Fellas, is it cringe to be "cool"?
I'm not an expert on how we define coolness, or if it even matters.
An embarrassing amount of my limited brain space is occupied by the desire to be cool. My weekdays are spent surrounded by youthful college kids who make me feel like a dork in comparison, with my business casual attire and firmly adult vibe. I envy their practiced carelessness, their version of cool carefully curated by influencers– I watch footwear and drinkware1 trends pass me by at a dizzying pace. But despite the appearance of ease, this kind of cool must be difficult to maintain2. One wrong step and the aesthetic may fall to pieces. By this logic, coolness is a trait that can be bought. The right shoes, the right jeans, the right way to part your hair, the viral lipgloss, the newest Hailey Bieber-coined word jumble nail color.
It starts to lose its appeal as you get older, the confines become suffocating, the trend cycle becomes exhausting, impossible to keep up with. Everything is the It Girl dress or the Cool Girl aesthetic or the Hot Girl socks3. When I spend too much time online, consuming Amazon hauls and OOTDs with every item linked in LTK, I start to feel disconnected from myself.
What the fuck do I even like anymore? Ugh!
It becomes difficult to distinguish between what I’m really interested in and what I want to perform interest in to appear “cool.” It’s not even a conscious thing. It’s like I’m being brainwashed the more I see people claim something is cool– I feel compelled to like it, too, even if, a week or two ago, I was disgusted by its existence.
Then I look at the older people who I think are cool. And they seem just so…themselves. Their interests are diverse and unique. Their style isn’t dictated by current trends, like they’ve spent years building a wardrobe that actually felt authentic. Being “cool” doesn’t seem to matter to them at all…and that is precisely what makes them cool. Maybe when they were my age, they performed “cool,” too, squeezing themselves into boxes that didn’t fit until they found what did.
I hope someday I am freed from the shackles of “cool,” so I too can find who I actually am– I’m sure that desire betrays how uncool I really am. But I am uncool! I don’t think anyone is actually “cool.” We just bury the pieces of us that make us unique deep down for fear of being seen and ridiculed. After all, the worst thing, the opposite of cool, is being cringe. Middle school taught us to pretend we’re aloof and disinterested at all times. If a twelve year old sniffs an original thought on you, you’re done for.
But life is so boring when you don’t care about anything, or at least pretend not to. The need to be seen as “cool” is what keeps people from really seeing you and loving you at all. Tim Kreider’s very famous essay, I Know What You Think of Me, is boiled down to its most heavily circulated passage: “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” I’d like to riff on that for a moment, in what is surely an original thought no one else has ever had before:
If we want the rewards of being cool, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being cringe.
The only way to ascend to coolness is to pass through cringe, to be so fucking weird and embarrassing and uncool that you have no choice but to become 100% sure of yourself– because no one else is. Everyone else thinks you’re a dork, but you have to keep going.
I think cool is a cop-out. I think striving for cool numbs us, keeps us from seeking out the things that are interesting and inspiring to us as individuals. We never explore what we’re really interested in because we don’t want anyone to find out. I don’t know what a cool interest would even be. Sports, maybe, but only if you aren’t too interested. Indeed, the trademark of “coolness” seems to be disinterest. Don’t be interested in anything, be aloof, be completely ambivalent about the world around you. And doesn’t that seem boring? Doesn’t that seem sad?
Whatever, who cares. It’s cringe to give a fuck and it’s cringe to let people see any of the soft, vulnerable parts of your self and it’s cringe to say “I’m starting a Youtube channel!” to your 189 Instagram followers who all knew you in high school and start hashtagging your posts. Whatever, who cares. You’ll always be cringe to acquaintances and middle schoolers. There’s no escaping it. There’s no outrunning it. You might as well give up on trying to be cool right now, because you’ll never make it.
And that’s fine, actually. Because once you give up on wanting to be cool, you’ll already be halfway there. My hope is that someday I’m 40 or 50 or 804 I’ll realize that being cool is achieved through caring, being passionate about the things that matter. There’s nothing cooler than someone who is unabashed about their hobbies and their passions and the people they love. That’s cool.
Other people’s thoughts on “cool” (Whether I agree with them or not):
is anyone actually cool?, anything goes by Emma Chamberlain. I listened to this episode when it was released last year, and I won’t refresh myself on the episode to pull a quote but at one point Emma claims that the opposite of “cool” is “weird,” and that idea really rubbed me the wrong way. It’s such a young person’s view, in which cool=trendy, essentially.
Tattoo Season and Music, Music, Music, A Thing or Two with Claire and Erica. They ask if tattoos are *gasp* cool now? And claim that it used to be, only 18 year olds thought tattoos were cool, but now even 30 year olds are getting tattoos. It’s funny to me that I grew up looking at “alternative” people– both young people and full-fledged adults– with admiration, but again, anything outside the mainstream is “weird” and therefore uncool to…certain people. Also tattoos used to carry a lot of stigma and could even make it difficult to get a job, and now workplaces are (thankfully) more lenient about it.
This Youtube video is my worst nightmare: a jury of middle schoolers decide if adults are cool. But it also begs the question, why would anyone care what a 12 year old thinks of them? It’s interesting to see how these kids perform coolness and how, as adults, we cringe as we see right through the act.
Somehow I was ahead of the curve this time. My MIL bought us all Brumate tumblers earlier this year– now they’re poised to replace the Stanleys and Owalas of the world because they’re leakproof.
I wouldn’t know– I’ve never achieved it in the first place.
Last year, someone on TikTok literally tried to say a pack of basic white socks from Target were THE Hot Girl sock. ????? They’re socks. Please, what are you talking about?
This would be more convenient if it kicked in at 30, but I don’t want to get my hopes up.