, irony, surrealism are critical to inhabiting the Permaweird with grace

When I was a child, I would often sit with my mother while she chopped vegetables. To entertain me, and herself, she’d often point out how a particular potato or carrot looked like something else, such as a bird, a mouse, or a bottle. Sometimes she’d stick bits of stalk into the vegetable, or prick eyeholes, to exaggerate a particular effect, and let me play with it a bit before chopping it. The vegetables did not turn out any worse for that lack of gravitas attending the chopping. In fact, arguably, they turned out better than more earnestly chopped ones in an alternate universe nearby.

I think I’ve inherited from my mother this tendency to do every mundane thing in a somewhat surreal way. I don’t believe in living in the moment. I believe in living slightly off to one side of it. Reality is best looked at side-eyed. This tendency is one pole of what I suspect is the governing tension of my personality, the other pole being a kind of anti-idealistic pragmatism that I think I’ve inherited from my father. I’ve never consciously noted or named it before (I suppose it’s like water to me), but let’s call it pragmatic surrealism.

Pragmatic surrealism is a sensibility born of always doing what is obviously necessary, but never being bound by unnecessary ways of seeing what you’re doing. The phenomenology of a behavior is absolute, necessary, and (within the bounds of inventive variation) inescapable. But any construction or narration you place upon that phenomenology need be none of those things.

Tautologically, you have to chop vegetables to end up with chopped vegetables, but you don’t have to see chopping vegetables as the instrumental business of reducing plant parts to form factors suitable for cooking and eating. You can see it as a little magic-realist journey through a world of strangely transforming shapes that can mean different things. Or as a mystical-mathematical act of reducing material reality to platonic primitives like discs and cubes. Or as research for inventing a vegetable chopping machine. Or as an unfolding sequence of tiny stories, each with its own tiny narrative arc. A cucumber that looks a bit like a bird doesn’t have to be sliced or cubed mindlessly and go right into the salad bowl, its journey uneditorialized and unnarrated. It can spend a transient moment starring as a parakeet (perhaps with a bit of carrot for a beak) in an improvised micro-fiction performance between strokes of the knife blade. That performance is as much part of the reality of the cucumber as the salad it ends up in.

The presence of multiple understandings around an unfolding behavior manifests as slight variations between and within repetitions, where a single-function automated instrument might perform the behavior with no discernible variations. This is one reason a metromome sounds less interesting than a human drummer keeping up a steady beat. Variety is not just the spice of life, it is life.

Or to put it another way, to even the minimally alive imagination, there is no such thing as a purely instrumental behavior.

There is a kind of escapism to this sensibility of action, but it is not the retreating escapism of high fantasy. You’re not going to conjure up an elaborate world of superheroes with epic backstories in the liminal seconds between knife strokes while chopping vegetables. You’re going to conjure up something vastly more powerful, an actually inhabitable temporality that I call the adjacent impossible. A zone where apparent historical necessity and inevitability can mutate into unexpectedness because you’re attending to the full meaning of every behavior.

Behaviors, understood on their own terms, outside the logic of the instrumental motives that seem to the earnest eye to fully determine them, constitute a latent space of ahistorical, extra-temporal unexpectedness. Because this space exists, and can be accessed, the future can repeatedly and reliably escape the past, beat-by-beat, continuously weaving the new into the old, noise into deadening signal, and possibility into necessity.

The image I like to keep in mind is that of the clock escapement. With each swing of the pendulum, the mechanism “escapes” between the tick and the tock, and in that little liminal interval, impossibilities can be entertained long enough to reshape actualities.

I think, through all of 2023, I was circling the idea of non-earnestness as a desirable disposition. The idea of pragmatic surrealism that I’m trying to work out offers one way of being systematically non-earnest, and in 2024, I feel like giving that a deliberate and conscious shot.

I suppose it’s obvious that I’m not a particularly earnest person. Which is not the same thing as not being a sincere person or serious person. I’m usually sincere, sometimes serious, but almost never earnest. These are fine distinctions that not all are interested in making or noting, but I’m going to trust that you are.

Let me define all three:

Sincerity is good-faith alignment between stated and revealed motives up to the limit of introspective self-awareness. Lack of sincerity is usually some sort of hypocrisy and an indicator of potentially malicious intentions. Too much sincerity is also a failure mode, where you develop a fragile sensitivity to any misregistration between stated and revealed motives, and agonize about motives for every little thing. Not every behavior is worth the introspective effort to achieve alignment.

Seriousness is an impedance match between stakes and behaviors. You don’t pause to scroll TikTok if you’re running towards a fire with a fire extinguisher. Lack of seriousness is usually a mark of cluelessness or plain ignorance (if your own stakes are involved) or selfishness (when others’ stakes are involved). Too much seriousness is also a failure mode, where you treat the stakes as being higher than they are.

Which brings us to earnestness. For my purposes, I will define earnestness as being helplessly locked into a single way of looking at what you’re doing, unaware of other ways. If you’re chopping vegetables, you’re chopping_vegetables(). Unlike the other two related attitudes, which are generally strengths by default, I think earnestness is nearly always a weakness by default, associated with unvarying functional fixedness around behaviors. In most circumstances, an overly literal-minded single-perspective way of being leads to an uncreative, unimaginative, and unvarying way of doing. A way that cannot escape the lifelessness of pure instrumentality.

Non-earnestness then, opens the door to creative, imaginative, variation in an unfolding behavior. It opens the door to life itself.

This matters particularly when you’re dealing with complexity. Life, arguably, is nature’s “solution” to the problem of complexity, and the essence of that solution is non-earnestness.

Life, Complexity and Non-Earnestness

I suspect there are only a few known and culturally familiar modes of being non-earnest, and the discovery of a new mode of non-earnestness ought to count as a major historic event; a consciousness-raising elevation of life itself to another plane.

I can think of only three pure or independent eigen-modes of non-earnestness. In order of historical emergence, I think they are humor, irony, and surrealism. I’d guess humor is at least as old as civilization and possibly as old as life. Irony proper seems like an outgrowth of early modern conditions. Surrealism is the newest and youngest mode, barely a century old. I think this potted history is fun, but I won’t insist upon it. Maybe there are more modes, and maybe they appeared in a different sequence, or were all always-already present.

My three modes form a Venn diagram and combine in various ways, leading to four additional mixed modes, but let’s not nerd out over that. Let’s talk basics, and why non-earnestness matters.

Here’s the core of my argument: the more complex the circumstances, the more dangerous it is to inhabit them from a single perspective; ie earnestly. The only really good reason to do so is when dealing with small children or deeply traumatized adults who both need some earnestness in their environment to feel safe.

The importance of non-earnestness is evident even in the “simple” task of chopping vegetables. If you’re doing that for more than 15 minutes, you’ll likely get bored, and start to get sloppy and careless. Creative multi-modal engagement with chopping vegetables — seeing shapes perhaps, or noting colors and textures with an artist’s eye — keeps you mindfully absorbed for longer, more robustly.

Recall the clock-escapement metaphor — your mind can and should wander a little around the core behavior. In your brain there are two basic modes — mind wandering, sustained by the default-mode network, and focus, sustained by the task-positive network — and my assertion is that they should work together like a clock escapement, unfolding as little micro-fugues of fancy that depart from and return to a base literal mode, and trace out a kind of strange-attractor orbit around the nominal behavior. Something like this is visible at even more basic levels: A healthy heart exhibits high HRV (heart-rate variability). Fitness trackers use HRV as the primary indicator of cardiovascular health. Low variability is a mark of poor health or disease.

Now apply that same principle to complex, large-scale systems and problems. Can you afford to be on-the-nose earnest in thinking about them? Are humor, irony, and surrealism optional extras?

We commonly recognize this point in relation to formal reflection and analysis, especially in armchair temporalities that lack urgency. The late Charlie Munger famously championed “multi-model” thinking.

That’s not what I’m talking about (that’s often just multiple passes of earnest thinking). I’m talking about multi-modal doing, at the level of the breath-by-breath, beat-by-beat basal tempo of the activity. You never just chop vegetables. You also put on a little theater of funny shapes for your own entertainment. You never just “paint the fence.” You also learn a karate block.

The more complex the circumstances, the more dangerous it is to act in ways that are entailed by only a single perspective. Such action is fragile and degenerate. Robust action contains multitudes. It contains obliquities that harbor strategic depth. It contains tempo variations that encode unsuspected depths of adjacent informational richness.

Action must be richer than thought, because phenomenology is always richer than any single theorization. Earnestness — action confined to the imagination of one theory of itself — is behavioral impoverishment. Non-earnestness is proof of richness. Proof of life.

This is not a matter of efficiency. It is a matter of philosophical hygiene. A matter of systematic skepticism of theorized motivations. A matter of what we might call dimensional thoroughness in behavior, where it sort of jitters through all the curled-up and illegible dimensions of meaning and intent we may not be immediately sensitive to, until circumstances sensitize us to their existence. To be overly earnest is to stamp those dimensions out of existence.

There is more than one way of looking at complex systems, and action within a complex system must make sense in more than one way. There must be more than one categorical scheme through which an unfactored reality can be viewed and justified.

And beyond conscious categories of inhabitance (maybe you chop vegetables with two actively conscious modes — literal chopping and imaginative shape-seeing) there is an unconscious sea of meaning within every behavior. The variety and multi-modality you are aware of, and perhaps consciously trying to shape, is only the tip of the iceberg. Every behavior has unseen depths to it. Beyond even those we recognize through humor, irony, or surrealism.

In fact, the more complex a system, the more behavior must become unconsciously attuned to its own unseen and untheorized depths.

But even beyond all these practical and philosophical reasons to be consciously and unconsciously attuned to the fullness of a behavior, I suspect non-earnestness is what makes a behavior worth enacting at all. The earnest life is not worth living. To live non-earnestly is to choose life over theories of it, with every breath.

It could hardly be otherwise. After all, it would be ironic to choose non-instrumental, non-earnest ways of being and doing for instrumental and earnest reasons.

Surrealism as Orientation

The particular mix of non-earnest modes that is suitable for particular circumstances is partly a function of personality, and partly a function of larger historical conditions. I think we’re currently caught between the retreat of irony and the advent of surrealism.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that the last decade has been marked by a broad and intense backlash against irony, the dominant mode of non-earnestness between 1989-2010 or so (I think humor dominated the 70s and 80s). Now, after a transient decade of various sorts of unstable forays into deadening collective earnestness, it feels like we’re shifting en masse to a dominantly surreal mode.

While there are of course threads of humor and irony too, they are not as dominant as they used to be.

Personally, I’ve decided to approach 2024 with a surreal orientation. I don’t quite know what the hell that means yet, but I plan to fuck around and find out.

Humor would be nice to have in what’s already shaping up to a joyless year, and irony will provide, as it always does, some solace in the darkest, most joyless depths of it. But the workhorse modality is going to be surrealism. Beat-by-beat, breath-by-breath, the creativity of our responses to the year is going to be shaped by our ability to repeatedly escape into the adjacent impossible, and from that vantage point spot the germs of new possibilities. You cannot jailbreak the future from tyranny of the past without stepping outside of both.

At the macro level, there is zemblanity all around. It is hard to escape the thought that we are going to be unsurprisingly unlucky as a planet in 2024, with few and uncertain bright prospects to alleviate the general gloom. We are going to end up with a cognitively compromised geriatric as US President by December. We are going to let two bloody wars grind on. We are going to see weaponized AI compound myriad miseries.

There is simply no solace to be found at the level of broad-strokes macro-history.

If there is serendipity —surprising luck — to be found in 2024, it will be found and nurtured at the micro level. By people who understand what it means to chop vegetables non-earnestly, and escape the tyranny of the real with every breath and stroke. By people who are not too scared of life to stubbornly resist the temptations of humor, irony, and surrealism in service of the idiot gods of authenticity and earnestness.

Here’s to the escapements in our heads guiding us to little escapes within every beat. Happy 2024!

(Rather appropriately, it is a leap year; there will be an extra surreal day between February 28th and March 1st).