There's a certain type of person you encounter sometimes who has consumed vast amounts of philosophy at a young age, particularly the postmodern variety. They inhabit what I call a perma-ironic stance that colors every interaction they have with the world around them. They see irony everywhere, recursing onto itself in endless loops that spiral deeper and deeper into meaninglessness. They've completely lost the capacity for straight-faced engagement with anything whatsoever and can't process even the simplest statements at face value anymore. Super judgey about it too. These people have elaborate rationalizations for why everyone else is fake. They're mercilessly critical individuals who are constantly criticizing others for being insincere while remaining blind to their own selves. They don't actually believe sincerity exists at all in any form or context. Gorging on all this philosophy has thoroughly scrambled their ability to recognize sincerity anywhere in the world around them. It has basically fried their ability to recognize when someone's being genuine, leaving them in a state of permanent cynicism.

But the truth remains that despite all this intellectual sophistication and philosophical posturing, they're still fundamentally human beings with all the flaws that entails. They still have selfish interests that guide their actions more than any philosophical principle ever could. They're convenience-pilled in the most mundane ways. The philosophy remains purely intellectual, never penetrating beyond the surface level of abstract thought. So they become cynical critics who are constantly judging everyone else while being completely blind to their own hypocrisy, which manifests in countless small ways throughout their daily lives.

You see this pattern when you look at how spiritual and philosophical texts get used by people in the real world. The Bhagavad Gita, Nietzsche, all the great texts get co-opted by people to further their own means and justify their existing beliefs and behaviors. People take excerpts from these books and twist them to fit their own agendas without any regard for context or original intent. But this shouldn't surprise anyone who has observed human nature, as every good piece of text will get co-opted for convenience by almost everyone who encounters it. If you already have narcissistic traits deeply embedded in your personality, anything you read will only feed that narcissism rather than challenge or transform it. The text gets twisted to serve whatever purpose you need it to serve at any given moment.

Ultimately, words are words are words, and all philosophy is essentially a conversation between you and yourself that takes place in the privacy of your own mind. The words are just the interface through which this internal dialogue happens. If your natural inclination is dishonest, the words won't reveal your own complicity in the very things you criticize in others. Instead they become weapons to project outward onto others, never reflecting back on yourself with the same critical eye.

"Everything is a social construct" enables this recursive, disembodied irony that allows people to dodge any form of genuine accountability or commitment. You can switch between different meta-levels as it suits you in any situation, always finding a way to avoid being pinned down to any particular position. Its common criticism is that this philosophy kills meaning by reducing everything to arbitrary social agreements. But actually it does something far worse than simply destroying meaning. It allows you to generate any kind of interpretation and meaning that serves you best in any situation, making you infinitely flexible in your self-serving interpretations. It puts your hypocritical tendencies on steroids by giving you sophisticated tools to justify absolutely anything you want to do. Philosophy and spirituality has always been weaponizable this way throughout history, but postmodernism just provides particularly flexible tools for this kind of intellectual dishonesty.

Any philosophical reading, in general, tends to crystallize whatever nascent tendencies exist within a person before they encounter it. Early exposure creates hardened patterns before countervailing qualities can develop to provide balance and perspective. What you read first colors whatever you read and experience later in ways that are difficult to overcome or even recognize. It can sublate whatever possibility existed for developing honesty by providing sophisticated frameworks for self-deception before genuine self-awareness has a chance to develop. The first framework becomes the interpretive lens for all subsequent experience, filtering everything through its particular distortions. So even when these young philosophy readers face negative consequences like social rejection or relationship difficulties that might otherwise prompt self-reflection, the consequences don't function as correctives to their worldview. Because there's a deeper quality, independent of knowledge itself, that allows people to be honest with themselves and others about their true nature. But without that quality of honesty already present in some form, philosophy provides sophisticated language to hoodwink their own flaws rather than confront them directly. The consequences get reinterpreted through the philosophical framework, and the framework becomes a defense mechanism that explains away all negative feedback as further proof of their intellectual superiority.

Philosophy hungers to articulate universal verities that transcend the messiness of particular situations and individual contexts. But this whole image-crafting enterprise becomes deeply fucked when it substitutes itself for the actual lived thing it purports to describe or explain. Reality keeps shapeshifting moment by moment in ways that no framework can fully capture or predict. It's fundamentally unframeworkable in its totality. Context is the only real-deal substance that matters in any given moment; the whole messy totality of any given situation, not whatever conceptual overlay you're desperately trying to superimpose on it to make sense of things. Frameworks are frozen, static, dead-on-arrival attempts to capture something that refuses to be captured, and reality is this churning, particularized flow that moves according to its own logic. Insincere pseudo-philosophers learn to impose images onto situations rather than perceiving situations in their totality, missing the forest for their carefully constructed conceptual trees.

What do 'context' and 'totality' mean here in practical terms? They mean you're part of the situation too — your motives, your agenda, your desperate need to be right are all baked into whatever you're perceiving at any given moment. You can't extract yourself from the context and pretend to be some neutral observer floating above it all; that's the ultimate dishonest move that philosophical and psychological critiques often encourage.

Intelligence cannot help you escape this fundamental predicament of being a situated, biased observer with skin in the game. Because honesty has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge in any direct or causal way. It's a separate quality altogether, existing in the domain of truth and virtue rather than cleverness or erudition. Even highly intelligent people cannot use their intelligence to escape a dishonest framework once they've adopted it as their primary lens. And the framework is sticky precisely because intelligence can be used to defend and rationalize it with ever more sophisticated arguments.

You see this pattern play out constantly in online intellectuals and academic philosophers who build entire careers on criticism. You see it in anyone who criticizes without reflecting the criticism viscerally onto themselves in a way that actually transforms their behavior.

One way this reveals itself is in how these people argue when challenged on their ideas or confronted with disagreement. They latch onto your exact words with pedantic precision. They won't let go of the specific words you used, treating them as if they were legal contracts rather than attempts at communication. This is itself a profoundly dishonest way of engaging in argumentation or dialogue. Within any argument or statement there's a contextual undercurrent that carries as much meaning as the explicit words themselves. There's reading between the lines that's required to understand what someone is actually trying to communicate beyond their imperfect word choices. There's understanding the spirit of what someone is saying rather than just parsing their grammar. So to expect that people will be extremely logical and precise with whatever they're saying is itself a dishonest requirement that ignores how human communication actually works. Yes, if you're publishing research, precision and rigor are part of your job because that's what the scientific method demands. That's how the world can claim what you say is objective and reproducible by others. But when it comes to interpersonal arguments and everyday discourse, latching too heavily onto words is fundamentally dishonest. You know what that person is trying to say if you approach them with good faith. Exploiting their exact words instead of engaging with their meaning is one example of how intellectual ungroundedness and insincerity reveals itself in discourse between people who claim to value truth.

Every day, you see someone on social media criticizing doom scrolling and how it prevents meaningful action on Gaza or any other crisis. She's performing this criticism on the same platform that enables the very behavior she's condemning. She's not actually in Gaza helping people directly. She's not funding charities or organizing material support for those who need it. She's just commenting from the safety of her comfortable life. The performance somehow absolves her because she's positioned herself as the critic rather than the criticized. But she's playing exactly the same game she's criticizing, just with a different rhetorical strategy. Do you really desire to help Gaza or do you want to earn brownie points by writing clever satire on social media platforms?

The honest answer for most people, including me, is brutally simple: I don't give a shit about Gaza. I know people are suffering there in unimaginable ways. I see them suffering through news reports and social media posts. But do I really give a shit in the sense of being moved to action? No, I don't. The sincere position would be silence rather than performing commentary that costs me nothing.

Intellectuals and philosophasters are perpetually stuck in logical analysis, satire, and criticism as their primary modes of engagement. They are often brilliant articulators who write great essays and books that win awards and influence discourse. But do we really understand what we are talking about when we criticize society or analyze its problems? Do we see that what we are criticizing is actually our own mind reflected back at us? That it's just a mirror showing us our own nature?

Once you see that clearly, you also see that you are the very society you're trying to fix through your clever critiques. So what are you going to do about it once this realization hits you?

You cannot do anything about it. This realization has to be visceral, felt in your bones rather than just understood conceptually. If it's just intellectual understanding, it will do nothing. But when the realization is truly visceral and embodied, you start living extremely honestly without pretense. You stop criticizing things you genuinely never cared about in the first place. You stop talking about political issues, trivia, and things you don't actually desire to care about but feel socially obligated to perform caring about. 

If you really cared about technology's harms to human connection and well-being, you would leave technology behind and go off the grid entirely. That would be the honest way to live according to your stated values. If you don't actually care about awards and recognition, don't go to award ceremonies where you'll be celebrated. Grigori Perelman won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics, and refused to accept it. He was busy gardening and living according to his actual values.

So why isn't there a state of genuine indifference in you toward things that don't actually matter to you? It should lead to total indifference, especially for things you claim not to care about when asked. If you're still performing commentary on things you don't care about, you're being fundamentally dishonest with yourself and others.

I think people would be vastly better off if they stopped claiming to care about things they don't actually care about. Stop trying to achieve some pseudo-consistency that doesn't respect your own reality at all. And the problem isn't lack of perfect consistency, which is impossible for any human being; it's the false claiming to care in the first place that creates all the downstream problems. Stop performing values you don't actually hold in your heart of hearts.

There is no way out of this paradox and simultaneously all of it is a way out. 

The difference lies entirely in sincerity or the lack of it. If you are sincere in your engagement, all content becomes a finger pointing to the moon. If you are insincere in your approach, all content becomes a finger pointing to intellectual and psychological hell. The same philosophy, the same text, the same experience produces completely different outcomes based on this quality of sincerity or its absence. Philosophy doesn't create the problem or solve it in any direct way; it simply reveals what's already there waiting to be discovered. For the sincere seeker, philosophy points beyond itself to reality in all its unmediated glory. For the insincere reader, philosophy becomes a recursive trap, a hall of mirrors reflecting nothing but their own ego.

You can rationalize self-reliance with sophisticated arguments about individual sovereignty. You can rationalize authority by pointing to expertise or tradition. You can rationalize authenticity through philosophical frameworks about the true self. You can rationalize honesty itself as a strategic choice. But the rationalization is never the actual thing being rationalized. The thing is what you are before the rationalization begins.

Sincerity itself is a quality that cannot be adequately named or defined without destroying its essence. Any label for it can be immediately appropriated by the very people who lack it most profoundly. You might call it intellectual honesty, self-awareness, capacity for genuine self-examination, or resistance to self-serving interpretation. But none of these labels truly convey the real quality, and all of them can be co-opted by those who wish to appear sincere. But sincerity will always have a self-negating effect on the human being who truly embodies it. This is how you can recognize it when you encounter it. The recognition negates you, incinerates you to ashes. It produces silence, withdrawal, and genuine indifference to things you don't actually care about.

Even this essay is vulnerable to co-option by readers who approach it with the wrong spirit. Someone can read this and use it to feel superior to others they now identify as "convenience-pilled philosophy readers." It's finally just words that can be interpreted and wielded in any fashion you like. 

No one can escape this fundamental problem of interpretation and appropriation. Not even the writer who penned these very words. If you're intellectually seeking sincerity in these words, you won't find it. What the intellect will find here instead is an endless series of logical double-binds and performative contradictions, a self-aware hypocrisy where the writer stands guilty of every single critique he's leveled at others — knowing this, naming this, and yet still unable to escape the very trap he's describing.

But recognizing this insincerity is paradoxically the beginning of sincerity. Recognizing your chronic inattention is the first moment of real attention. 

Truth is nothing but complete and utter devotion to Truth itself.