"Nonchalance" is Ruining Us
Michel Foucault's parrhesia and harmful online rhetorics
It used to be enough to be chill, relaxed, and mysterious on Instagram. Now, we fabricate ourselves to be enigmatic in our day-to-day lives. At some point, the desire to appear carefree on social media seeped into the personal values of Gen Z, and the online aesthetic of being “nonchalant” and “auraful” on platforms of short-form media like Instagram Reels and TikTok now shapes our interactions with our closest friends offline. The cultural fixation of being nonchalant, driven by online influencers and aesthetics like “aura,” has led to the downfall and erosion of parrhesia– Michel Foucault’s notion of courageous and uninhibited truth-telling– and represents a broader loss of assertion and individuality in Gen Z.
Our generation’s ethos is digitally fluent, emotionally intelligent, and deeply skeptical, but also anxious, ironic, and performative. We crave authenticity but fear vulnerability. It’s like we’ve all been trained to flinch before we speak, God forbid we say what we mean without five disclaimers and a meme reference. This contradiction shapes how we engage with truth and often retreat into detachment rather than expression. The shift in authenticity to a prioritization of “cool” reflects a regime of truth choosing the facade of emotional detachment over authenticity and parrhesia, and coolness over conviction and ethics. When an entire generation falls into the rut of “nonchalance” and puts its values, emotions, and convictions in the backseat, we lose our personalities as a whole.
Our generation must take a step back and assess how these online trends and mentalities legitimately shape who we are on the inside and how those trends play out in social, romantic, and digital contexts.
In French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault’s lecture series, The Courage of Truth, he introduces parrhesia as an act of truth telling— that is, both forthright and personal— it must bear the risk of harming the relationship between interlocutors as well as be believed by the truth-teller themself. Parrhesia and honesty are not perfect synonyms; parrhesia is an assertion of bold, risky, and vulnerable speech that somewhat exposes the speaker. This exhibition of truth-telling is rare in our cultural moment, as eschatological exasperation and personal revelation are heavily discouraged online. The disappearance of parrhesia is closely intertwined with Foucault’s power-knowledge thesis that asserts that power interests decide what will and won’t count as valid or actual knowledge. For Foucault, power and knowledge are inseparable– those in power define what counts as knowledge, and that knowledge, in turn, reinforces their power.
In the context of digital culture, influencers act as informal authorities, legitimizing behaviors like emotional detachment while invalidating open vulnerability. TikTok influencers shape shifting norms of acceptability, wielding cultural power that defines what’s emotionally in or out. And these “given times” pass and morph more quickly as the years in the digital age drone on. In Foucault’s terms, a regime of truth is an institutional and cultural system that societies use to determine what is accepted as truth. These regimes are not neutral; they are formed and reinforced by those in power to maintain social order and control. For nonchalance culture, influencer algorithms, aesthetic codes, and community values enforce this regime of truth that values disinterest, detachment, and ambiguity over sincerity and conviction.
This brings us to the ethos of Generation Z altogether. Sure, we could be described as emotionally intelligent or authenticity-obsessed, but we’re constantly looking for masks and coping mechanisms to share our parrhesia on and offline. This generation prefers the neutral aesthetic of both sign and emotion: flat affects, muted tones, and performances that comfort rather than shock. The “beige aesthetic” in question, quite literally a trend encouraging blandness and a lack of maximalism or expression in interior design and in authenticity, reflects a broader cultural aversion to the experience of intensity. Subtlety thus becomes a way of declaring control and protecting oneself. As the article states, the beige aesthetic “communicates composure, not chaos.” Together, these frameworks of parrhesia, power-knowledge, and the regime of truth help us to see how nonchalance isn’t just a style, it’s a cultural logic that rewards emotional suppression and punishes expressive risk. Nowhere is this more visible than on TikTok, where trends like “aura farming” turn detachment into a performance standard.
The inverse of nonchalant, aptly deemed “chalant,” now shows up in ironic jokes and trends, taking its revenge on the act of being visibly and unironically invested. Saying too much or caring too openly isn’t just something frowned upon online; it has also become a face-to-face constraint. A few months ago, my roommate noticed that I’d gotten a haircut earlier that day and was complimenting my highlights and layers. Before finishing her sentence, she laughed and said, “Wait– I’m being too chalant to you right now.” It was a funny quip in the moment, but it has stuck with me. Even complimenting a friend feels like crossing an invisible line. The language isn’t just a joke– it reflects how our generation has started to police emotional expression based on online ideals of staying impersonal and chill.
Influencers play a massive role in the online rhetoric as well. TikTok creators with large followings make content about how to act chill, dress in a way that suggests you don’t care, and post with a calculated mystery. Over time, the influencers who embody this detached vibe gain the most respect and attention. As Foucault would say, they help define what kind of behavior is cool or acceptable; they hold the power to shape social norms. That’s where his idea of power-knowledge comes in. Emotional detachment, in this context, becomes a form of influence. People who express themselves too openly risk being deemed cringeworthy– that fear stops us from being honest, even when we want to be.
I once had a boy I was seeing preface a serious question with, “This is chalant suicide but…” and he was only half-joking. His voice caught at the edge of the sentence, trying to make light of what he was about to ask me, softening the impact of his sincerity. The quick phrase told me everything: he wasn’t afraid of my answer, he was scared of being earnest. It struck me afterward, the way we tiptoe around vulnerability now, padding it with irony or disclaimers. As if honesty, real honesty, is too loud for the room. In Foucault’s lectures, he writes about how parrhesia means putting yourself at risk: of discomfort, of rejection, of breaking a fragile bond. But what happens when we build a culture around avoiding that exact risk? What happens when sincerity is framed as weakness? What used to be “playing hard to get” in love and friendship has twisted into something colder. Now it’s “don’t speak first.” Every expression of affection comes with a side of strategy; we hold back not just to protect ourselves, but because that’s the rule. Wanting, caring, and yearning are things we ought to conceal behind a curated shrug.
Acting like we don’t care keeps us safe, but keeps us isolated.
Nonchalance protects us from looking foolish, but also keeps us from being known. If we don’t believe what we’re saying, or if we’re unwilling to say it at all, we’ve lost both pieces of what Foucault says make parrhesia possible: belief and danger. More and more, expression feels like performance. We edit before we speak, laugh while confessing, and turn our most profound thoughts into punchlines or posts. When you share something real, happy, or exciting and the group chat sends back a GIF or meme instead of a response… that might be the culture talking. We cross a line when we say something without trying to be cool. Those who do are often brushed off, made into memes, or dismissed as “doing too much.” The cost of this nonchalant performance isn’t just interpersonal, it’s psychological.
Many young people feel emotionally “numb” and less authentic after spending extended time online, especially on platforms that reward “curated detachment.” The emotional tax of constantly suppressing one's real feelings to maintain an aura, or avoid being “too much,” leads to the disappearance of parrhesia and quiet exhaustion. We are encouraged to be ourselves, but only within an algorithmically approved range of expression. This paradox is especially damaging for a generation raised on the idea that authenticity is power. In reality, our truths are often buried beneath aesthetics that leave us feeling more disconnected from ourselves and each other.
In an article from The Guardian detailing the binaries in authenticity on social media, Eugene Healey writes that even our pursuit of “realness” is often another clean, curated, and emotionally safe performance. We bare just enough to get credit for it, but not enough to risk anything. We fall into aura debt, borrowing from a version of ourselves we think is more likable: quieter, cooler, blurrier. The contradictions are wearing us down. And this weight doesn’t just affect our personal lives; it affects the ethos of Gen Z as a whole, even our political actions and social movements. Irony and detachment act as buffers in spaces that often demand urgency and conviction. A generation raised on filtered sincerity may hesitate to speak openly about issues that demand moral clarity and personal stake. This applies both politically and socially, but I’d argue that there is no more social scenario in a more dire need of parrhesia than in the dating lives of those in Gen Z. After all, what should be more honest than love? It’s not just about social media, dating, or how we speak– it’s about how we disappear from our own lives. How we sidestep the truth in small ways, until we wake up one day and realize we haven’t said what we meant in years. Nonchalance has turned into a kind of emotional extinction. We think we’re protecting ourselves, but we’re starving ourselves. Maybe we can bring back being chalant.
That word, funny and made-up as it is, holds something sacred. To be chalant is to care, show up, and risk being understood. It’s about asking a girl a complex question without the buffer and complimenting your roommate without making a limiting joke. It’s about saying what you mean when you mean it and trusting that your friends won’t gag and the world won’t explode. We used to say, “When did expressing yourself become uncool?” But maybe the better question is: when did we start mistaking composure for character? And what would it take to make courage feel natural again?