Obviously we need seriousness to avoid and mitigate things like pandemics. There’s stuff that needs to be done. And the US’s sluggish response to #COVID-19 testing is a pretty clear demonstration that we’re not serious enough.
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“We have a seriousness deficit” is a meme: you see it in the “state capacity” discourse, in talk about “decadence”, in pretty much everything Peter Thiel has ever written. Preppers have always been big on it.
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I have a weird relationship to that meme because I more or less believe it’s true, but I’d like to minimize the amount I personally *need* to be serious. Responsibility is exhausting.
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I think the opposite of seriousness is LARPing, and often it manifests as taking things *too* seriously. People want to be living in the midst of consequential events: it’s always The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes, fascism is always on the doorstep, etc.
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Very much agreed. People don’t know when they’re doing it! It might be ok if they labeled it!
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I’ve never really thought about this, but I think what you’re saying is: “be serious about...” is a synonym for “devote maximum resource to...”. If that’s the case, then “ be serious” cannot exit on its own, only in relation to something else, “be serious about...”
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Which would mean that “be serious about X” is the opposite of “be serious about Y” (where X and Y compete for the same resource). Frivolity would therefore be “devote small amounts of resource across lots of things”
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