The Case for Being Unserious
In a world where serious people use their seriousness as a mask, be the jester.
Unseriousness isn’t the absence of depth.
It’s the confidence to not need the depth to be visible at all times. It’s knowing that your competence doesn’t require a performance of competence…
There’s a particular kind of person who walks into a room and immediately makes everyone else feel like they’re wearing the wrong shoes. Not because they’re louder, or taller, or better dressed — but because they’re relaxed. Genuinely, irritatingly relaxed. And that relaxation, in a room full of people who’ve spent the morning rehearsing their opening lines and ironing their gravitas, is absolutely lethal.
We’ve built entire industries around seriousness.
Consulting. Law. Finance. Politics. The unwritten rule is clear: if you want to be taken seriously, you must first be serious.
Furrowed brows. Measured tones. The strategic nod. That particular way of saying “that’s a really interesting point” when what you mean is “I have no idea what you just said, but I’m not going to be the first to admit it.”
Seriousness, in most professional settings, isn’t a marker of competence. It’s a defence mechanism. A beautifully tailored suit of armour that protects you from the most terrifying thing in any boardroom, parliament, or pitch meeting — the possibility that someone might notice you don’t actually know what’s going on.
And honestly? Most of the time, nobody does. Not fully. The serious people are just better at pretending.
Tim Wilson stood up in Question Time last week and sang Billy Joel.
Let that sit for a second. The Shadow Treasurer of Australia, in the chamber, belted out a rewritten version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” — complete with adapted lyrics about inflation, public sector bloat, and a treasurer who is, in Wilson’s melodic estimation, squirming. Liberal MPs cracked up. Zoe McKenzie apparently muttered “oh, God.” The Deputy Speaker called for order. It was, by every conventional measure, profoundly unserious.
It was also brilliant.
Because here’s what Wilson did that a thousand serious Dorothy Dixers couldn’t: he made people pay attention. Not just the chamber — the country. The clip spread because it was unexpected, funny, and disarming. But underneath the Billy Joel was a bloke who clearly knows his brief. You don’t satirise inflation data if you don’t understand it. You don’t rewrite lyrics about public sector growth outpacing private sector jobs unless you’ve actually read the numbers.
The unseriousness was the delivery vehicle. The substance was the payload.
There’s a line I keep coming back to — one I use with our team at General Strategic all the time: we take our work seriously, but never ourselves.
It sounds like a throwaway. Something you’d put on a mug or a LinkedIn banner. But it’s actually a pretty useful operating principle, because it makes a distinction that most people collapse into one thing.
Your work? That’s the craft, the quality, the rigour. That should be bulletproof. Your self? That’s the costume you wear while doing the work. And the more seriously you take the costume, the less energy you have for what actually matters.
Think about the people you trust most in your professional life. Are they the ones who perform gravitas? Or are they the ones who can laugh at themselves, ask a dumb question without flinching, and still deliver when it counts?
I know where my money goes.
The thing about seriousness as a mask is that it doesn’t just hide uncertainty from others — it hides it from you.
If you’re too busy performing composure, you never actually sit with the discomfort of not knowing. And not knowing is where every interesting idea starts.
The unserious person has an unfair advantage here. They’ve already signalled to the room that they’re not playing the status game. Which means they’re free to say “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out.” They’re free to try something weird. They’re free to be wrong in public without their entire professional identity collapsing like a soufflé in an earthquake.
Serious people can’t afford to be wrong. They’ve invested too much in the appearance of certainty.
Unserious people? They’re wrong all the time. They just recover faster, learn quicker, and (crucially) they’re a hell of a lot more fun to work with.
None of this is an argument for clowning around. There’s a canyon-sized difference between being unserious and being unsubstantial. The court jester, historically, was often the smartest person in the room — the only one who could speak truth to power because they’d wrapped it in a joke.
The king couldn’t punish the punchline without admitting the observation landed.
That’s the trick. The unseriousness isn’t the absence of depth. It’s the confidence to not need the depth to be visible at all times. It’s knowing that your competence doesn’t require a performance of competence. That the work will speak — if you let it.
Wilson could have stood up and delivered a perfectly serious question about national accounts. It would have been accurate, procedurally sound, and forgotten by lunchtime. Instead, he sang Billy Joel, got people, who otherwise would have ignored him, talking about inflation, and made the Treasurer’s day materially worse.
Which one was the serious contribution?
I grew up around serious people.
Smart, serious people who treated every conversation like a chess match and every silence like a vulnerability. It took me a long time to realise that the ones who made the biggest impact weren’t the most serious — they were the most present. The ones who could read the room, crack the tension, and then drop something genuinely sharp when everyone’s guard was down.
Seriousness is a posture. Substance is a practice.
You can absolutely have one without the other. And if you have to pick — pick substance. The seriousness will take care of itself the moment you demonstrate you actually know what you’re talking about.
But no amount of seriousness will compensate for having nothing to say.
So be unserious. Be the person who sings in parliament, who asks the question no one else will, who laughs at the absurdity of it all while still doing the work that matters. The serious people will roll their eyes. They’ll mutter “oh, God” under their breath.
And then they’ll wish they’d thought of it first.