Golden Love

I found myself thinking about earnesty in the shower yesterday.

I worry about being too earnest a lot. Whenever I try to do creative writing, I find that I inevitably return to super earnest nostalgia. On some level, I guess that is fine, because earnest narrative non-fiction is what I do and it's what I'm best at. It's good to be good at something, right?

On the other hand, I wish I could do more than that. Every time that I've tried to branch out into different types of writing, it doesn't really work out well. There's even been times where I try really hard to do something new, move into fiction, and it still just ends up being a mess of earnest nostalgia. I want to be more than that, you know? I want to be able to write an actual story out of nothing, rather than just churning out whiteboy feelings.

I think that earnesty is slippery slope for white guys. When you start with it, people applaud you for communicating your feelings, which requires bravery to some degree. That's important, I guess, and I suppose that talking about your feelings works against the shittier parts of masculinity to some degree, but the problem is that if you are earnestly talking about your feelings constantly, and people are constantly praising you for it, you start to believe that your feelings are the most important and you start to take up a lot of space. I don't ever want to be that person.

To illustrate what I'm saying, I don't think there's a better example than whiney pop-punk.

Like, it's not stupid for me to say that's too earnest, right?

Okay, here is a whole mess of mixed up metaphors: There is definitely is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Sugar is great and amazing and helps things taste good and adds to the other flavours when you're cooking, but something being too sweet fuckin' sucks. Earnesty is like that. Maybe that's why people always refer to pop-punk as "sugary".

This all being said, I fucking hate when art kids are ironic to the point of not meaning anything they say, so the other end of the spectrum fuckin' sucks too. It's hard to know what the right amount of earnesty for something is, and I think that depends on the circumstance too. Being earnest about things that have affected you? Seems to be mostly good, from my experience. Being earnest exclusively about how hurt you are by your ex-girlfriend? Mostly dumb.