Performative seriousness

When does a responsibility become a liability - a cruelty to the self? It becomes so when it is devoid of the lightness it needs to be relinquished without any frays and frets. Seriousness sours responsibility into cruelty. "Seriousness" here means to behave overwhelmingly inaptly under the facade of sincerity. What connotations are meant for seriousness here? Let's try to understand it by its opposite. The opposite of seriousness doesn't mean frivolity; it means play - the joviality in undertaking and fulfilling a responsibility.

Only the veterans of sustained pain and suffering epitomise the lightness of responsibility. After all, it's a matter of one's attitude towards life. As life is to be lived, then why shouldn't it be lived to its last dregs? When we try to control what is beyond our pale, it incapacitates us to make the most of what is in our control.

The pursuit of perfectionism in fulfilling responsibilities leaves no space for the lapses or losses. It elbows out the human element. When man wears the mask of seriousness, it doesn't let him laugh at himself. In extreme cases, when he fails to come to terms with human fallibility and limitedness, he resorts to an escapist mentality, leading to masochistic and suicidal tendencies. However, when our life is attached umbilically to the lives of people around us, we will have to figure out how our presence or absence in their lives would impact them. Absence is always more damaging than the presence when we are the sun by which people measure the time of their lives. That's enough to be the meaning in a meaningless world.

The sincerity of seriousness to responsibility can be tested personally: can we be laughed at about the things we love most? A poseur is an egoistic person. His ego renders him incapacitated to enjoy humour because the ego is terrified of becoming small.

At workplaces, responsibility devoid of compassion becomes bureaucracy of the soul. It is when the rule is prioritised over the person. The most responsible person is he who leaves the people around him a little lighter than he found them. Socially, the shallow dictatorially demand that we be serious, as our seriousness reassures them that their refuge is real. They forget that levity is the luxury of the profound. Depth is always an attractive smile; shallowness is a smirk, a botched effort to sound witty.

I know a teacher who fanatically accomplished all professional assignments. However, he taught students as a duty, not as a calling. He was afraid of lagging behind and being laughed at. He once expressed his emptiness, saying that he had failed in inspiring his students and winning their hearts, though he made them win laurels in exams. Teaching without inspiring is a more polite form of exclusion. And to arouse inspiration comes from lightness in relinquishing one's responsibilities.

Oscar Wilde says, "Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow." A shallow person is a one-dimensional frame of mind. He is intolerant of the incompatibility of things. That's why he fails to savour humour, which always arises out of incongruity. He doesn't laugh at the oxymoronic realities of life.

Performative seriousness is now brazenly strutting its stuff. An ostensibly "serious" person collects and displays ideas as ornaments, while his opposite lives the ideas and allows them to change him. A shallow writer can't help writing serious content. 'Seriousness is always secondhand. It is what we borrow when we have not lived the thing itself.' Wooden seriousness becomes all obtrusive when people with tiny imaginations spawn grave pronouncements on art they haven't ever felt, on classic books they haven't ever touched, on the uncharted areas they haven't ever dared to tread, and on the metamorphosis they themselves haven't ever undergone.

One of the tenets of literary criticism declares that seriousness must be proportional to the subject, not to the writer's ego. In the latter case, the diction becomes grander as the substance becomes thinner. The critics also differentiate sarcasm from irony on the metric of seriousness. Sarcasm is the humour of the shallow (the seriousness faking as humour), while irony is the humour of the deep (the lightness speaking straight to us).