Just lately I’ve been advised that I’m excellent, one thing I’m completely conscious I’ve by no means been nor ever will likely be.
This beneficiant evaluation has come from strangers after I apologize for bumping into them and from the exceedingly cheerful salespeople on the retailer the place my daughter outlets for garments. “No, you’re excellent!” they’ll insist after I clarify the necessity to relaxation my Gen X weariness on the becoming room flooring the place a modest “No downside” would have sufficed.
The urge towards pronounced perfection is annoyingly catchy. Virtually in opposition to my will, I now reply to emails with a knee-jerk “Good!” the place I as soon as would have mentioned one thing extra in keeping with the nevermind sensibility of my era. “Sounds good,” for instance, or “OK.”
Even our synthetic intelligence exhorts us to better heights of enthusiasm. To an e mail during which an acquaintance notes pleasantly, “It was good seeing you final night time,” Gmail suggests a extra boisterous reply: “It was nice to see you too!” or “So enjoyable!” Our chatbots likewise talk with countless effervescence, simply as we now have taught them to do(!).
When not being excellent, we’re decidedly good. Ought to I a lot as show a downbeat facial features when fumbling a social nicety, the response is nothing in need of impassioned: “No, you’re good!”
Being good is for everybody. We’re all good now that “You’re all good” has changed each the Commonwealth “No worries” and the American normal “That’s OK.” And it’s not at all times private. Incessantly, declarations of goodness come within the type of an expansive assertion of basic excellence: “It’s all good.”
However is all of it good, actually?
It’s laborious to not learn one thing barely defensive into this relentlessly vivid veneer. Even when the zeal appears real, if misguidedly so, the brand new affirmative language has an nearly oppressive bent. Most of us are keen to consider we’re OK or that we’re not less than not an issue. It was straightforward to be no massive deal. However who amongst us can stay as much as being all good, not to mention excellent, on a regular basis?
I requested a colleague what she made of those present linguistic tics and her clarification was unmitigated passive aggression. “If somebody tells you ‘You’re all good,’ it means, ‘You silly previous woman,’” she defined. “It’s like saying ‘I like your sneakers, for a mother.’”
The rise of “It’s all good” is often thought to have originated, like a lot American vernacular, in Black tradition. Based on a New Yorker article devoted to the recognition of the phrase, M.C. Hammer’s 1994 hit “It’s All Good” was instrumental. Now everybody appears to make use of “It’s all good,” typically as a technique to shut down dialog round one thing which will truly be fairly dangerous.
On a regular basis chitchat as soon as defaulted to a sure bland “I’m OK, you’re OK” neutrality. Folks have been at all times “wonderful,” even when we weren’t remotely wonderful and in no temper to debate it. So far as everybody else was involved, we’d insist it was “no downside.”
At the moment, the true world is approaching the nightmare state of affairs within the “Nosedive” episode of “Black Mirror,” set in a future during which everybody charges each day interactions in actual time on their gadgets. Folks in “Nosedive” earned likability scores based mostly on different folks’s snap judgments, which then had social and financial ramifications, comparable to employment alternatives. In the meantime, in our world, you possibly can earn a one-star Uber ranking for asking a driver to show down the music. Maybe we’re going past the requisite niceties merely to keep at bay the prospect of getting written up someplace.
However this does create a obscure aura of dishonesty round our each day interactions, and should even perpetuate it. One trainer pal identified what he referred to as the “poisonous positivity” of A.I.-generated faculty advice letters (sure, they’re turning into widespread), which are likely to blurt out the identical saccharine phrases of endorsement. Simply as all children can’t be geniuses, all assessments and the feelings that convey them can’t be this oppressively upbeat.
It’s laborious to not see senseless optimism as an effort to stability the forceful nastiness and negativity of social media. It’s as if our emotional expressions have turn out to be as polarized as our politics, with the extremes loudly articulated on the expense of the previous middling opinions and equivocal emotions.
Maybe people have collectively determined that we may all use somewhat pick-me-up, a technique to offset the net and offline grievance discourse on the market on the earth. Or not less than masks it. Possibly it is a technique to convey on-line emojis in the true world. How else to say “100%” in bright-red sort or “smiley face blushing” to a different particular person and not using a superlative flourish or two?
In fact, one should look on the intense facet. Within the grand scheme of what deserves grievance, emotional inflation might be the least of our most urgent issues. One may even say it’s simply wonderful. Or maybe that it’s all for the great. As we head into what appears prone to be a bumpy 2025, it is probably not solely improper to name it excellent.
