Earnestness

I have always been a very earnest person. I don’t like spending time fucking around and making jokes. It’s not that I don’t like to have fun, it’s just that I don’t think most people are fun.

I have always thought of this as kind of a handicap. Like there’s something wrong with me. And it is. It is a handicap, and there is something wrong with me. But I have also learned what it is that makes me this way, and how to live productively with it.

I wondered for a long time what was my issue when I was a boy. When I was growing up, I had almost no success making friends. It’s not that I wasn’t friendly, or intelligent, or even charming to some extent. Because I was. I am charming.

And it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in people. Because I was. If there’s one thing I’ve always been, from the time I was a lad, it’s a good listener. I have always been disproportionately attentive to other people’s needs, to what makes other people feel things. I see people, and I let them talk about themselves with me. It generally leads people to say things to me like “you’re the first person who I can be truly honest with” and “you’re really handsome.”

The problem was, I couldn’t move at the same speed as everyone else. I had no ability to simply live in the moment, aggressively creating humor and banter. In most social circles in school, at least the ones I was in, being social required aggression. It required having a brand of humor ready-made for any conversation. It required punctuality and a willingness to jump into conversations. In some circles, popularity was just a contest of who is the biggest bullshitter. You earned respect by just never shutting the fuck up.

Most of the time, school-age social life disincentivizes earnestness. Nerds are unpopular because they’re the most earnest people on the planet. They have earnestness that nobody has any use for other than other nerds. Or is it earnesty? No, there’s a squiggle under that one. So it’s earnestness. Maybe that’s good, because earnesty just sounds like someone saying honesty like an idiot. Which, despite the theme of this piece, I find funny.

I couldn’t vibrate at the high frequencies of adolescence. I was slower. A lot of people are.

And I had no interest in saying things I didn’t mean, just to speak. From the time I was able to talk, I thought speaking without having something to say was just a total waste of time.

Nor can I vibrate at that speed now. Anytime I’m out with groups of people, I’m voted most likely to speak least. Not because I have no things to say, but because jumping into fast-moving conversations just isn’t fun for me. It feels more like jumping in front of trains than it does like socializing. If I can’t speak slowly with an indoor voice, I just don’t want to speak. I’d rather go work or play the piano.

There's a competitive side to being social with fast movers. Even from the age of 9 or 10, I was looking for wisdom. Not entertainment or status. I didn’t find much value in the gossip of the moment or someone’s silly antics for getting everyone else to piss laughing. I either want to have a good conversation, or I want to go do something else.

I think this is also why I’ve always been more inclined towards being friends with women, than men. I just think women are generally more earnest than men. They don’t spend as much time fucking around.

And I’ve never been able to keep up with the hazing that men put each other through. The teasing, the friendly bullying. I heard a story one time about a young man going to work on a railroad crew. On his first day, he got teased for every available thing wrong with him. How skinny he was, how he wore his cap, his boot laces, the way he swung a hammer. And he went home discouraged. They don’t like me, he thought. But his father told him, son, they’re just testing you. This is how men test each other. They want to see that you’re thick-skinned, because they know that if you are, they can trust you. And if they can trust you, they will like you.

And this has always been true of men. More often than not, men fucking with each other suggests affection, not contempt. Men have tested each other forever.

(Funny enough, it’s the opposite for women: women will act like best friends face to face and then absolutely shit on each other behind closed doors. I’ve never understood that — it seems counterproductive.)

But that young man, being earnest, did not understand it until someone told him. Even then, it’s hard to vibrate at that frequency if it’s not how you naturally operate. If you’re not the kind of person who fucks around, it’s hard to become someone who fucks around. You either have it or you don’t, and I don’t have it. Or as J.K. Simmons said in Whiplash before assaulting high schoolers with musical equipment, it's just “not quite my tempo.”

And that’s fine. I don’t need it. I’d rather just have a good conversation. I can tell just as quickly through conversation whether someone is trustworthy as someone else can tell through hazing. (And I can also tell how thick-skinned someone is: if someone thinks they’ve had a particularly hard life, they’re not thick-skinned.)

I’ve been told before that I have an old soul. I’m sure you’ve heard that said before. But what the hell do people mean when they say that? “He’s a sharp one; he’s got an old soul.” I think it’s a comment about earnestness. I think it means someone is unusually earnest. And it doesn’t even have to be “unusually earnest for his/her age”… it can just be “unusually earnest.”

The people I get along with best are unusually earnest. In business, in creativity, in relationships… anywhere.

Although there are people, like my boss and good friend Brent, who can give me both. And that’s refreshing. We can fuck with each other but also have extremely meaningful conversations. We can make jokes for minutes while working on something extremely serious for hours.

At my last job, there was a young woman who struggled to be social. She would sit in the lab alone, walk the hallways alone, and eat lunch alone. She didn’t speak to people. But she spoke to me a few times, and I spoke to her when I saw her. And it was cool. She was an exceedingly kind person. And she liked ‘90s grunge bands, which made us literally and not figuratively twins. I’m not sure what the point of that story was. Maybe just that earnest attracts earnest. And that that’s a good thing.

I no longer feel like I need to vibrate at anyone else’s speed. Not only because I no longer care (I don’t need to be friends with people who aren’t logistically easy for me to be friends with), but because I have seen the evidence that earnest attracts earnest. Over and over.

If you’re still going out, at 22 years old, at 31 years old, at 45 years old, and feeling like you need to vibrate at a higher speed than you’re comfortable with, I’m giving you permission to stop doing that.

I heard that Naval Ravikant, one of the most genuine and admirable human beings I know of, spontaneously leaves dinner parties. If he decides that he’s not interested in the conversation, or that he’s finished socializing, he just stands up and leaves.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact I think it’s useful — it sends a strong signal. Especially since he’s not a rude person. At all.

The signal it sends is, “if this was interesting to me, I’d be all-in on it. But it’s not, so I’m going to go do something interesting.” And the reason he’s such an interesting person is because he doesn’t waste his time. He only spends his time on things that are interesting to him.

Drink some water and stop fucking around.

JDR

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” - William Morris.