On Being Self-Deprecating
I still remember the day in high school when I realized I was too self-deprecating. A teacher handed me back a paper and made a remark about how I was lazy. “You even said so yourself. All you talk about is how lazy you are.” “I’m just being self-deprecating. That’s my sense of humor.” This was not, it turned out, believable. In reality, I worked about 16 hours a week, was on student council, did bullshit volunteer work for NHS and I was on a Taekwondo sparring team. I drank no more than three times, and spent most of my spare time writing Ginsberg rip-off prose. As you can see, I was painfully nerdy and uppity, which is why I was so careful to construct an outer persona wherein all I did was sit around watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force and eating peanut butter M&Ms. I hadn’t realized people around me were taking it so seriously. Since growing up and becoming a generally shittier person, I’ve toned down on the self-deprecation. Oh wait, I can’t stop. But what I have noticed is how self-deprecation has become built into culture in general. It goes beyond Liz Lemon. Indie culture itself has become the most self-hating subculture around. After a hipster magazine wrote about hipsters being the dead-end of society, it has gone beyond affectionate goading of your own lifestyle to absolute refusal to be associated with it. I’m supposed to write a preview post about Pitchfork Music Festival and I caught myself thinking of headlines to make fun of it, because it’s almost the precedent when talking about Pitchfork. In reality, they’re bands I listen to all the time and I’m psyched to go. I think part of this hipster self-deprecation is because our generation is, without realizing it, anti-high culture. We grew up with TV and graduated into a huge recession – we expect entertainment to be democratic and accessible. Anything associated with the upper class just doesn’t sit right. Hipster culture is built on masking class advantage. Nonetheless, indie is the opposite of mainstream, occupying intellectual territory that inevitably makes it into its own type of high-culture. This is confusing to us, so the best way to deal with it is to treat it with constant self-deprecation while consuming it eagerly. That’s the benefit of self-deprecation – it allows you to be two things at once: nerdy but “cool,” insecure but “realized,” Animal Collective-loving but also “so over them.” Excuse me while I go spend my night watching stupid shows on Netflix.
