I was looking through a transcript of a podcast episode I did with Chris Williamson of Modern Wisdom, and I noticed I mentioned… lemme just paste the transcript

Chris: Explain to me the line between this– people that lop seriously and people that are serious, and the fact that what everyone is trying to do in some form or another is get all of the benefits of seriousness, i.e. being taken legitimately whilst not necessarily having to pay the price of seriousness, which is consistency and hard work and all the rest of it, and also being able to seem chill and cool and like the vibes are vibing. What’s the line between this sort of public world of seriousness and how it can cause cynicism and criticism among the general population?”

“That’s a good question. The messy thing is that nobody has it all figured out at the start, right? I love to look up the earliest work of anybody who’s very successful now–like you see like Obama’s earliest speeches, or Jason Mraz’s first concert. They look nervous! They don’t look like they know what they’re doing. You know, so in the earlier stages, I think if anybody has intellectual honesty, they are going to be like, well, I think I got a shot, but I’m not completely sure. But I’m gonna try. Right? And you know, so there will be self-doubt and if someone tells them you’re not serious, they might be like, am I? I’m not, I’m not, I think I am, but I’m not sure. Right? Like, there’s that cluster of people and then, okay, there’s also the cluster of, I imagine Kanye is probably at the extreme end of just radically certain of themselves. And that group probably splits into those that make it, and those that crash and burn. And then there’s like out of survival bias, you get, uh, you hear from a lot of those who do make it, um, I’m drifting from your question you were asking about. Like that causes cynicism.”

“So basically the way that, the way that I see it is that the fact that so many people want to be seen as serious and so few are, and that you don’t really have a way to expedite working out whether or not somebody is legitimate in their claims of seriousness beyond just waiting, which is the exact opposite of expediting that causes cynicism to occur as a defense mechanism against sort of fraud and bullshit. And the trouble you say with cynicism as a defense mechanism is you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything good ever happening for you too. Task failed successfully.”

“Yeah. I think it’s especially difficult when you’re starting out, which is why I tend to think about and focus on teenagers and like people in the early twenties a lot because that’s such a… I do think as you get older, if you’ve been somewhat rigorous, you have like some hygiene principles in how you examine things and who you talk to. Over time, you cultivate a social graph, a social network, that’s the people in your life. If you have other serious people around you who are serious about figuring out who’s for real and who’s not, it gets easier a little bit. You might still make some errors here and there. But after a while, I think Steve Jobs has this quote about how, and he’s talking about a company and running a team. When you hire A people and you put them in a context with other A people, they become self-policing in only welcoming other A people and like pushing, and like kind of, not necessarily pushing away, but like they keep out the B people, I guess. But yeah, so if you are not rigorous about your information environment and who you allow to take up your time and energy and attention, cynicism becomes a natural response because you keep seeing failures and you keep seeing, you know, evidence of people bullshitting you and, you know, if you look out into the world there’s always people bullshitting, right? Like I have an essay I want to write I haven’t written yet it’s called Shitwatch and it’s like it’s already funny. It’s like, there’s like the incentive, the social media algorithms incentivize high arousal emotions. And so there are people who, whether coordinated or not, end up, so the analogy I give is, imagine there’s a group of people in your city who go around looking for like the worst public toilets they can find, and then they look for the shit, and then they scoop up the shit and they present it to you. And he’ll say, hey, here, look at this shit. Smell it. Taste it. I don’t know. And you’ll be like, that’s disgusting. What’s wrong with you? But we do the equivalent with information and content and be like, oh, here’s these people fighting. Here’s this. And it’s like, in a city of millions of people, there’s going to be someone fighting somewhere. And if you can scroll through some feeds where it’s like, fight compilations, and it says, oh my god, in five minutes of scrolling, you think that the whole world is full of people fighting. But if you go out into a restaurant, everyone’s just sitting around having lunch or dinner. So there’s that. With regards to cynicism, I think it’s very much a function of how well you curate your information. And I think there’s this unfortunate tendency for people, especially intellectual types, who want things to be objective. And I remember thinking this way as well. I need to know all the bad things. I need to know the truth. I need to know the whole… So you know that somewhere out there, there is shit. True. You don’t need to be in denial of that. But you also don’t need to like go around sniffing it. You know what I mean? You don’t need to like immerse yourself in that. So my recommendation is always to like do an audit of what you have been consuming, what you have been reading, who you’re talking to. How does that make you feel? Does it inspire you towards action? Does it inspire you to, you know, make things better? If it doesn’t, if it’s making you feel more helpless, more angry, more all of those things, then like what’s the point? You know, and even just knowing that you can experience different realities by modifying what you allow in, I think that’s like a huge, like as a way of overcoming cynicism. And, you know, like our to be to be fair, like as a species, we are new to having smartphones. It’s only it’s been like 15 years, 16, 17 years. And it takes time for like the collective to develop like antibodies and proper protocols. It’s funny, you can read up about when the telephone was invented. People didn’t know how to use it. And they would just call randomly at any hour of the day. They wouldn’t say hello. They’d just start talking. And they would have to write into magazines to complain about people crank callers and all that. And it took a while for healthy norms to develop. And I think we’re still in the process of figuring out how to have healthy chaotic information environment diets. But the scary thing is that, you know, like AI and all these things are coming up. And so by the time we adapt to whatever is happening now, like new stuff is going to happen faster. So it’s, it’s, it’s a challenge.”