The Sincerity Project

“Man, I had the weirdest dream last night…”

“Why, what was it about?”

“An angel came to me and showed me how everything would be if I had never been born.”

“Wow! What was that like?”

“Well, it would have been a lot better if everyone hadn’t been so damn happy.”

I posted this to Facebook a few weeks ago as a status update. I have been using this joke, or something like it, for at least a decade. Hell, I think I stole it from the Beavis and Butthead Christmas special. But in writing it and posting it I just felt wrong. Partly because the format made it less funny but mainly because the person who made this joke ten years ago is not the same person I am now.

When I was a teenager I perfected this persona of a sarcastic, cynical, world weary geek. In many ways it was a defense mechanism. I was never going to be the athlete or the life of the party. I was a shy, awkward kid who was always more comfortable talking to a teacher than a classmate. I was the kid who no one called unless they needed to know the answer to problem number seven. In my mind the only way to protect myself from being picked on was to be as self-deprecating as possible because I knew that I could make funnier jokes about myself than anyone else could. Plus, you don’t bully the guy who bullies himself and makes you laugh in the process. This view of me, as the geeky loser who takes a darkly comic view of the world, has lasted for almost thirty years.

At times it worked. As someone who didn’t really know who I was, and certainly had no confidence in front of people, I realized that this façade helped me to be social. It didn’t get me a girlfriend but it got me out of the house and as strange as it is to say that was a huge victory. Plus, there is a huge thrill in just being a sarcastic bastard who tears into the world and the hypocrisy around him. Better than just sitting there blankly.

But somewhere a little over five years ago things began to change. I kind of got a better sense of who I was. I had a job I didn’t care for in a town I wasn’t a fan of and that gave me the freedom to finally let myself just be and weird things started to happen. I started to go out and enjoy myself, I had my employer pay me for four months to just stop showing up at the office and this led to me lucking into the job I had been working towards for my entire career. And when the woman of my dreams called me up I was ready for it and somehow, through a series of events that still mystifies me, we get married. Everything was how I had always wanted it.

Yet I remained a cynical bastard.

That is a nice way of saying that I could often be a complete asshole. A well-meaning one in that I never intentionally tried to hurt people but an asshole nonetheless. I would just say mean spirited things on the nature that they would be funny and maybe they were but they usually weren’t. It certainly wasn’t funny to those people who had to deal with me regularly and I kept on feeling that I wasn’t myself even though I once again did not know who I was. I had been the cynical loser for so long I didn’t know how to be the successful married guy. I kept on struggling to figure out what was missing in my life. What had been lost from my world view that I needed to make my life worthwhile again. Then I figure it out…

Sincerity.

We live in a world where sincerity no longer exists. We live in a world of snark, where once a news story hits we are all rushing to Facebook and Twitter to crack the first mean-spirited joke in some hope to gain immaterial internet points. We have to have arguments on whether people have the constitutional right to be assholes in public forums. It is almost impossible to watch the news due to the constant rhetoric and complete lack of compassion or consideration for the viewpoint of others. And I hate to admit but I am as guilty of this as everyone else.

So when I was thinking about resolutions this year I decided that I would do something different than saying I would work out more or lose weight or eat eight fruits and vegetables every day. My resolution this year is to be a sincere human being: a considerate, caring non-judgmental person in a world full of sarcasm and noise. I read somewhere that if you want to be avant-garde in the world today you should be sincere so in some strange way this is just me reliving my punk rock fantasies in an incredibly productive way. So for 2014 I am embarking on (and hopefully documenting here) The Sincerity Project. The dream of a cynical bastard to become a better human being by being open to some of the wonders of life instead of hating everything. I have no clue if this will work, or how I will even accomplish it, but the journey should be fun.