/lit/ - Literature

I have a real fear that nobody outside of a handful of autists genuinely enjoys things any more.

My friend once described me to his wife by saying, "Anon doesn't do anything ironically," and that is largely true. I don't like doing things ironically. I don't like participating in things ironically. I don't like engaging in things ironically. I want to have real, genuine experiences. I want to feel real happiness, and real joy, and real love, and also real sadness, real grief, real ruin, and real anger, real rage, real hatred.

Yet I can't help but feel that this isn't all that common these days. It feels like younger people don't have depth of emotion, or at least a lot of them don't. Like there's always this veneer of irony or cynicism that prevents deep feeling. I think this fuels some of the reaction to effortposting on 4chan. And it fuels the reaction to genuine effort in the real world, too. People put it down, people deride it, people denigrate and shame all acts of genuine feeling because they don't feel genuinely themselves.

This terrifies me. I can't imagine spending every waking moment putting on a veneer and only effecting false feelings. Yet is that what so many people are really like now?