/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18771495]

okay so i pretty much spent the last decade being a post ironic retard as a personality and worshipping sam hyde
now i’m 27 and i’m just a bitter asshole and doesn’t take anything serious. like i think of society and reality as this one huge movie and everyone is actors playing a role in it and making all these decisions ironically
but yeah i have no idea how to be evenly remotely genuine anymore. i’m always just being a smart ass to ppl and lying to ppl just to see if ppl will actually fact check me and they never do
but now i’m stuck this way and i want out
i know david foster wallace talked about new sincerity but he hero’d himself
is there anything i can read as a moral compass to get me back on track?

[Anonymous No.18771512]

>>18771495
disregard society and spend your time combing through the renaissance, the baroque, the romantics and whatever else you can
there is little sincerity to be found in modern times so it's not worth even trying

[Anonymous No.18771525]

>>18771495
well start with infinite jest then. what are you waiting for? after you finish infinite jest, if you like it, google some shit like "david foster wallace favorite books" and read some of his favorites, then branch out from there, that's how any sane person does it

[Anonymous No.18771794]

>>18771495
https://youtu.be/_kwgvyZAi6A

[Anonymous No.18773229]

The other DFW/irony got archived before I could reply so I'll reply here.
>>18741243
I mostly agree with you but I believe that the people of the past's humor does not have the same tendency towards irony as ours. Indeed as you mentioned irony implies adding a layer of meaning that has 2 sides: the "real" meaning and the "magic trick" that plays the irony part, this means that you must construct an abstract context in which these two can be different but not trivially differentiated. This isn't the case when Aristophanes makes unironic poop jokes (today such jokes can only work if operated within a much more convulted context, that of modern self-deprecating child-imitating irony), but is present in other aspects of his work, marking a progress in the abstraction of humor. We see the same things with the evolution of memes, how it went from relatable and friendly-to-all rage comics to more abstract and reference-driven humor. In the case of the internet, this process of abstraction is precisely accelerated by the cultural arms race you mentioned, and vice-versa. You could consider that abstraction (as in the manufacturing of more and more inaccessible contexts in which the humor is based) is the tool with which one constructs irony, and cultural power is what motivates people to use this tool and to integrate it into various aspects of their lives, even where it would be better to not add any humor at all.

[Anonymous No.18773482]

>>18771495
don't listen to any of these people. you are probably unhappy because you are 27 and not good at anything. no societal effort or literary movement is going to fix that. it's not like you care about that anyways. you understand a youtuber, sam hyde, as some sort of misery irony poison monster man even though he just makes videos about funny things. similarly you understand DFW as the sincerity man and then look to his personal life outcomes to see what sincerity gives you cause the sincerity man did that so whatever is sincere must reflect him as something. You need to get the people out of your head, stop letting the mere ethos of ephermal culture figures govern your life. You are at an age where you need to be impacting the world in some way.