27 Takes On What It Means To Be a Serious Person
27 Takes On What It Means To Be a Serious Person
Plus a rattle bag of goodies
Catch-up service:
The Sunak Question
Why Does Being Left-Wing Make You Unhappy?
How Silicon Valley Hacked Behaviour
Can You Imitate a Genius?
What do we mean when we call somebody “serious” or “unserious”? Let me say, right off the bat, that I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to this. Seriousness is something we recognise in people, or feel we recognise, without being able to fully articulate. Even more so than “woke”, it’s a “know it when I see it” term.
That’s probably why the best explorations of seriousness and unseriousness are in fiction, from Henry IV to Pride and Prejudice to Succession. In a book, or TV show you can make people feel the difference without trying to explain or define it.
The most significant moment in Succession is when Logan Roy says to his manoeuvring, petty, childish grown-up children, “I love you, but you are Not. Serious. People.” And we feel that we know exactly what he means. We agree with him about his children, and I think we also agree with him on the implicit contrast he draws with himself.
One of the interesting things about that moment is that it tells us what ‘serious’ doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean good. Logan Roy is not a compassionate or generous man. He is, if not immoral, then amoral. Yet even if we find him repugnant, we can’t help but feel he’s serious.
The grey beard helps. There is obviously some correlation with age. Seriousness doesn’t arrive automatically, but the more time we have on the planet, the more of a shot we get at it. It requires experience, often hard-earned or painful, and knowledge, both of which accumulate as years pass, at least if you’re lucky, or unlucky.
Logan is a masterful dealmaker. In Succession he nearly always comes out on top. People who are deeply skilled or expert in something are more serious than those who aren’t. If you get stuck talking to an annoying person at a party and you’re thinking, this person is so unserious, and then it turns out they’re an expert in microbial genetics or Renaissance architecture, they immediately start to appear more serious, even if you still want to get away from them.
But you don’t have to be old or highly educated. Look at Jude Bellingham. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he’s England’s most talented young footballer. This season he has established himself as the MVP of Real Madrid, the biggest club in the world. He’s twenty years old. What makes him remarkable is not just how he plays, but how he talks. Every time I see an interview with him, I’m amazed at his seriousness. He exudes composure, sagacity, gravitas - at twenty! Where does that come from? I have no idea, but it’s wondrous to behold.
Being taken seriously is not quite the same as being serious, although they overlap.
Seriousness is context-dependent. No matter how hard you try, and no matter how serious you are, nothing you write on Twitter will sound serious. As I’ve noted before, Twitter can increase the fame and influence of serious people but only at the expense of their authority. Don’t blame me, it’s science.
The law of Twitter also applies to LinkedIn. Even more so.
The siblings in Succession are flamboyantly prolix. Baroque fountains of profanity-laced speech gush from their mouths. The connection between what they say they’re going to do, and what they do, is extremely tenuous. Logan says relatively little but acts decisively. Serious people tend to use fewer words. Seriousness has something to do with speaking only when you feel you have to, knowing what you want to achieve with each intervention, and following through.
Being serious doesn’t mean being humourless. As Martin Amis put it, “The humourless don’t know what’s serious.”
Having said that, I do think that the older you get, and the more responsibility you take on, the less you should attempt to be funny. People in positions of seniority who try too hard to amuse end up conveying a lack of confidence, which is unnerving for everyone else.
When it comes to my children, I completely ignore this advice. I try to make them laugh all the time, and they’re still just about young enough (11 and 9) for me to succeed more often than not. I’m the ‘fun’ parent, which is fine, although there’s probably a trade-off here: I suspect that when they encounter difficulties, they will be more likely to confide in their mother than in me.
While seriousness doesn’t mean humourlessness, humour is certainly dangerous to it. It can sound like an attempt at ingratiation. As Katherine Boyle points out, most people would rather that serious institutions communicate in a serious way, and not like this:
If you know that someone grew up in poverty or fought in a war or survived a life-threatening illness, he or she immediately seems more serious. While it’s not the only path to seriousness, suffering is the most reliable one. If you’re thinking, ‘I’d rather take the no-suffering route, thanks, even if it takes longer, or leads somewhere else,” - well, I agree with you, though of course we may not get a choice.
Martin Amis insisted on humour being a component of seriousness, but in his work he didn’t always trust that it was enough to be taken seriously. He slathered great existential themes - nuclear war, the heat death of the universe, the evils of man - on top of his acutely perceived comedies. His mid-to-late period novels can feel weighed down by this stuff, but then again, nobody else would think to write a novel about the concentration camps and include jokes. The only line of dialogue that the otherwise humourless movie, The Zone of Interest, takes from Amis’s book, is when Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz commandant, surveys a party in a grand, high-ceilinged ballroom and idly calculates how long it would take to gas all of the guests.
Rishi Sunak is not a serious politician - at least, most voters don’t find him to be serious. This is partly because of the sense that he has been coddled - born into wealth, married into hyper-wealth. More fundamentally it’s because, as I said in my piece, he seems to lack a sense of purpose. Purpose is the closest thing to the secret ingredient of seriousness.
Dame Janet Baker, the great mezzo-soprano, is a deeply serious person, as anyone who has watched the incredible BBC documentary about her will attest (if you haven’t watched it, you must; you don’t need any prior knowledge about her or about classical music, just watch it). She turned ninety last year and I listened to her being interviewed on the radio. I can’t find the interview, but I remember her talking about her extraordinary talent - she would have used the word gift - and how she had felt duty-bound to make the most of it. She wasn’t for a moment self-deprecating and she wasn’t at all boastful either. She was just honest. She was serious.
As a child, Baker was devastated by the loss of her elder brother. It instilled in her, she said, a great sense of responsibility. Serious people often suffer setbacks early on. Bereavements, in particular, make them unusually alert to the fact that life is too short and fragile not to be taken seriously.
Here’s another serious person: Dashrath ‘Mountain Man’ Manjhi (hat tip: Visakan Veerasamy). In 1959, his wife died from a fall because it was impossible to get her medical attention in time. Manjhi determined that nobody in his village should suffer the same fate. For 22 years, he used a hammer and chisel to carve a 360 feet tunnel through a mountain, reducing the distance between his home and the nearest doctor from 55km to 15km. People called him a lunatic when he started, and frankly, they were right to, but he proved to everyone how serious he was. I wonder, was he serious before his wife died? Was he serious when he started chiselling or only when he finished?
Paul Theroux on what his friend and mentor V.S. Naipaul taught him about writing: “When I told him I was at work on a novel he said, ‘Tell me why,’ and then explained: ‘You have to know exactly why you are writing whatever it is you’re writing. Otherwise, you’re just playing with art.’ The unexamined intention meant you were not serious. The same went for the unexamined word. ‘Why did you use this word?’”
Mind you, Naipaul had exacting standards: "I thought Hemingway was not serious. I thought Fitzgerald was not serious. I thought Faulkner was not serious. They were all entertainers. The man who was serious was Joseph Conrad."
I wanted to have children partly because I thought it might make me feel more serious. It actually did, although only somewhat. Maybe the biggest difference is that I stopped worrying about being serious.
The cruellest trick that twenty-first century societies are playing on young adults is to make it harder for them to be, or feel, serious. By allowing the price of having a family and owning a home to rise so steeply, we’ve blocked the most popular route to a serious life. It’s harder to feel that you’re serious when you live with your parents.
On top of that, Millennials and Generation Z also have to put up with older people scolding them for not being serious. It’s a joke.
Perhaps this mocking tendency is projection on the part of Boomers and Gen X. You can read Succession as exposing the fundamental frivolity of the super-rich, if you want to feel better about yourself. But I think the power of that scene, and of the series, comes from the way it forces a certain self-recognition. Compared to our ancestors, we - at least those of us who are middle-class and live in peaceful societies - are the super-rich; the coddled and comfortable. We therefore have a nagging suspicion that previous generations have a gravitas that we’ll never acquire. When you look at the politicians and intellectuals of our generation and compare to them to who came before, they do seem rather unserious. That might be a retrospective illusion. Or maybe we’re just Not. Serious. People.
Next: a rattle bag of goodies including why Protestants are more miserable than Catholics (related to last week’s post on liberals vs conservatives); the most underrated attribute of music; what it’s like working with Larry David; what people in sixteenth century England actually sounded like in conversation; sublime music from the most serious of composers, and more…
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