I could be telling the truth

Young people can’t afford to be sincere because everything stays on the internet. Anything that we can do wrong can be brought up on a #Cancel(anyone) storm a few decades later. It’s problematic that some people hold these ideas, but they change over time, and people can become educated on these topics over time. Nonetheless, we see that people mature as they grow up, you are not the person you were ten years ago

This, however, is bad news for teens, because we are at the age where we constantly screw up. We learn from experiences that are meant to be forgotten, or rather, meant to not be immortalized. We can’t both learn or live our teenage years without expressing our truths at the moment and remain inscrutable from criticism. Even if our social media profiles were perfectly crafted to hide any imperfections or defects (in the actions that we make), our mistakes can still find their way onto the internet through other people’s social media accounts.

It’s impossible for teens to live sustainably this way, and there’s two options: either stop social media from imposing on people’s privacy, which grants them the right to screw up and learn from their mistakes; or be completely insincere. We’re too used to social media, though.

It should come as no surprise, then that insincerity is becoming the norm of communication for younger generations, and this manifests itself in the memes we share. Some of the things we laugh about don’t make sense to someone that’s not in our generational mindset because they are ambivalent in nature. They have to be this way, in order to not fall in trouble with the self-appointed, self-righteous and surprisingly close-minded members of a “moral police” patrolling the internet, on the lookout for any new victims they could call out first. 

So what do some teens do? Be insincere about their insincerity, what could be called “post-irony”. This can go two ways, the first being that someone says “I like dogs” in apparent sincerity. While the person may like dogs they could also be intentionally lying by claiming to use sarcasm, which makes them seem they may like cats instead. If someone questions them, they can either say they whole-heartedly like dogs or are lying ironically and prefer cats.

An example of this was the “How to be ASFM” article published in a previous edition of El 107 back in August. Here, the immediate, apparent assumption is that the article is promoting consumerist tendencies in students by associating them with the “ASFM brand” (which in itself is somewhat ironic). However, this could have also been the writers acknowledging the prevalence of consumerism in the student body and external critiques of this practice, adopted this consumerist tendency ironically, and went with this idea as an irony to the irony itself.

But, who am I to know, and who are you to judge? In our modern world, adopting a post-truth stance could very well be the only way to mature while keeping our reputations intact.