It will probably not surprise you to learn that I really love this Alana Massey piece on why chill is dumb and destructive and shitty. It’s important and funny and so well written.

Massey is writing from the perspective of social life and relationships, which is a very good place to write from. I have made something like this case in a different context for many years. I think that the same basic dynamic crops up in a cultural expectation that pretension is the worst of all sins and that being straightforward in your desire to live a life of depth and meaning is somehow ridiculous. It is the voice that tells you that you must spend your time in an art museum making little cracks about how you know it is somehow self-involved to want to look at artwork worth looking at. It is the expectation that a novelist is very high status but an MFA student is very low status. It is your desire to be seen as smart but never to be seen attempting to become smarter, to have read important books in the past but never to be reading one now. It is never mentioning the fact that you actually liked your thesis and thought it was worth writing. It is the way in which you are trained to see your impulses to live surrounded by beauty and intellectual challenge and meaning as somehow a matter of vanity and self-absorption instead of as the most understandable desires a human can have.

I have told the story about my old African philosophy professor in undergrad. I would have questions for him after class and he would humor them with patience and understanding. He was very tall and impossibly skinny and I would follow him up the stairs to his office and he would take them two at a time and I would struggle to keep up, panting along as I asked directionless questions about existentialism and racism. We talked about negritude one day. He had been saying in class about how negritude was a type of passionate cool, an explicit decision to live with a certain and utter commitment to the narrative of your own life. I asked him how they could do that and avoid being pretentious. He laughed his laugh and said, “I don’t think they could!” Well I don’t suffer from other people’s racism and I can never access negritude but I think that there is something to be said for believing in the narrative of your own life out of the recognition that failing to do so leaves you defenseless against the pitiless accumulation of tragedy and petty indignity that are the beat that set the rhythm of adult life.

Sadly these thoughts are often misunderstood, in the Think Piece sense. They are taken to be a rejection of irony or an embrace of smarm or a collapse into glurge or, worst, a New Earnestness. This is all wrong. As soon as you have named these things they are useless  to me. The villain is never irony. In fact romance and irony are husband and wife. Besides, the purpose is never not to find yourself ridiculous. The purpose is to recognize that your ridiculousness is a product of living as a human being in a world that tempts you at all times to be anything other than human. Yes, those tweets are very dry, but they are written by people whose knuckles go white with effort as they compose them, who are sitting in the green light of a laptop screen in a dark room alone.

I’m just saying: self-ownership can keep you going in a world where violence is relentless and every communicative tool is a new means of mutual misunderstanding. Meanwhile, I know many people who are hopelessly devoted to never appearing pretentious and I have no idea what that does for them; they mostly just always seem frightened. I was very unpretentious when I was 20 and I used to lie in a ball curled up on my carpet, for hours. I don’t do that anymore.