How to Kill Cynicism

Why We're All Sick of Cynicism and How to Recover Sincerity

Audio voiceover available here for paid subscribers!

I’m a recovering cynic.

Over the years, plenty of friends have informed me of my keen ability to notice what’s wrong in any situation — even ones that seem vacuum-sealed from potential wrong. It was never meant as a compliment.

For awhile, I thought it was a strength. If I never let myself celebrate good news, I never had to experience let down; if I never trusted any person or institution, I never had to have that trust broken; if I put up a cynical wall between myself and the gravity of situations, I never had to experience the pain of sincerity.

But it’s not a sustainable – or happy – way to live.

Cynics become cynics because they’ve been made to feel stupid one too many times for not being cynical enough. As the comedian George Carlin put it, “Scratch a cynic and you’ll find a hurt idealist.”

The novelist David Foster Wallace describes how our whole society became filled with hurt idealists:

What’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.¹

Cynicism is just the cultural mood. Psychologists have even noted that we idealize cynical characters — like Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield or The Stranger’s Meursault or Fight Club’s Tyler Durden or Rick and Morty’s Rick — as if they’re aspirational.²

We admire these characters because they don’t show weakness or stupidity. Their cynicism is like armor against messy emotions.

pictured: an incredibly juvenile design I made

But we also don’t see the offscreen reality that guarding ourselves from emotional investment forfeits potential emotional payoff.

Worse still, the fact that onscreen cynics usually end up straightening the crooked worlds they inhabit can make viewers believe their own cynicism can pull off the same. Yet in reality, offscreen cynicism rarely accomplishes anything beyond encouraging pessimism and passivity.³

This is cynicism’s fatal flaw; if we don’t aim our irony or critiques at something meaningful (i.e., exposing injustices for the sake of inspiring justice, highlighting hypocrisy to mitigate it),⁴ then it doesn’t do anything. It creates a hero-complex for having seen through a charade without having actually done anything heroic.

As the social scientist Jamil Zaki puts it simply, “Cynicism does tune people into what’s wrong, but it forecloses on the possibility of anything better.”⁵

Like many in my generation (Z), I grew into the world’s cynicism naturally. But also like many in my generation, I got sick of it: the attempts to look enlightened about social issues by offering the most pessimistic take, the anxious safeguarding against associating myself with anything cringe, the signaling that I only enjoyed certain things because they were “guilty pleasures.”

I think we all got burnt out. And now Gen Z is apparently leading the nation in church attendance.⁶

Which almost feels like a healthy overcorrection toward growing up in a world where nothing was sincere, beautiful, or meaningful.

We had to kill the cynic to find real Center of meaning.

—

Lots of people have been talking about this. Some call it a “post-cynical” movement, a “vibe-shift” or an evolution from postmodernism to “metamodernism.”⁷

Regardless of what you call it, I love it.

Rather than forgetting all the problems in the world and committing to an ignorance is bliss mindset, post-cynicism takes the perks of postmodernism (like skepticism and self-awareness) but trades its cynicism for sincerity.

So what follows is just my attempt to articulate how and why I’m trying to kill my own cynicism and commit to sincerity — and how you can too.

Let’s start with exhibit A:

Cynicism Isn’t Smart

There’s an unfortunate but widespread belief that pessimism and cynicism are smarter than optimism.

We see this a lot in academia; whoever’s the most pessimistic – on anything from the authorship of New Testament to a historical figure’s motives to the veracity of biblical events – is usually deemed the smartest person in the room.

As such, refusing to let the downside overpower the brightside comes across immature, or whatever the opposite of astute is (unstute?).

Thankfully, this is totally untrue.

In a study called “The Cynical Genius Illusion” that surveyed over 200,000 subjects across the globe, it was found that even though people generally see cynics as smarter, cynics unanimously perform worse than non-cynics on basic tests of cognitive ability. “In contrast to what many people tend to believe, cynical individuals are typically not more but rather less competent than their less cynical counterparts.”⁸

Plenty others have noticed this tendency. Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Philip Tetlock, and Hans Rosling have each argued that even though negative forecasts for the future — as in those talking heads that Zoom into news shows to describe impending doomsday — seem intelligent, they rarely pan out.⁹

For example, it’s common for experts to predict the end of democracy after something horrible happens. But, rationally speaking, this new event will almost certainly not end democracy.

If we base our predictions of the collapse of democracy off of all past events that have threatened democracy, we’ll see that those past events have had a 0% success rate in ending democracy.

So is this new event really going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? If we’re going off strict logic and rationalism, it’s way more likely that this new event won’t end democracy.

This is just one example, but we could apply it to anything. Worst-case scenarios seem smart, but they’re statistically unlikely.

Optimism is literally smarter than cynicism. Put crassly, catastrophizing is simply dumber than looking for greener grass on the other side.

Next,

Cynicism Isn’t Healthy

Cynics have a greater chance of suffering from dementia, chronic stress, loneliness, and feelings of failure than non-cynics.¹⁰ They’re also more likely to fall into depression, drink heavily, and even die prematurely.¹¹

cynics also tend to have the lowest income, due to some mix of refusing to collaborate with others and generally acting negatively toward others.

While it’s a bit oversimplified, there’s a surprising correlation between happiness and health.¹² The happier you are, the healthier you tend to be. And so part of the reason cynicism wreaks havoc on the body is because committing to it is almost like taking a pill that blocks the emotions that incentivize health, like joy, gladness, or delight.

As the writer Mark Brians notes, the cynic’s “illusion of believing that they see through the superficial happiness of the world” basically ruins their chances of experiencing joy.¹³ Ruminating on doom and gloom, regardless of how real or impending it feels, is not a healthy way to live.

While phrases like “power of positive thinking” make me want to throw up in my mouth, there really is a theological imperative to meditate and dwell on whatever is “honorable, just, pure, lovely, excellent, praiseworthy, or commendable” (Phil. 4:8). We don’t have to become a naïve Ned Flanders; but we do have to remind ourselves that pessimism, hopelessness, and fear are not Christian habits of mind.¹⁴

Which brings us to how

Cynicism Isn’t a Christian Duty

One of my favorite thoughts I’ve come across recently comes from the theologian Oliver O’Donovan:

The prophet needs a point of view from which it is possible to criticize without criticism becoming a mere form, empty of substance. The prophet is not allowed the luxury of perpetual subversion. After Ahab, Elijah must anoint some Hazael, some Jehu.¹⁵

Some Christians defend their right to critique on the grounds that it’s part of a prophet’s job description. But that train of thought often leads to a lot of empty, pessimistic, self-inflating rhetoric.

Prophets should challenge the culture’s dominant narratives — that’s more or less their job¹⁶ — but they shouldn’t valorize critique or cynicism for their own sake.

A true prophet doesn’t get the cynic’s luxury of giving up. Regardless of how bad the last king was, they don’t abolish the institution of kingship; their calling binds them to anoint another king even in spite of all the potential bad they could cause (and even if the potential good seems miniscule from the outset).

magic mike, except without magic or mike and instead of chippendale dancers it’s prophets. So not magic mike at all, upon reflection.

Unlike the prophets, many thought leaders today engage in what’s called “critiquiness.”¹⁷ It’s a kind of communication style that uses criticism to elevate the critic. We see this a lot with content reviewers. Needlessly harsh reviews against the new N.T. Wright or Taylor Swift album or Mission Impossible or fashion trend makes the reviewer can come across astute because it implies their own tastes are more refined.

And by not offering any positive vision or alternatives to replace what they critique, they preemptively guard themselves from receiving any criticism. By not constructing anything new on top of whatever they deconstruct, it protects them from anyone else’s attempts to deconstruct their ideas.

But as the theologian Miroslav Volf put it in his critique of critiquiness, “To change the world, we need an ‘I have a dream’ speech, not an ‘I have a complaint’ speech.”¹⁸ A prophet doesn’t subvert just to subvert, but to point to something good.

Next,

Cynicism Makes Us Judgmental

I think a good candidate for the most post-cynical, metamodern verse in the Bible is this one:

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will…What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice (Phil. 1:15, 18).

I’d personally rather not rejoice over a pastor who preaches for selfish motives. But Paul finds a way to.

Paul could’ve easily discredited these preachers — digging up something on their less-than-exemplary rap sheets to show the Philippians that they weren’t worth listening to. But it’s almost like he restricts himself from going that far because there’re more important things to worry about, like preaching the Gospel.

Rather than critiquing and dissuading them from grasping for power (the postmodernist move), he more or less says, “all’s well that ends well.”¹⁹

I wonder if Paul’s awareness that we’re not all that great at judging others is what makes this possible. Even the most mature of Christians can’t evaluate others perfectly, let alone themselves. It’s why Paul “doesn’t even judge himself” (1 Cor. 4:3). If Paul is imperfect, then his opinions are also imperfect; therefore, why would he assume his opinions of others, let alone himself, are perfect?²⁰

photograph of the actual Paul. And the atheists still try to say the Bible isn’t reliable even when they were this prescient in terms of photo technology? C’mon.

Every Jesus follower is going to do so very many things wrong. They’ll let us down and continue to; their motives will seem mixed from time to time. But in whatever way Christ is followed, whether selfishly or idiotically or truthfully or sincerely, Paul offers a way through the cynicism that allows us to rejoice in the simple fact that He’s proclaimed at all.

However, at this point, I should mention

The Brief Potential Upsides to Cynicism

In a large analysis of medical student performance, it was found that cynical students sometimes had a leg up over their non-cynical peers.²¹ Apparently, an awareness of how wrong things are provides some extra unction toward making things right. Yet, it’s a slippery slope; there’s a thin line between cynicism that can help solve problems and a cynicism that debilitates us.

G.K. Chesterton offers a great thought for differentiating helpful and unhelpful cynicism: “The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises.”²²

Cynicism’s problem isn’t as much skepticism as it is not loving what we criticize enough to offer a backup plan. We should feel a responsibility toward what we feel cynical about – as in the cynical medical students who are required to intervene with patients.

nothing silly about this picture; it’s just nice

Killing cynicism doesn’t mean we have to ignore the evil in the world or hide under a rock. It just means that we have to love the world enough to continue to hope for it even when we come face-to-face with crippling amounts of doubt.

Why We Need Sincerity

I read an interview with Donald Glover, or Childish Gambino, depending on whether you’re more into his music or Community, where he said, “No one on their deathbed is going to look back and say, ‘Thank God I avoided being cringe.’”²³

Even though lots of Christian talk about how we shouldn’t care what others think of us, this line really solidified that reality for me. I genuinely care a lot about not coming across cringe — but I don’t want to care. At all. I want to extract the compass in my brain that steers me toward or away from cool and uncool so I can spend more time earnestly pursuing God and loving others.

Like the writer John Green put it, “I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing.”²⁴ We won’t see the beauty in others, in the world, in our lives, until we make ourselves vulnerable to enough to notice it.

thanks to Substack’s @jennascolumn for posting this

Which isn’t very easy — to set our honest and open and emotionally vulnerable selves out on the table unguarded. We might get made fun of, critiqued, etcetera. Like The 1975’s Matt Healy put it, “Sincerity is Scary.” But it’s necessary.

Jesus is of course the model anti-cynic. At the wedding in Cana, He didn’t sigh in relief when the wine ran out, thanking God under His breath that no one could get too tipsy. He made more wine. Jesus was fun at parties. People wanted Jesus at parties. People don’t want cynics at parties; and cynics don’t want to be at parties; cynics have the least amount of fun, especially at parties.

Throughout the whole of Jesus’ life and ministry, he displays a complex awareness of the gross ways humans can twist their motives (just read Matthew 23), but He chooses to love them anyways; to lay down His life for them; to redeem them and invite them into life with Him. I want to love like that, too.

All to say, I’m trying to retrain myself in sincerity. I want to tell my friends that I love them even though it’s corny and they’ll make fun of me. I want to write love notes to my wife that aren’t just silly but really explain how much I like her. I want to listen to music because I like it and not because Pitchfork gave it a good review. I want to compliment someone’s book or sermon before arrogantly assuming I found a bunch of stuff wrong with it. I want to trust that church leaders are trying their best even though I’ve heard all the horror stories of how pastors abuse power. I want to enjoy worship music even though it can come across like a joyless consumeristic strategy to profit off of easy melodies and uninspired lyrics. Like C.S. Lewis said, even though I may dislike the “fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music,” I should rejoice about the “old saint” singing with all their heart, so sold out for God that it’d be an honor to clean their shoes.²⁵

In short, I want to I want to make sure my hope is stronger than my cynicism.

By the way, I’m so indebted to

Paul Anleitner

for a lot in this essay. He’s one of the thinkers who’s been putting these ideas together in exceptional ways for Christians. If you haven’t yet, please check out his publication, his YouTube channel, and his podcast.

ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m hosting a writing worship for Christianity Today’s Inkwell on Saturday, Oct. 11 at 1pm EST! I’d love to see you there! Sign up here: Growing as a Writer in the Substack Era

1. Stephen J. Burn, ed(s), Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 49.

2. O. Stavrova and D. Ehlebracht, “The Cynical Genius Illusion: Exploring and Debunking Lay Beliefs About Cynicism and Competence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 45 no. 2 (2018): 254-269.

3. Jamil Zaki, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness (New York: Grand Central, 2024), 5-8.

4. Alain de Botton offers an exceptional overview of how ironic humor can be a tool to shed light on hypocrisy and thus inspire moral behavior in Status Anxiety (New York: Vintage, 2005).

5. Zaki, Hope for Cynics, 7.

6. A Barna study found this recently. I’m curious what Ryan Burge’s take on it is though. I imagine it’s somewhat similar though, based off of Burge’s recent posts.

7. I owe a well of gratitude to

Paul Anleitner

for championing metamodernism for Protestant Christians.

8. I originally came across this study through Paul Anleitner’s wonderful post. O. Stavrova and D. Ehlebracht, “The Cynical Genius Illusion: Exploring and Debunking Lay Beliefs About Cynicism and Competence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 45 no. 2 (2018): 254-269. Other studies back up these findings: T. Ståhl, M.P. Zaal, and L.J. Skitka, “Moralized Rationality: Relying on Logic and Evidence in the Formation and Evaluation of Belief Can Be Seen as a Moral Issue,” PLoS ONE 11 no. 11 (2016): e0166332; Olga Stavrova, Daniel Ehlebracht, and Kathleen Vohs, “Victims, Perpetrators, or Both? The Vicious Cycle of Disrespect and Cynical Beliefs About Human Nature,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 149 no. 9 (2020): 1736-1754.

9. Take all these sources with a grain of salt, since many are atheists. For Pinker, see Enlightenment Now. For Ridley, see The Rational Optimist. For Rosling, see Factfulness. For Tetlock, see Superforecasters.

10. Olga Stavrova and Daniel Ehlebracht, “Cynical Beliefs About Human Nature and Income: Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Analyses,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 110 no. 1 (2015): 116–132.

11. B. Kent Houston and Christine R. Vavak, “Cynical Hostility: Developmental Factors, Psychosocial Correlates, and Health Behaviors,” Health Psychology 10 (1991): 9-17; Susan A. Everson et al., “Hostility and Increased Risk of Mortality and Acute Myocardial Infarction: The Mediating Role of Behavioral Risk Factors,” American Journal of Epidemiology 146, no. 2 (1997): 142-52; Tarja Heponiemi et al., “The Longitudinal Effects of Social Support and Hostility on Depressive Tendencies,” Social Science & Medicine 63, no. 5 (2006): 1374-82; Ilene C. Siegler et al., “Patterns of Change in Hostility from College to Midlife in the UNC Alumni Heart Study Predict High-Risk Status,” Psychosomatic Medicine 65, no. 5 (2003): 738-45; Olga Stavrova and Daniel Ehlebracht, “Cynical Beliefs About Human Nature and Income: Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Analyses,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 110, no. 1 (2016): 116-32.

12. Willroth, E. C., Ong, A. D., Graham, E. K., & Mroczek, D. K. (2020). Being Happy and Becoming Happier as Independent Predictors of Physical Health and Mortality. Psychosomatic medicine, 82(7), 650–657.

13. Mark Brians, “On Merriment,” Theophilus, May 27, 2025, https://theopolisinstitute.com/on-merriment/. Thanks to the exceptional curator/matriarch of Life Considered fame for highlighting this essay a few months ago (and also thank you for fixing Mark’s typo in the original essay lol).

14. This is allusion to the excellent line “Fear is not a Christian habit of mind.” See Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 125.

15. Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12.

16. This is basically the task of the prophet as described in Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination.

17. Christopher Castiglia, “Critiquiness,” English Language Notes 51, no. 2 (2013): 79-85.

18. Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2019), 55.

19. Markus Bockmuehl, The Epistle to the Philippians (New York: Continuum, 2024), 80-81.

20. This is inspired by Tim Keller’s exegesis of this passage in The Art of Self-Forgetfulness.

21. Mary Sim Hershey and H.A. Stoddard, “A Scoping Review of Research into the Origins of Cynicism Among Medical Trainees,” Medical Science Educator 31 no. 4 (2011): 1511–1517.

22. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: With Annotations and Guided Reading by Trevin Wax (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2022), 98

23. Thanks again to Paul Anleitner for highlighting this one.

24. John Greene, The Anthropocene Reviewed (New York: 2021), 99

25. C.S. Lewis, “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 52.