Baby Talk, or Is Sincerity Dead?

On "being a baby," sincerity, and post-ironic tampon cage matches.

There’s something inherently childish about worrying you seem childish.

Picture a person telling another person that their favorite thing is “for babies.” The person you pictured is probably not an adult but a grade-school kid, one who is trying to distance himself from the childhood in which he is still very much embroiled. He turned eight this year and that makes him basically a teenager, which is basically an adult. He’s trying to raise himself above the other kids sitting at his table in art class by claiming that Blue’s Clues is “a baby show” and that only babies watch it.

And as the other kids smile weakly and return to cutting Thanksgiving turkey feathers out of colored construction paper, at least one of them is remembering when they watched Blue’s Clues just the other day and thinking, “I’m not a baby,” kind of bitterly, not really meaning it.

That feeling never went away for me—only the signifiers changed. Now, instead of worrying that the TV shows I watch are baby-ish¹, I worry that I should have grown out of nearly every idiosyncrasy that makes my life my life. I worry the fact that I still think of chicken mcnuggets as a “special treat” and that I still think I can become best friends with people by literally DMing them let’s be best friends! makes me fundamentally “behind” other people in their late twenties. And yes, if you haven’t read the footnote, I watch teen and tween TV for fun, and I take it seriously, and I often relate to it more deeply than I do the prestige, “adult” media people around me seem to enjoy watching.

Most importantly—or at least most relevant to this audience—I worry that my writing is fundamentally shallow or “childish” for its disinterest in engaging with things like Craft and Aesthetics. For how inward-looking and confessional it is. There’s this vibe among the more seasoned indie lit, cyberwriting, crowd that after a certain age or tier of seriousness as a writer, you are supposed to think of books more like aesthetic constructions that exist outside of yourself. If you are making things only for you, that only satisfy your own curiosities, follow your own obsessions, sublimate your own angst, then you aren’t really making literature. You’re just… I don’t know… doing whatever this is.

I have no doubt that this is a valid way to approach the creative process, and probably a much healthier approach than mine. But it just does not resonate at all. The times where I have been the least prolific, the least interested in writing, have been the times where I was forcing myself into that framework. Why? Because I wanted Cool People in the writing sphere to like me, because I wanted to have an audience, because I was feeling insecure about sounding like I am emotionally trapped in middle school.

I enjoy writing the most when I treat my work as an extension of myself, letting certain stories and images play out for my own self-gratification rather than because I think they would do nicely in conversation with other pieces of literature. And I’m sure the people who think of themselves as artisans building up their novels and poetry collections like a person builds a kitchen chair are also just following their bliss in the same way.

…It’s just really unfortunate that my bliss happens to lead me to, like, ruminating about social anxiety and complaining about the same things I was complaining about when I was fourteen years old.

Lately, I’ve been probing my own mind trying to figure out the root of this insecurity. Where does the feeling of “being a baby” come from? I don’t have a definitive answer—these are the kinds of things we go to therapy for—but I have an inkling it has something to do with sincerity.

I think social media is allergic to sincerity, and it rubs off on writers whose communities are centered around social media. Throughout the 2010s, even as we killed the utopian idea of social media democratizing information and discourse, dug up the corpse, and pissed on it, we continued to be delighted by “authenticity”—or, you know, the appearance of it. Think of how many 2010s-era YouTubers would start their videos with these contrived little clips of them being awkward in front of the camera. “Oh uhhh… hey, haha! Wow, I’m definitely going to edit that one out,” they say in the published version of the video where they have clearly made the choice to not edit it out.

In retrospect, it’s obvious what a contrivance that kind of I’m-awkward-just-like-you-I-swear routine is, but once upon a time, it worked on a lot of people. There’s also the phenomenon of lonelygirl15, a vlogger who captured the hearts and imaginations of some of the earliest YouTube viewers and turned out to be a fictional construction, not a real person. In fact, lonelygirl15 grew out of the creator’s fascination with the apparent authenticity and intimacy of early-YouTube confessional bloggers. The fact that they were able to pull it off for any length of time demonstrates just how little the appearance of authenticity—you might say, sincerity—actually has to do with being truly authentic or sincere.

My totally subjective observation is that as social media has become more sophisticated, we have become more difficult to impress with sincerity.

If we see someone “being awkward and weird” in the introduction of a YouTube video, we are more inclined to see it as a performance than a genuine glimpse into the content creator’s real personality. Every advertisement is a parody of advertisements, tampon companies sprinting to social media in a post-ironic cage match to prove they’re cooler and more self-aware than the other tampon companies. Hell, half the “people” posting on social media at any given moment are bots, and not just in the jaded “everyone but me is an NPC” way, but like, real bots, and these fake-real people have real-real influence. Sincerity is a hollowed-out husk of a word, now, like truth, and in this climate it’s hard to fault anyone for feeling like it’s all but dead.

To live in the world I’ve described and to still value sincerity seems naïve, immature, “baby-ish.” Who cares if someone is “living their truth” in a time where truth is a joke? What is that actually worth?

And where does that leave people like me, who have been told their entire life to keep it to themselves, to save it for their diary, to find a way to make the gunk in their heads and hearts palatable to society at large? Is there a space where it’s still laudable to introspect for an audience? Is there still something new inside the navel (…so to speak)? I don’t know, and it’s Friday night, and there are plenty of Substack posts ahead of me to try and figure it out.

And, of course, it’s possible that what “everyone” seems to be saying is true, that it’s time to sink or swim, to diversify or cement my reputation as a big, whiny, non-literary baby.

And in that case… goo-goo gaa-gaa, bitch. 🍼

1. I mean, I rewatch the entire Degrassi series at least once a year, so I’ve kind of surrendered that hill, honestly. Btw, I just started leeching off my parents’ Disney+ subscription and I forgot how amazing of a show Lizzie McGuire was. Such earnest, great TV.