The Poison of Modern Cynicism
A society obsessed with not seeming obsessed
This feels like a particularly transitionary time in American culture. The zombified remnants of the pre-COVID world still walk amongst the living, for now. Cultural entropy has infused itself into existing institutions, transforming them from within like a parasite. This has resulted in a demand for more disorder, more randomness, and more unscripted events that we, the audience, can feel agency over discovering. Pageantry and pomp are increasingly looked at with a perverse skepticism.
Take, for example, the Oscars and Grammys, both of which inherently rely on their prestige in order to serve as a semi-objective body for a very subjective topic. Even as viewership has steadied after a nearly half-decade of decline, both have struggled to intentionally create memorable moments. While Will Smith slapping Chris Rock was a spectacle, its cultural relevance was centered on the individual and not the event. The Grammys, long the little brother of the entertainment-event twins, have seen a roughly sixty percent decrease in viewership from 2013 to 2023.
Yet, even as these Hollywood icons fail, the people they’re designed to celebrate have cemented their place in our culture. We hear more about celebrities than we ever have before, at a depth that would be seen as impossible just a decade ago. You know where Sydney Sweeney is vacationing, and who Timothée Chalamet is dating, and what Kylie Jenner ate for dinner. Now, of course, this is not an ability dependent on stardom. Social media has filled in the murky and mundane gap of most of our lives, a power amplified by those with the discretionary spending to enjoy and show off what, for most, are inaccessible luxuries.
What is unique, to me at least, is the proclivity of celebrities and their fans to form a more personal and symbiotic relationship than existed in the past. If you’re a superfan of Timothée Chalamet, you can make an Instagram account for free and maybe, one day, interact with your idol. These superfans act as the hub for the diminishing spheres of fandom that make celebrities celebrities. You can follow a fan account and see what Chalamet was doing at Madison Square Garden without ever visiting his profile.
In that sense, we have transitioned away from celebrities as part of a larger ecosystem (i.e., Hollywood and franchises) towards a more specific and intimate relationship. Blockbuster Hollywood franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, which had the power to lift actors into an established cultural property, have lost their magic touch. Since Game of Thrones ended in 2019, no show has been able to regain the cultural relevance that served as water-cooler fodder for millions of Americans. Iconoclast viewing habits have shattered our shared entertainment consumption in much the same way that the Oscars and Grammys have been in cultural hospice while the celebrities they celebrated have thrived.
What you watch is now as much a part of your identity as it was for the people creating it, signaling to yourself and others what you like and how you like it. This dynamic is naturally most present in the lives of young people, whose ability to navigate and project their place in the world has an exacerbated value to their social standing and sense of self. Unfortunately, though, for young people and our society at large, this entertainment fracturing has led to an overwhelming and unfortunate wave of cynicism. It feels as if the trend cycle has accelerated to an unsustainable pace, cauterizing any hope of genuine interest out of fear of being too en vogue. A subculture of young people has been created to serve this market, creating a sort of inside joke for twenty-somethings eager to feel above the latest trend. While the sheep1 drink their flavored matchas and read their Dostoevsky, they jeer and remark on their impeccable ability to notice mundanity.
In simple but perhaps no less confusing terms, young people have become pretentious about being pretentious.
Even if the entertainment monoliths of Marvel and the Oscars may have been a bit flat, they at least offered some sense of actual excitement. Genuine interest, even if just about an entertainment product, is still a start to opening up more lanes of creation and enjoyment. What is not genuine nor enjoyable is dedicating your valuable time to thinking about what an uncool person would do, and then announcing to the world that you do the opposite.
You can see the prevalence of this thinking in the evergreen jokes of young and online adults. Jokes about men reading feminist literature on public transit, on a basic level, point out a very real and growing problem in our society. Young people are both more isolated than ever, with fewer friends and less free time, but also, conversely, more dependent on their larger social sphere than ever before. We have become actors for others’ enjoyment, and in turn attempted to contort glances at our literature and looks at our tattoos into the same sense of meaning that conversations once held. Thus the obvious performance art of the guy on the bus with a cardigan reading Marx with his wired earbuds should be viewed as a symptom of a larger societal sickness.
If the solution to this inauthentic performance art is pointing and laughing, the result will be no more authentic. Cynicism is the death of anything additive. It is culturally stagnant and intellectually repulsive. Yet, it has exploded into the mainstream of society. There seems to be an obsession with never being caught doing anything that could be considered performative or embarrassing. This is a noble goal, and one that I’m sure we could all agree with on face value. Who wants to do something embarrassing? Isn’t performance demeaning to our true sense of self? The answer to both is yes, but complicated. Most young people, eager to fit in and unconfident to act outside of expectation, will follow the path of least resistance—which is, in this case, a nauseating dose of skepticism about anything and everything.
When you put on these cynic-tinted glasses, the whole world can end up looking demoralizingly dull. Your entire day is spent thinking about what a millennial who says “doggo” would do, and then doing the opposite—but not so much that you start using the word avant-garde unironically, because then you would be even worse! You never want to look too polished, because you may give off the wrong impression that you cared about what you wore today—because you didn’t—but you also did try on six variations of shirts to pair with your below-the-knee jorts. You get a drip coffee at your favorite café because you saw a reel poking fun at guys who drink espresso, and god forbid the barista think of you as pretentious! You decide to open up a non-fiction book and start reading. But what if those people your age are laughing at you at the table over? Better stop now and start scrolling. Rinse, repeat.
There is a common notion that this cynicism is also itself a symptom of the socioeconomic factors that punish creativity to serve pragmatism. This is, in my view, an excuse. Our lives are more comfortable than ever before, with more free time to explore and define our interests and passions without thinking about things like clean water or medical facilities. This is not an issue of economics2 but rather an issue of agency and kindness. It feels undeniable that social media platforms incentivize pervasive nastiness in order to build status, which offers a comfortable existence for many young people. This starts with refusing to engage and perpetuate what is quickly becoming a dominant new trend of anti-pretentious-pretentious jokes. On the surface, this may appear trivial, but individual agency is the only true way for society writ large to reverse course before it’s too late.
Truthfully, though, I will admit that such a positive prognosis feels grim. Cynicism is the most intoxicating emotion not because of its cruelty—which is an unintended but not unacceptable side effect—but rather the emotional insulation it provides. Even the “pretentious” habits of a typical 2010s cosmopolitan reading their New Yorker article were at least on some level engaging in a larger societal buy-in. Even if the habits and behaviors were commonplace, they were still on some level a public display of actual enjoyment. By not participating—and by actively pointing out that they don’t participate—this new generation of jaded young adults is able to refute any potential criticism immediately. I dearly hope that this is not sustainable. That at some point, this miserable and chosen existence is shed as our species grapples with a technology that can, if left unguarded, conquer our creative spirits if we let it. That future, though, is too murky to predict, and will require real action now.
Written with sarcasm, to be clear.
Which, for the record, is never clearly defined beyond some variation of “in this economy?”