Some thoughts about being literal and sincere lately

[packbat]

I don't know how literally they meant it, but in the time we've been active on the fediverse, we've seen a lot of people talking negatively about irony and trying to speak out in favor of being sincere, and ... well, we take things literally. It's literally a thing we do. And taking literally this push to be sincere, genuine, and unaffected has been...

...I think "transformative" makes it sound bigger than it is.

But it's not been as simple as flipping a switch, making a choice. It's been a learning process, or an unlearning process.

What we're noticing - what we're noticing now, anyway - is that we have more work to do. We wrote a reply just now that could have said, "It sounds like they're making some ... assumptions", and that would have been funny, but it also would have been a way to avoid having to explain why we thought those assumptions were troubling. It's not a huge change going from that to "It sounds like they're making some expansive assumptions", but it changed the remark from a vague expression of negativity at a group of people to specifically naming a problem we see in how that group of people have gone about their business.

It was less cruel, looking it over. Less cutting. Instead of saying they're bad, it says that they messed up and it says how and it points in the direction of them doing something about it. Wanting to be sincere led to us being kinder - not necessarily less negative (honestly, I think the scale of what that word implies makes it more so), but less brutal.

Wanting to be sincere has also forced us to recognize negative self-talk and respond to that instead of vaguely self-deprecating. I ... don't remember an example of that, though.

I don't know. It's a process. We think it's been worth going through.