is being nonchalant cool and mysterious, or just disconnected and self-absorbed?

lately, there has been an appearance of countless jokes and satirical posts online about the rise of nonchalance. people are growing frustrated and tired of the air of indifference that everyone seems to be sporting. what was once meant to look effortlessly cool now just feels exasperating.

nonchalance has become a social act, reflected in people’s genuine attitude towards life and their tone of voice. there is now a performance of coolness that runs through the way we talk and text online–dry and deliberately detached. the less you appear to care, the more composed you seem. it’s like playing hard to get, but as a daily social performance. at the same time, people are catching on, now making fun and rejecting this behaviour. essentially, the term ‘nonchalant’ itself has become ironic. when people call themselves so ‘nonchalant’, it’s rarely sincere, a half-joke half-confession. everyone recognises how performative this attitude is, but still continues to participate in it anyway. saying you’re ‘nonchalant’ now signals awareness of the irony. you’re detached, but self-aware about being so. how meta.

but why go through all that trouble to present yourself like this?

in the past years, to be perceived as ‘cringe’ became the ultimate insult. not to beat a dead horse by mentioning the pandemic (chills), but during this time, people could freely embrace their hobbies and passions, especially in digital spaces. for a moment, it felt acceptable to be openly passionate about something and be experimental with anything. yet, as the world resumed, everyone was eager to return to ‘normal’.

in response, nonchalance has become the move to claim immunity to judgement on the internet. if you don’t even try, you can’t be mocked for anything. nonchalance is like a self-defense mechanism, a refusal to appear invested or emotionally available. there will be no cracks for people to tear into. now this raises another question: surely the act of nonchalance is also just a response to everyone becoming more judgmental online? 

i don’t think i need to go into the fakeness of social media; everyone is very much aware of it. the desire to appear casual and authentic online has become a performance. how many times have you rearranged your pictures on an instagram photo dump for it to look aesthetic, but effortless? with this level of constant curation, it’s only natural that seeming too earnest or too emotional will reveal vulnerabilities and make you seem cringe. the horror!

i think most of us are already aware of this ‘nonchalance epidemic’, and we are collectively pushing back against the idea. the word ‘chalant’ is now making the rounds, as the antonym of nonchalant, the direct opposite.

funnily enough, this was not previously a word. you wouldn’t think so, because of the way the word “nonchalant” is written. the prefix non suggests that chalant can exist independently as the root of the word (a lemma!) like in other similar words such as nonsense or nonstop. the rise in use of chalant reflects a linguistic phenomenon known as backformation. this refers to the morphological process that forms neologisms by removing affixes from existing words. this typically results from the assumption that the word already exists, where the longer form is interpreted as its derivative. this is perfectly reasonable, as it is based on intuitive awareness of a word’s morphology. but backformation can also emerge as slang or humour. many words used today originated as backformations, like ‘diagnose’ from ‘diagnosis’, ‘donate’ from ‘donation’, or ‘edit’ from ‘editor’. so it’s only natural that people imagined chalant as the opposite of nonchalant. after all, english usually gives us neat little oppositional pairs like nonfiction and fiction. if there wasn’t a word for it before, there is now.

maybe that’s just the irony at the heart of it all. what started as nonchalance has ended up something we joke about to avoid admitting that we care. the internet moves fast, trends shift. sincerity becomes cringe, and then cool, and the cycle keeps spinning.

at this point, i think i’d rather stay chalant.