How to Live Without Irony. Cross-Post from r/Psychology. This is a good article for inner game on a META level.

MARSpu · 2012-11-18T17:00:41+00:00

This is a pretty cool article but allow me to offer up a rebuttal. What the author is suggesting is true and all but beyond that, I can't see what's wrong with living with irony.

We're humans. Our brains are always going to try and avoid pain, whether we live ironically or otherwise. It's not possible to rid ourselves 100% of defense mechanisms because our ego is always there. We're the middle grounds between apes and another higher-conscious being and we still carry our primate emotional facilities.

The author brings up the point of children living without irony. While this is also true, that's simply because children haven't developed the full capacity for rational thinking that adults have. Being able to logically break thinks apart is a natural development for our species. Of course, this thought process comes with some downsides. One of those downsides is we can see, or at least perceive, pain, and try and avoid it. Other mammals were not as great at this as we are. That's where I call in defense mechanisms to explain how we cope with fear.

It's a great article but it's something every self-help author is trying to feed us nowadays. Change yourself. Cast off your defense; vulnerability is the ultimate protection. You too can be a child again. It's the fountain of youth for our ego; everyone wants it because no one likes growing up. I don't feel it's very realistic at all though and neither should you.

Sure the author has titled her article a little differently. She isn't a psychologist by any stretch of the imagination. Her credentials are listed at the bottom, so you can understand that her approach towards a very psychological matter is in a very cultured way. Regardless, it's still an approach at the same thing many others take a swipe at: breaking down our ego.

EDIT: And as always, please inform me if there are any wondrous studies that otherwise go against my argument. I would really like to know. For the most part, I am an armchair psychologist but I have always been into this subject and have read a number of books in search of explanations.

NegativeJuice · 2012-11-19T05:02:53+00:00

"'Hipster' is a term co-opted for use as a meaningless pejorative in order to vaguely call someone else's authenticity into question and, by extension, claim authenticity for yourself. It serves no conversational function and imparts no information, save for indicating the opinions and preferences of the speaker. Meanwhile, a market myth has sprung up around the term, as well as a cultural bogeyman consisting of elusive white 20-somethings who wear certain clothes (but no one will agree on what), listen to certain music (no one can agree on this either), and act a certain way (you've probably sensed the pattern on your own). Suffice it to say, no one self-identifies as a hipster; the term is always applied to an Other, to separate the authentic Us from the inauthentic, ironic Them. You can't define what that kind of behavior or fashion or lifestyle actually is, nor will you ever be able to. That's because you don't use 'hipster' to describe an actual group of people, but to describe a fictional stereotype that is an outlet for literally anything that annoys you. The twist, of course, is that if it weren't for your own insecurities, nothing that a 'hipster' could do or wear would ever affect you emotionally. But you are insecure about your own authenticity - 'Do I wear what I wear because I want to? Do I listen to my music because I truly like it? I'm certainly not like those filthy hipsters!' - so you project those feelings onto others. tl;dr: if you believe hipsters exist, you are a plebeian."

andrey_b · 2012-11-18T19:35:16+00:00

I agree with everything in the article except the last line:

It takes little effort to dust them away.

This is too ingrained in my personality to easily change.

HeIsMyPossum · 2012-11-19T00:45:56+00:00

i liked this. irony bothers me. it assumes superiority while offering nothing. it is a vacuum pretending to be intellectual.

aa24577 · 2012-11-19T00:45:51+00:00

Why do we have to take life so seriously?

Choopster · 2012-11-19T04:30:40+00:00

Over half the article is bashing hipsters and "statistics" used to build his point are over exaggerated and generalized...

Inner game? Shit man all the hipsters ive run across are cocky as hell. Some can be an inspiration to game tbh

starveling · 2012-11-19T16:34:43+00:00

All of you so ardently against irony probably have terrible senses of humor.

findlifealgorithm · 2012-11-18T19:42:50+00:00

This article surely explains why this song is all over the radio and simultaneously ranked #22 on the pop charts (Billboard): Some Nights - Fun.

Kat_Angstrom · 2012-11-18T23:34:50+00:00

"He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream."

I'd disagree with this point. Most hipsters I'm acquainted with just shop at Urban Outfitters or a few other stores of the same vein, managing hipster-chic without actually cultivating anything outside the hipster-mainstream.

momfer · 2012-11-19T12:54:37+00:00

A bit late to the party but I just came across a nice quote from Tom Waits (who in turn quotes Bukowski) on identity:

'You can't really be too concerned with what people think of you. You're on your own adventure of growth and discovery. Like Charles Bukowski said: 'People think I'm down on Fifth and Main at the Blarney Stone, throwing back shooters and smoking a cigar, but really I'm on the top floor of the health club with a towel in my lap, watching Johnny Carson.' So it's not always good to be where people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well...which is easily done, because then you don't have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else.'

SeekingAlpha · 2012-11-19T20:57:11+00:00

"Living with irony" is rather ambiguous. This article/discission leads me to thinking about Richard Rorty's conception of The Ironist (in his prescriptive Contingency, Irony and Solidarity). The world surely could use more and not less Ironists.

From Wiki: An ironist is someone who fulfills three conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. — Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73

ezsayz · 2012-11-20T04:39:45+00:00

http://deepthoughts.myshopify.com/blogs/news

2012-11-18T23:07:43+00:00

So, inner game is listening to someone in some article chiding us for cultural tastes?

Fuck that, like what you like even if it is ironically hilarious.

JackRawlinson · 2012-11-18T22:26:55+00:00

I wouldn't want to live without irony. Irony is fun. It's stimulating. It's a sign of intelligence, and the ability to think on multiple levels. Irony gets a bad rap these days because the less-intelligent don't like the way it makes them feel dumb.

SeekingAlpha · 2012-11-19T03:43:25+00:00

She lost me when she labeled home-brewing and trombone playing as "outmoded hobbies". Bitch, please, use that brain.

EDIT: Sure hope the downvotes reflect my callous second sentence...

zeezbrah · 2012-11-18T20:46:39+00:00

Anecdotal evidence big words big words blablabla

Title	How to Live Without Irony. Cross-Post from r/Psychology. This is a good article for inner game on a META level.
Author	MrADHD
Upvotes	212
Comments	67
Date	November 18, 2012 4:10 PM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/seduction
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/13egz0/how_to_live_without_irony_crosspost_from/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/seduction/how-to-live-without-irony-cross-post-from.1342956 https://theredarchive.com/post/1342956

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