When Life Gives You Banana Peels—or, Why I Am an Ironist

A man slips on a banana peel. Intending to go forward, he pushes the floor backward with his foot except it isn’t the floor; it’s a banana peel. Intending to go forward, he slips backward. That’s slapstick. It’s also visual irony walking forward, fall backward.

An ironic situation is one in which things go the reverse of what’s expected. You thought you took the faster route and ironically, it was the slower one. You waited for Mr. Right and, ironically, ended up with Mr. Wrong.

Or the reverse kind of reversal: You thought you made a big mistake but ironically, it turned out to be one of the best decisions in your life.

There are reversals in physics. Winds shift; tides turn. We, the living, are trying to track reality, which means even we’re trying to time and track reality’s reversals. Reality zigzags unpredictably. If we want to stay upright, we have to try our best to zigzag with it.

Trying to track reality’s reversals is dead-serious work. Change sails on time and your boat stays upright, change sails but miss a shift in the wind and you could capsize and drown. Likewise, when investing, you try to buy low and sell high. But if your timing is off, you might end up buying high, selling low, and becoming destitute. To get anything done, we have to commit to our decisions but giving unpredictable shifts, our commitments can be our undoing.

Think of it as like living on a turntable. You run in the right direction, but, while running, the tables turn 180 degrees so now you're running in the wrong direction. Steadfast commitment won’t help you when you’re dealing with reversals like that. You’ll end up in outer wrongolia.

Trying to track realty’s reversals is also a hapless hoot. Just watch a few “cat fail videos,” animal slapstick in the physical world. There’s something bittersweet, poignant—the right word is ironic about all of us living creatures trying to keep upright while skating on jello, throwing ourselves at solutions that could turn into problems given our unpredictably wiggly world. Just when you discover the meaning of life, it changes.

An ironist is someone who recognizes that reality contains these reversals that, for us fortune-seekers, means that there will be these reversals of fortune. The right action can turn out wrong. The wrong action can turn out right. An ironist embraces this as an inescapable feature of life.

People sometimes confuse ironists with hypocrites, which is ironic because they’re opposites. A hypocrite uses reversals as an excuse for doing whatever they want. If things don’t always turn out as we plan, then don’t plan. Just do whatever the hell you want. If good turns out bad and bad turns out good, good and bad are bogus concepts that only suckers believe in. If your hypocrisy ends up angering people, blame it on the reversals. “Yeah, I said 'til death do us part, but the situation changed. You changed. It’s your fault. If you had stayed young and sexy, I wouldn’t have been tempted to sleep with that barista.”

In contrast, an ironist cares deeply about trying to do right, not wrong but accepts that, given reality's reversals, trying carefully the best we can do. An ironist takes fallibilism to heart. Fallibilism is the assumption that any behavior, no matter how well-conceived, can fail. There are better and worse guesses about what to do, but no guess is 100% certain to succeed—not in our wiggly world. Fallibilists aren’t spineless, mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy flip-floppers. They still make big fierce commitments, but they know that their commitments are guesses that could fail. The fallibilist mantra is “no matter how confident I am in a bet, I remain still more confident that it is a bet.”

In contrast, a hypocrite assumes that since no bet is 100% certain to succeed, all bets are equally valid so they don’t have to make careful bets. They can live by unconstrained impulses. If anyone challenges them on whatever impulsive insistent bet they place, they can play the skeptic. “Hey you don’t know for sure you’re right and I’m wrong. I can do and believe whatever I want.”

In general, when we're challenged on our inconsistencies, I’d argue we respond in one of three ways, two of which lead to stunted growth and hypocrisy.

Suppose someone tells you “don’t be negative.”

If you’re someone who embraces the fundamentalist principle that negativity is always a no-no, without noticing the self-contradiction, you might say “No! I wasn’t being negative! I was merely saying that I’d prefer another outcome, which is positive!"

If you’re a hypocrite, you might say, “Haha, you idiot, 'don’t be negative' is negative which proves you’re a hypocrite so I don’t have to listen to you, or anyone. Morality is bogus, everyone’s a hypocrite, so I can be as hypocritical as I want."

If you’re an ironist you might chuckle, “You’re right. I was being negative. I wonder about negativity a lot. I try to place good bets about when to accentuate the positive and when to accentuate the negative. Though I try not to, I make mistakes, being positive when I should be negative and negative when I should be positive. That’s life. I’ve got to laugh at my errors. Laugh and learn.

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The three basic responses are:

1. Fundamentalist equivocation: Pretending you don’t alternate between different responses when really, you do.
2. Cynical hypocrisy: Pretending that since everyone’s inconsistent you’re free to be as inconsistent as you want.
3. Fallibilist irony: Admitting that you alternate, that you try to alternate well, that you commit to guesses that could turn out badly given the wiggly jello world we’re all skating.

I think humble fallibilist irony is the rational, adaptive response to reality’s inescapable reversals. I’ve got life’s 3.8 billion-year trial and error history to back me up on this. Just watch a few videos of cat fail videos. Even nimble acrobatic animals bet wrong sometimes. I’m an irony fundamentalist, fundamentally opposed to fundamentalisms of any kind. I’m absolutely opposed to absolutism.

And if you think that’s ironic, you’re right. Which proves my point.