Nonironic models also include that guy with the fixie telling that girl in the skinny jeans that he loves her, or that guy with the mustache turning down the New York Times interview because he doesn't want to be made into a Styles piece, for real this time! Point being, stereotypes are just stereotypes. No one person suffers from 100 percent irony, no matter what they wear or look like, because it's pretty hard to live—or even order a grilled cheese with artisanal bacon—that way.

So what is this piece, exactly? Is it a kind of performance art? Is it, as Gothamist's Christopher Robbins writes, "an important piece of service journalism"? Is it hopelessly New York Times-ian, i.e., self-serious as it attempts to join the trend party several years later than it began? Is this really a think piece about Guy Fieri? Or is it just that Wampole feels really, really strongly about irony?

Here's what I can share about irony. The term's first known use in English dates back to 1502. It comes from Greek and Latin, meaning that way back before trucker caps and skinny jeans and the way we talk about them now (are we still talking about them now?) even existed there were ironies of a different time and with a different look. There were Socratic ironies, for example, and there are dramatic ironies, and there are accidental ones, too. Alanis Morrisette has sung perhaps the most annoyingly stick-in-your-head song about irony, but the ironies characterized in that song—"rain on your wedding day," a "free ride when you already paid," and so on now seem less ironic than they seem, well, basically just cliched. Which is sort of what Wampole might be talking about. Maybe she just wishes people would stop trying so hard and be, and is that so wrong, to be without the faux-cleverness that distances people from the real emotion of life, or everyone hiding in public behind the subterfuge of wit or ennui, or "life in the Internet age," and all the cliches and hashtags and brand appreciation and anti-brand appreciation that come with it?

But life in the Internet age isn't ironic anymore than anything else is, really, it's just life. And the lack of acknowledgement of that, along with the article's focus on hipsters, is part of what makes its cry for more earnestness seem a bit dated. (We've been talking about earnestness for months, you guys! Sometimes it's great. And sometimes a dash of irony is precisely what the meal needs.) Our ironies aren't confined to times and places and hipsters and Instagram or whatever it is we're talking about right now: The seesaw of earnest to irony is something that's been a part of life, a part of humor, a part of entertainment for centuries, even if it appears differently over time. It's not a Gen X or Gen Y or Gen Next "thing"; it's a seesaw that need not end even when twentysomethings who currently live in Bushwick and play the ukelele have reached middle age and are getting their tattoos removed by laser. Irony has been alive for a long, long time, and there's no indication that it will cease (nor, really, reason for it to do so). It's a thing of value, really: That option, when there is too much enthusiasm or earnestness or real emotion with which we can feel comfortable, to measure out a dose of snark, sarcasm, or some other distancing tactic to neutralize the extreme level of our emotion. And vice versa, when there is too much irony, when we feel like we've lost the real sense of who and what we are and how we feel, we can add a bit more honest emotion to the equation. But without irony, God, we would be insufferable. There are incongruities of life that can be reflected in no healthier way than with a clever ironic retort.