Earnest Ill: Why Sincerity Became Cringe and Why We May Need it Back

In his song “$0,” Cameron Winter, frontman for the indie-rock band Geese, sings at the crescendo: “God is real … I’m not kidding this time.” In an interview with the U.K.-based independent music publication The Line of Best Fit, Winter describes his own feelings about that section of the song as ambiguous: “The ‘God is real part,’ frankly, I don’t know exactly where that came from.”¹

Elsewhere in the same article, Winter regards confessional lyrics with something close to aesthetic quarantine—a subtle hint not only of his affinity for Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, but of his desire for lyrics that have not sold out to something or someone. What sort of ruse does Winter suspect confessional lyrics of performing? If Cohen and Dylan are his patron saints, what qualities do they embody that Winter finds so refreshing?

Perhaps there is a clue in the same interview. Winter says of Cohen’s music, “I felt it in my bones.” Dylan and Cohen, in his view, were not simply announcing a feeling or an identity; their songs represented “a slice of their whole lives. Almost like a painting.”¹ Felt it in my bones and a slice of their whole lives seem to point toward Winter’s desire for something real—something vulnerable.

In another interview, Winter claims that an audience can sniff out the counterfeit: “If you’re not being totally vulnerable during any performance, people can usually tell.”² Apparently Winter is not anti-sincerity. He is anti-simulated sincerity. And it seems an entire generation may be with him.

In 2024, Morning Consult measured roughly 1,700 consumer brands and found that 95 percent had lower trust ratings among Gen Z adults than among U.S. adults overall. The average brand’s net-trust score was ten points lower with Gen Z.³ In 2026, Morning Consult examined more than 3,200 brands and found essentially the same pattern: 94 percent scored lower with Gen Z, suggesting the earlier finding was hardly a statistical mood swing.⁴

The irony is that a generation famously associated with authenticity may have become suspicious of authenticity as an aesthetic. Sprout Social found that only 35 percent of Gen Z respondents ranked authenticity among the qualities they most valued in influencers. Having grown up inside the machinery of social media, they know the shaky camera, unfiltered confession, and supposedly spontaneous post may themselves be carefully staged.⁵

Winter thus embodies an intelligible suspicion present in Gen Z, whose reflexive question in the face of so-called sincerity might be: What’s behind your sincerity?

It is a posture bearing the faint fingerprints of a distant ideological forefather: Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: When Seeing Through Becomes the Only Way of Seeing

Nietzsche also asked, in effect, What’s behind your sincerity? His suspicion frequently led toward hidden drives beneath moral claims: power, resentment, status, self-protection.

Perhaps that is why, in the preface to Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche describes his writings as a “school of suspicion” and says that no one had looked at the world with such “profound suspicion.”⁶ Moral and religious claims could no longer simply be taken at face value; they became phenomena requiring genealogy.

Nietzsche was not alone. Marx trained suspicion on the material and class interests beneath ideas. Freud looked beneath conscious explanations toward unconscious desire. The sincere person might not merely be lying; more unsettlingly, he might sincerely misunderstand himself.

This seeing-through impulse helped establish Nietzsche as an important precursor to postmodern thought. To reduce postmodernism to a single impulse is, of course, to provide only a rough sketch of a notoriously elusive mid-to-late-twentieth-century intellectual movement. Nevertheless, one recurring postmodern instinct was to distrust the apparent solidity of inherited categories—to look beneath institutions, language, identities, and claims to universality for the forces that helped produce them.

Michel Foucault once remarked in an interview with Paul Rabinow, “Nothing is fundamental.”⁷ Foucault was not exactly allergic to opacity, but one thing is quite clear in his work: he repeatedly saw through authoritative institutions and examined their tendency to produce norms, discipline bodies, and consolidate power. Discipline and Punish, for instance, is far more interested in exposing the mechanisms of discipline than in offering us a tidy positive theory of justice.

Jean-François Lyotard, a contemporary of Foucault and one of postmodernism’s defining voices, famously described postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”⁸ In other words, postmodernity learned to see through the big stories that legitimate our smaller stories: progress, reason, capitalism, Marxism, religion, and so on.

Like Winter—though in a vastly different register—Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and their postmodern progeny developed a formidable set of skills for seeing through things, lest they be bamboozled by the power games hiding behind the image games of the pseudo-sincere. In doing so they took their place with many a prophets who challenged the complacency and dehumanizing tendencies of the hegemony.

The trouble begins when this skill becomes total.

Consider the theater technician who attends a play but never sees the actors or follows the plot because he spends the entire performance inspecting the curtains, dressing rooms, and pulley systems. Or the boyfriend who hears yes to a marriage proposal and immediately diagnoses the answer as some elaborate instrument of control. The impulse to call bullshit on everything may eventually mean missing everything.

If there is nothing behind the speech, the song, the moral claim, or the sincerity in front of us, we are, in a manner of speaking, SOL.

If Bob Marley sings mere symbols set to music with no connection to anything we might call real human liberation, haven’t we lost something invaluable? If the justice and equality invoked by Martin Luther King Jr. are nothing more than another will to power, haven’t we, in some fairly dire sense, lost the plot to life itself—assuming there is one?

To See Through Everything Is to See Nothing

Gen Z—and perhaps every generation before them—has good reason to see through the avalanche of simulated sincerity on TikTok, Instagram, and every other platform that promises connection through algorithms.

Nevertheless, there is a subtle danger lurking inside the school of suspicion’s propensity to see through.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis considers the modern tendency to explain supposedly objective values entirely in terms of the biological, psychological, or social forces that produce them. His concern is not with explanation itself. His concern is with explaining away.

Eventually, the technique begins consuming its own foundations.

Lewis writes:

“A wholly transparent world is an invisible world.”

And then delivers the line upon which this entire argument might turn:

“To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”⁹

Lewis’s warning leaves us at an uncomfortable threshold. If we cannot go on seeing through everything, eventually we must risk seeing something—and trusting that what we see might actually be there.

This is the territory of children because it is also, in some sense, the territory of faith.

Children receive the world before they master it. Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them” (Matt. 19:14). Their receptivity should not be confused with gullibility. Jesus treats their posture as revealing something important about the kingdom of God: there are realities one must receive before one can control them.

Kierkegaard understood that living by faith requires something certainty can never provide: risk. “Without risk, no faith,” he writes. Faith lives in the tension between passionate commitment and what he calls “objective uncertainty.”¹⁰

This is not an abandonment of reason so much as an acknowledgment of its limits. At some point, the suspicious observer must become a participant.

• Young lovers taking one another's declaration of love at face value rather than explaining it away.

• A social worker willing to hold on to hope for their clients when everything in them wants to call hope opium for the masses.

• A person attending church for the first time suspending their pre-conceived notions of church people and instead allowing themselves to lead with curiosity.

Kierkegaard pictures the believer as “out on 70,000 fathoms of water” and still believing.¹⁰ Faith begins where our demand not to be duped finally gives way to trust.

After suspicion has done its necessary work, we risk believing that another person might actually mean what they say—that love might really be love, that truth might genuinely address us, and that God might be more than the psychological, ideological, or linguistic explanation through which we have learned to see.

Could it be that Cameron Winter’s wryly confessional “God is real” refrain comes from a place of both cynicism and hope; sarcasm and buoyancy; nihilism and faith?

Maybe that would explain why Winter himself can offer only benighted reflections on the origins of the lyric. Maybe, for young Winter, the muse of faith momentarily gave him eyes for what he hopes for, and a momentary certainty in things he cannot see (Heb. 11:1).

Perhaps, then, Gen Z’s suspicion is not merely something to outgrow but something to pass through.

Hannah Arendt argued that each new generation must retain the possibility of undertaking “something new, something unforeseen by us” in the renewal of our common world.¹¹ Maybe this generation’s unique gift is precisely its difficulty believing the manufactured version of things—the brand, the performance, the power game, the carefully staged confession.

But suspicion need not be its final destination.

What if, having learned to see through so much that is false, Gen Z is uniquely positioned to risk faith in something more real.

Lewis imagines Heaven in The Great Divorce not as an ethereal escape from reality but as a world almost painfully more solid than the shadowlands from which its visitors have come: the grass itself is more substantial than the ghosts attempting to walk upon it.¹²

Perhaps the younger generations are uniquely positioned to inhabit something like neo-earnestness: a posture that embraces the audacious possibility that beneath our systems, manipulations, ideologies, and carefully managed selves lies not another hidden mechanism to expose, but a reality of such weight that our cynicism begins to look strangely insubstantial beside it.

Perhaps the next great act of seeing will require the courage not to see through, but simply to see.

Sources & Notes

1. Sophie Leigh Walker, “Cameron Winter Is Not Kidding This Time,” The Line of Best Fit, December 10, 2024. Winter discusses the “God is real” refrain, his admiration for Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, and his aversion to straightforward confessional songwriting.

2. Adison Gamradt, “Cameron Winter Is Not Kidding This Time: Interview,” STATIC, originally published April 18, 2024. Winter discusses vulnerability, sarcasm, performance, and the audience’s ability to sense when an artist is “faking it.”

3. Nick Laughlin, “Why Gen Z’s Trust Is So Difficult for Brands To Come By,” Morning Consult, June 25, 2024. The analysis covered roughly 1,700 U.S. consumer brands; 95 percent registered lower trust among Gen Z than among U.S. adults overall.

4. Morning Consult, “Gen Z Brand Trust: Why 94% of Brands Score Lower,” June 22, 2026. The analysis covered more than 3,200 brands and found Gen Z’s average net-trust score roughly eight points below that of U.S. adults overall.

5. Matilda Schieren, “Authenticity on Social Media Is a Moving Target,” Sprout Social, May 1, 2024; see also The State of Influencer Marketing Report.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Preface §1, trans. Helen Zimmern. Originally published 1878; the quoted preface was added in 1886.

7. Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” interview by Paul Rabinow, Skyline, March 1982. See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).

8. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.

9. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943), chap. 3, “The Abolition of Man.” The “seeing through” passage occurs at the conclusion of the book.

10. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 203–204. Kierkegaard’s language of risk, “objective uncertainty,” and the 70,000-fathom image all occur in this discussion of faith.

11. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking/Penguin, rev. ed. 1968), 196.

12. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945). Lewis depicts Heaven as radically more solid than the ghostlike visitors who arrive there—the grass itself painfully substantial beneath their feet.