The Weirdest Thing You Can Do Right Now Is Actually Mean It

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in after years of performing not-caring. Your face hurts from the ironic smirk. Your voice has developed a permanent register of detached amusement. You've watched so many things "ironically" that you've genuinely lost track of what you actually like. Somewhere in the timeline between the first season of Arrested Development and the fifteenth layer of a meme about a meme about a meme, sincerity got buried so deep it started to feel like a punchline.

Gen Z apparently decided they didn't have time for that particular performance. And in doing so, they accidentally invented the most genuinely countercultural stance available in 2024: giving a real, unironic damn.

How Irony Culture Ate Itself

To understand why earnestness is suddenly radical, you have to understand what irony culture actually cost us — because the invoice has been sitting on the table for a while.

The ironic sensibility that dominated millennial cultural consumption (and, honestly, a lot of Gen X before that) was originally a defensive move. If you acknowledged the absurdity of something before someone else could mock you for liking it, you maintained social safety. You liked Shrek "ironically." You watched reality TV "as a sociological experiment." You wore the bad sweater "on purpose." The quotation marks were armor.

The problem is that armor worn long enough starts to feel like skin. By the mid-2010s, the ironic distance had collapsed into something genuinely nihilistic — a cultural stance where nothing was allowed to matter, where earnest enthusiasm was the most embarrassing thing a person could display, and where "cringe" became one of the most socially powerful words in the language. Cringe wasn't just embarrassing. It was disqualifying.

And then, quietly, it stopped working.

The Cringe Pivot Nobody Predicted

Something shifted around 2019-2020 — the exact origin point is contested, but the evidence is everywhere now. The kids who grew up being mocked for their enthusiasm about anime, cottagecore aesthetics, niche indie games, or deeply specific musical subgenres decided, collectively and without a formal meeting, to simply... not stop being enthusiastic about those things.

Olivia Rodrigo cried on camera about heartbreak and sold 18 million records. Chappell Roan built an entire aesthetic universe around sincere, maximalist self-expression and became one of the biggest artists on the planet. Boygenius made folk-rock about genuine feelings and won Grammys. The through-line isn't genre — it's the refusal to put protective ironic distance between the artist and the emotion.

On the fashion side, the same logic applies. Cottagecore, dark academia, goblincore — every micro-aesthetic that defined Gen Z style is rooted in unironic commitment. You don't wear a full prairie dress "as a bit." You wear it because you have genuinely constructed an identity around the aesthetic of someone who might churn butter and also have complicated feelings about modernity. The commitment is the point.

Authenticity as the New Transgression

Here's the genuinely interesting cultural inversion that's happened: in an entertainment landscape still largely structured around ironic detachment, sincerity has become the transgressive choice.

Think about what it actually takes to stand in front of people — online or otherwise — and say "I love this thing with my whole heart, without reservation, and I don't care if that's embarrassing." In a media environment where the default mode is still knowing, self-aware, and hedged, that's a genuinely weird and brave stance. The person who cries at the animated movie and doesn't feel the need to frame it as "okay but the score was objectively devastating" is doing something more culturally radical than the person still performing detachment.

The indie film world has noticed. The wave of earnest, emotionally direct storytelling in recent years — from Past Lives to Bottoms to A Real Pain — represents a conscious departure from the ironic indie aesthetic that dominated the 2000s and early 2010s. These films trust their audiences to feel things without a winking acknowledgment that feelings are, like, a lot.

Same story in visual art, where the maximalist, deeply personal work coming out of younger artists reads as a direct rejection of the cool, concept-heavy minimalism that dominated gallery spaces for decades. "I made this because it matters to me" is, apparently, a revolutionary statement.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

If you came of age in the irony years and developed, as many of us did, a deep suspicion of your own sincerity, this cultural shift requires some actual internal work. It means noticing when you're hedging your genuine enthusiasm with a joke that nobody asked for. It means letting yourself like the thing without the footnote.

It also means reckoning with the fact that "cringe" was always, at its core, a social control mechanism — a way of enforcing conformity under the cover of aesthetic judgment. The things that got labeled cringe were almost always things that someone cared about too visibly, too specifically, or in ways that didn't align with whatever the dominant cool consensus was. Killing cringe culture isn't just a vibe shift. It's a small act of liberation.

Glitch Canopy has always been interested in the places where the signal breaks down and something stranger and more honest comes through. The death of irony culture is one of those places. The glitch in the detachment machine is revealing something that was always underneath: people who actually care about things, all the way down, without the safety net.

Turns out that's the weirdest, most interesting thing you can be right now.

Mean it. See what happens.