Am I cool? Are we cool?
I am pretty sure I have asked myself this question many times. Looking back on old Facebook posts, pictures, and my hairstyle… oh my…my hairstyle was pretty bad, I wondered how anyone thought I was anything close to cool.
Society nowadays has this obsession with being cool. Why do we think we are so cool? Does it validate our social standing or give us confidence? Well yea… it does and that’s why we want and need it.
Think about the current situation we have with hipsters. Hipsters are supposed to be the “embodiment” of cool before it was cool, that is why they are cool. But everyone else hates on them because they are trying or defined themselves to be cool even if they do not say it themselves.
Alright, that was confusing and rather ranty. Let me try this one more time. We hate on hipsters because WE think they THINK they are cool. Did that make more sense? Alright time for the analysis part. I’m very analytical so I like breaking things down.
This idea of cool is so interesting and so confusing. It brings up something interesting about how we think about people. If I give you the “cool” tag and if others follow and also give you the “cool” tag, then you are cool. However, if I think that I myself am cool, there may be some disagreement, because other people might not think of me as cool. For example, people say that you have to earn respect, so does that mean I have to earn being cool? If I respect myself, am i respected?
Cool people seem to be naturally cool by nature. They seem to say what people like to hear and act as socially acceptable as one can be. So in a sense, they act in the middle. I am not saying that their personalities are in the middle, cool people are cool in their own way but still all their actions end up being in the middle because if they were jerks, who would think of them as cool.
This is an observation of mine that I have found so fascinating. I do not really have a solution for the concept of coolness. We all have our own idea of what cool is.
I just want to open up our minds to the notion of how we validate coolness. It is part of society, we most likely can not do anything about it but if i can leave you with an question, it would be: Can we be cool on our own?
Unanimous 