Let’s Get Chalant

The nonchalant attitude pandemic may be the most catastrophic movement of the 21st century. 

Nearly every social setting demands a person to limit their self-expression, and yet this new generation of young adults still imposes further restrictions on the self. 

 The worker should be orderly and efficient in the office, the young student must be silent unless spoken to and now every person has to be aloof to the world.

 The coolest kids in middle school don’t care about school, sports or the political and economic state of the world. Future CEOs and presidents shirk public expressions of passion off like winter coats at the first sight of a groundhog in February. 

This generation’s counter-culture isn’t a force of artistic creativity or a disruption of the status quo, but instead a count of someone’s aura and how many times a person can respond to sincere questions with vague, one-word answers.

Why is this minimalism in character becoming so highly valued among young adults?

I’d say it always has been. As Tony Soprano says, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American.” In TV shows and movies, the most suave and talked about character typically handled business with little emotion. 

Think of the stoic cowboy in old westerns, the soldier who’d sooner take a life than wear their emotions on their sleeve. This stone-cold protagonist trope in media is dangerous. It glorifies an uncaring and inhuman behavior. It’s also unrealistic to expect a seriously dispassionate person to be social and the center of attention, as they are in a great deal of shows and movies.

It’s harder to find a main character portrayed as both cool and chalant. 

So much of our minds are occupied with coming off as disinterested with the peculiarities of life, we even forgot to make chalant a word. Only its oppressing sibling, “nonchalant,” can take up space in English dictionaries.

With all the talk of how deplorable the concept of nonchalance is, it’s important to make a distinction. For those whose avoidance of the chalant is a natural development in personality and not a forced phenomenon, I say let them be.

Many kids are shy and don’t feel the need to express themselves passionately to every person they meet. I’m well acquainted with such a life, yet I disagree with the active performance of this personality trait.

Acting as something other than who you are simply to impress others isn’t a sustainable practice. Friends come and go, and true friends will stick around for who you really are, not who you pretend to be.

What is so great about bottling up and hiding emotions from others? I believed we’d left those days, but as Mark Twain would say, it seems history has rhymed once again.

This nonchalance is a rhyme of the past, but not quite a repeat. Nonchalant people are slightly different than the emotionally suppressed “tough” guys of previous generations.

Today, they wear sunglasses, not for shade but to see less of the world — to be less interested in the troubles and triumphs of daily life. They wear headphones to block out the wonderful sounds they choose to ignore. People pass, the seasons change and yet the nonchalant person remains without reaction.

 It’s an enviable position to have all anxieties or life developments bear no effect on our attitudes, yet a greater life is possible. 

It’s Socrates who supposedly said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” A life without passion and curiosity is like a butterfly who has yet to leave its cocoon. It can be difficult to express oneself, but the point of living is trying even when it’s challenging. Find interest in the world and it will find interest in you.

So let us be present in the loud moments of life, and present in the quiet moments too. Let our personalities shine from the light that is true to us. Let us be chalant and end this phase of indifference.