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What My Younger Brother Taught Me About Character & Earnesty

Different Field; Different Game

Character is the quiet bedrock of the soul — a deeply personal, private foundation that inherently shapes how others see us and rely on us. We admire strength of character because it's solid, reliable, trusted; its absence, unsteady and chaotic.

We think we know people — their quiet decisions, their tells, gestures, and body language, the words they use, their interactions and involvements among strangers and friends, the way they move through the world. As patterns emerge, we assume something like understanding. We think we have people figured out, but we don't. We can't. Not until they're tested — thrown into the fire, pressed against adversity; life raising the stakes and rattling the walls.

How people navigate the many gantlets of everyday life matters. Only then can we hope to know who they are. Laid bare.

And every time, what do we find? Most people, when pressed, waver and fall. Many break and quit. Some stand tall. Others hold firm and push forward. But the rarest? They're playing an entirely different game on an entirely different field.

What they have is something different. Something unshakable, resolute, and true.

Who are these people? And what exactly sets them apart?

Character Pollster

A few months back I ran down 25 random strangers and asked their opinion of the most important character trait a person can have. Their responses surprised me.

The poll began in right fashion with honesty quickly registering 8 of the 25 votes. Then things took an unexpected turn. Loyalty registered a single vote. Courage and reliability both got just 2 nods. Empathy, humility, and perseverance — the so-called pillars of virtue according to social media — each got 1 vote equaling intelligence which garnered 3 selections. Hmm?

These results didn't sound right to me. Would another group of randomly selected people have the same or similar opinions? I decided to try another poll. This time around, I swapped the suburban strip mall for a Starbucks location in Midtown Manhattan. Surely, New Yorker candor would yield sharper, more morally clarified responses, right?

Wrong. Or maybe not wrong. Or maybe… people are way different than I expected.

A staggering 40% of the NYC group chose empathy/compassion, terms they used interchangeably, apparently unaware of their distinct meanings. (Empathy is feeling what someone else feels; compassion compels action in response — but I digress). Honesty held steady at eight of the twenty-five votes. Resilience doubled; curiosity and humility both quadrupled.

These results felt better. But, instead of revealing a clear pattern, they only deepened the mystery. If anything, they highlighted just how fluid — and perhaps inconsistent — our moral hierarchies can be. In one setting, honesty reigns supreme and empathy barely registers. In another, empathy wins out while honesty, thankfully, holds its own. I don't consider these quirks in the polling. Rather, what this tells us is that what we value most isn’t set in stone — it shifts depending on where we are, who we’re with, and what we’re asked to prioritize in the moment.

(You can see the specific results of both polls in the appendix at the end of this piece.)

"Earnesty" Is the Character Trait I Most Admire

Conducting these polls got me wondering about my own views. Despite the likelihood that my opinion was now primed, and perhaps highly biased, by the 50 opinions I'd recently heard, I pressed on. What character trait do I most admire in people?

My answer takes me back to that something different I referred to earlier. What is it? Earnesty — the opposite of performative hand waving and the antidote to cuddled cynicism. Earnesty is that rare fusion of earnestness, authenticity, and humility, blended with a fine mist of honesty, sincerity, integrity, and humble curiosity.

Genuinely earnest people are not apathetic, cynical, or full of shit. They are the opposite of so many people we all know: the try-hard, the lazy looky-loo, the tireless virtue-signaler, and the person swallowed whole by confirmation bias.

Though earnesty is absolutely worth striving for, only a rare few possess it in full. If you think you see it in yourself or those around you, take note — it’s highly uncommon. Earnesty requires a radical kind of self-trust and self-awareness. It demands not just honesty but a complete lack of fear about how that honesty lands. And in a world obsessed with optics, that’s a hard thing to master.

Theo Von's Mt. Earnesty

Searching for an example of someone who embodies earnesty, you probably wouldn’t expect me to land on a mullet-wearing comedian with a thick Louisiana drawl. But hear me out — because Theo Von might just be one of the purest examples of earnesty in the public eye.

I don't expect you to agree. Honestly, I didn’t at first. When I encountered Von for the very first time this past spring, I didn’t get him at all. I was shocked to learn that the comedian best known for his absurd storytelling and bizarre punchlines is one of America’s top funny men — and even more shocked that he’s one of the biggest podcasters on the planet. At first glance his humor was awkward, purposefully ridiculous, and not particularly sharp or interesting.

But something about Von lingered in my mind, forcing me to give him a second chance. And when I did, I saw that something different.

Von doesn’t posture. He never tries to be anyone or anything other than himself. As exaggerated as his stories are, they carry the unmistakable mark of someone telling the truth — or at the very least, his truth. He is a deeply curious, genuinely humble, and never self-important person.

In my recent piece on Von I called him the zeitgeist whisperer we didn’t know we needed. If you’ve only seen one or both of his Netflix specials (this one or this one) or only listened to one or two episodes of his hugely popular podcast — This Past Weekend — you'd likely miss Von's observational brilliance, eclectic wordplay, and elephantine curiosity. And, you'd definitely miss his deep-seated earnesty. In a digital landscape dominated by curated personas, Von is one of the most genuine and authentic voices you're likely to hear, a level of integrity that almost feels radical.

My Younger Brother and the Purest Earnesty I've Ever Known

If Theo Von reps earnesty in the spotlight, my late brother was its quiet, everyday master. He didn’t wear who he was as a mask, a philosophy, or a badge of honor — he embodied it. And in doing so, he taught me more about authenticity, humility, and sincerity than anyone I've ever known.

My younger brother had no capacity for pretense. He wasn’t naive or careless, but he was incapable of being anything other than himself. He never altered his opinions to suit the room, he was the furthest thing from performative, and he never feigned interest in things he didn’t care about. When he laughed, it was real. And boy, was it beautiful. When he cared, it was unmistakable. When he disagreed, you knew. There was never any guessing with him, no hidden motives, no calculated charm, no subtle manipulations — just truth and goodness, plain and simple.

What made my brothers earnesty so rare was its deeply natural coexistence with humility. He was different in a way that’s almost impossible to articulate — so different, in fact, that I often joked he was a Martian — something different from somewhere different. He carried a quiet wisdom that made you feel like he understood something about life the rest of us hadn't yet grasped and maybe never would no matter how long we lived. He died young — just 30 — but in those three decades, he lived with a depth and presence that most people never reach in twice or three times the number of years.

It’s only now, nearly two and a half decades after losing him, that I fully grasp how rare his kind of sincerity and quiet strength was. In a world full of posturing, defensiveness, and people constantly, annoyingly, and effusively hedging their bets, my brother always stood apart — not because he tried to, but because he didn’t know how to be any other way. It wasn't just his genuine goodness or his willingness to show up — it was his complete lack of hidden motive for doing so. What you saw is what you got and what you got was a very special gift. He didn't need or want the recognition. Or credit. Or the incredible admiration he'd earned from nearly every person that ever met him over his short life.

I might remind you that this was my younger brother. Younger by four years. And yet, more often than not (read ALWAYS) it was him — not me — doing the teaching and showing the way.

I remember one snowy, winter night when we were kids, walking home through streets slick with ice and snow. An older man — a neighbor we barely knew — was struggling to shovel his driveway. I kept walking. My brother didn’t. He didn’t ask if I thought the old man needed help. He didn’t say a word. He just took the shovel from the man’s trembling hands and got to work. I stood there watching, shivering, waiting for him to finish so we could go home. But for him, this was warmth. This was home — the quiet, ordinary act of doing the right thing simply because it was the right thing.

Years later, well into his illness, which by this time had reached an advanced state, I was staying at his house. I was sitting on the couch watching television, trying to pretend things were normal even though we both knew they weren’t. I kept hearing movement upstairs above me — footsteps, back and forth, someone busy with something. I finally called out to ask what he was doing. His answer stunned me.

He was changing the sheets in the guest bedroom. No one had slept there in months and he didn’t want the room to be too dusty for me. WTF? My sweet, precious brother who could barely walk at the time was tidying up the guest bedroom for his older, much healthier brother.

I broke down in a torrent of tears. It's a memory that still haunts and warms me in equal measure to this very day.

Even as his body betrayed him, as he carried the weight of his nearing death, his instinct was to take care of me. To make sure the freaking bedroom I was sleeping in that night wasn't too dusty. To show up. To make sure that people felt seen and cared for in even the smallest, quietest of ways. I could go on and on. I have hundreds of anecdotal stories of my brother's Martian ways. The rarest of rare birds, indeed.

My younger brother — my closest friend, my soulmate in ways I can never fully explain — was proof that earnesty isn’t just a virtue. It is instead a compass pointing us to what truly matters. It’s what makes life meaningful. It’s how we connect, create, and contribute. And in a world obsessed with curation and performance, with looking like we care instead of actually caring, earnesty cuts through the noise. His version of something different was the rarest thing of all, like an art form that's been lost to time, for all time.

Earnest Revolution

My character trait polling experiment didn’t provide a universal answer, but it did confirm something I’ve long suspected: what we value isn’t fixed, but fluid. The setting, the culture, the moment all shape what we elevate and what we overlook.

But if I had to place my bet, if I had to choose one trait that transcends context, it wouldn’t be honesty or empathy or resilience. It would be earnesty — the rare, natural ability to be real and sincere, to walk tall with an abundance of integrity, and to embrace both curiosity and conviction without any pretense whatsoever.

Because in a world of algorithms, brand-building, and social performance, earnesty isn’t just rare — it’s revolutionary.

Appendix: Character Traits Poll Results

Character Traits Poll Results #1

Character Traits Poll Results #2

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