A wise woman is aware that she shouldn’t meet up with strangers on the internet whose names she doesn’t even know… especially not people from Reddit. No exceptions, not even for something as harmless as a book club. When wise woman enters the pub and turns the corner to see that the group is all men, she most definitely slinks back out the door quietly…
I am eternally thankful for my naivety. Truthfully, I’m not sure what I was expecting from a Reddit book club, but I needed something. When we went around the circle answering the customary question, ‘what brings you here?’, everybody had a different answer. For me, it was the end of the line, an ‘if I don’t talk to someone with similar tastes to me I’ll explode’ situation.
I got what I initially came for. Every fortnight, seven of us crowd around a table at a pub and talk literature. Short stories, articles and essays, mostly. We briefly tried basing each session around a theme, but for a session about ‘transformation’, both people responsible for setting the texts chose harrowing short stories about death, so that didn’t last very long.
After a session about David Foster Wallace’s essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’, I realised that in the process of talking to these strangers I was saving something in myself that might well have been withering to a husk: my capacity for sincerity.
Maybe the real reason I joined was because I was lonely. Yes, social media makes it easier for us to ‘connect’ in the superficial sense. It’s how I found these people in the first place. But above all else, the internet makes it easier and more gratifying for us to sit for hours in a room alone. This loneliness is complicated by the fact that irony and cynicism have become dominant modes of our culture. This is the crux of Wallace’s essay. Whilst irony and ridicule are amusing, they are ultimately ‘agents of great despair and stasis’. We agreed it’s probably for the best that Wallace didn’t live to see how completely irony would permeate what we consume in the age of social media. Every explore page is tangled in webs of it. Gen-Z posting has gotten so convoluted that ‘irony’ no longer seems like a serviceable descriptor, shrugged off in favour of terms like post-irony, meta-irony and post-truth satire.
Consuming immense volumes of ironic content inevitably seeps into how we interact on a person-to-person level. Cool, ironic detachment and self-ridicule are very useful defence mechanisms. I’m guilty of this. After all, people can’t roll their eyes at my aversion to AI when I beat them to it by proclaiming that I’m ‘in my tinfoil hat era’. But what this pervasive irony, ridicule and cynicism really achieves is distancing us. From each other, from what we really mean, from what we really believe. It trains our gaze away from the world around us and onto ourselves; onto how we might come across to others and only that.
For Wallace, sincerity is the way for us to step back into ourselves. He ends the essay by suggesting that the real ‘rebels’ of our age are those who turn away from irony, cynicism and the comforts they offer. Who ‘treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions … with reverence and conviction’ and are ‘willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs’ that come with being sincere, earnest and sentimental.
I don’t fancy myself a rebel, but by committing to regularly spend a weeknight passionately discussing literature with strangers, weren’t we doing exactly what Wallace was talking about? Here I had stumbled into something I didn’t know existed. A place where sincerity was wholly embraced. An opportunity to share reflections that would usually be relegated to the pages of a diary, or that wouldn’t have surfaced at all had we not dedicated close attention to whatever text elicited them. That a group of edgy hipster types can manage to be, even for a few hours per fortnight, unabashedly sentimental and reverent about literature and all its associated themes is a cause for hope.
These short bursts of sincerity wield an unexpected power over the rest of my life. I’m more curious and attentive. I’m more sure of what I believe. I’m seeing the beauty in things I otherwise wouldn’t. Maybe this boils down to it just being easier to be vulnerable with strangers. The book club has the same appeal as a holiday romance – no need for pretence, no real consequences involved. Or maybe there’s something to putting aside cool, ironic detachment and choosing to choke down the sincerity pill together.
