If I can impart exactly one lesson onto younger people it would be this: you cannot do anything 'ironically,' actually, because it still goes into your body and brain and soul even if the reason you did it was a goof.
One of the most memorable occurrences of my early life as a furry was a small group of of-the-era shitposters who started coming into some of the Livejournal furry RP communities I was involved in, roleplaying as clunky steampunk-ass robots 'as satire' to 'make fun' of furries, basically doing parody performance art and calling themselves 'clankies.' You know what they weren't prepared for? A community of people who earnestly took them at their word that this was their Situation and didn't point out the joke but instead just smiled and let them join in. Within like, 8 months, it had gone from 'ironically detached mockery' to a lot of these people realizing '...oh fuck, I do identify as a weird clunky robot. oh god, this is actually emotionally-significant and important to my personal development.'
The lesson is this: it's always ironic until you realize you've been doing the 'ironic' thing more consistently and intently than any of the non-ironic things in your life. And then you realize 'irony' only works from the outside and this is actually just Your Thing Now. You can only smash random keys on your brain's console entry for so long before you accidentally put in a command and have to just live with it. There is no Monkey's Paw more powerful than the one that came stock with your operating system.
