Feel Something: How Sincerity Became the Most Radical Move in Entertainment

There was a long stretch—call it the irony era—where sincerity was basically embarrassing. To care too much about your work, to let the emotion show without a wink or a layer of protective distance, was to mark yourself as naive. The cool kids were detached. The smart money was on meta. And for a while, that aesthetic ruled everything from indie film to prestige TV to the music that got taken seriously in certain critical circles.

That era is not exactly over. But it's cracking.

Something has been quietly shifting in the cultural atmosphere, and if you spend any time paying attention to what's actually connecting with audiences right now—not what's getting buzz in the right rooms, but what's making people cry in their cars or rewatch a scene four times at midnight—you'll notice a pattern. The work that's landing hardest is the work that takes itself seriously. That commits. That means something, and isn't ashamed to say so.

The Irony Hangover

Irony served a real purpose. It was a defense mechanism, a way for artists and audiences alike to engage with difficult or earnest material without feeling exposed. It also produced genuinely brilliant work—think of the early seasons of 30 Rock, or the way certain songwriters used sardonic distance to say true things sideways.

But somewhere along the way, the defense mechanism became the default. Everything got a layer of quotation marks around it. Sincerity started to feel like a liability. And the internet turbocharged this—ironic detachment travels fast online, because it's easy to share and hard to argue with. Genuine emotion, meanwhile, risks mockery. It's a slower, more vulnerable kind of communication.

The problem is that irony, deployed constantly, stops meaning anything. It's a flavor that overpowers everything else. And audiences, whether they can articulate it or not, started getting hungry for something that would actually reach them.

What Genuine Intention Sounds Like

Look at what's happened in music over the last several years. Artists like Noah Kahan, Phoebe Bridgers, and Zach Bryan have built enormous audiences—not through ironic posturing, but through an almost uncomfortable directness. Kahan sings about anxiety and small-town claustrophobia with zero protective distance. Bridgers makes records that sound like she's reading from a private journal. Bryan sounds like he's talking directly to you, about something that actually happened.

None of them are doing anything technically revolutionary. The craft is excellent, but it's not the craft that's making people feel like these artists understand them. It's the willingness to commit to the feeling without hedging.

The same thing is happening in film. Past Lives became a genuine cultural moment in 2023 not because it was experimental or formally daring, but because it took its emotional subject—love, loss, the roads not taken—with complete seriousness. No ironic undercut. No clever twist to let the audience off the hook. Just the weight of the thing, plainly presented. People were devastated by it in the best way.

Why Now?

Part of this shift is exhaustion. The content economy has produced an almost incomprehensible volume of clever, self-aware, irony-armored material. People are drowning in it. When everything is a reference to something else, when every creator is performing their awareness of their own artifice, the cumulative effect is a kind of numbness.

There's also something generational happening. Younger audiences—Gen Z especially—have developed a complicated relationship with irony. They grew up in it, they're fluent in it, but there's a documented hunger in that demographic for what some researchers have called "new sincerity." The ironic mode was their inheritance; earnestness feels, paradoxically, more transgressive to them.

And then there's the broader social context. After years of collective stress—a pandemic, political chaos, economic anxiety—people are not particularly interested in art that keeps them at arm's length. They want work that acknowledges the weight of being alive right now. Detachment doesn't do that job.

Sincerity as Strategy (Without Killing the Feeling)

Here's where it gets interesting for working creators. Sincerity is increasingly a competitive advantage, but the moment you approach it as a strategy, you've already lost the thread. You can't manufacture genuine intention. Audiences are extraordinarily good at detecting the performance of authenticity, which is its own kind of irony—a kind that's particularly annoying.

What you can do is get out of your own way. A lot of the protective irony that creators deploy isn't really about aesthetic philosophy—it's about fear. Fear of being laughed at, of being misread, of caring about something that doesn't land. The armor goes on because the work matters, and that feels dangerous.

But the work that's breaking through right now is being made by people who decided the risk was worth it. Who wrote the straightforward thing instead of the clever thing. Who let the song be sad without the knowing smirk. Who made the film that believed in its own story without hedging against the critics who might find it too earnest.

In literature, there's a similar current running through recent work that's found real readership. Authors like Hanya Yanagihara and Anthony Doerr write with an emotional directness that would have seemed unfashionable in certain MFA circles not long ago. Their books are not cool in the detached sense. They are devastating, and they are selling.

The Long Game

There's a version of this argument that's just a trend piece—sincerity is in, irony is out, adjust your content accordingly. That's not really what I'm getting at.

What I'm saying is something more durable: work that means something to the person making it tends, over time, to mean something to the people receiving it. That's not a new idea. It's actually one of the oldest ideas in art. What's new is that the market conditions have finally caught up to it in a visible way. The noise level has gotten so high that genuine signal—work made with clear intention and real feeling—cuts through in ways that clever, armored content simply can't.

If you're a creator trying to figure out what move to make, the most radical option on the table right now might be the simplest one: mean it. Actually mean it. Let the thing be what it is.

That's not naive. In this environment, it might be the sharpest thing you can do.