What's cooler than cool?

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

I’m bringing you something a little different today, some speculation about a topic that might normally be considered outside our purview here. You might wonder what it has to do with politics, but, like everything, ‘being cool,’ or not, is political. It doesn’t take much recollection to consider that as a kid coolness and power were intertwined. And that may well true in your adult life, although there seems to be a much greater range of experience in that regard. But we understand that coolness is, in many ways, social power. Abstaining from the game of coolness is, maybe, a way of exercising power as well.

What it means to be cool is hard to pin down. In adult world exceptional artists, people on the cutting edge of the fashion world, amazing athletes and sometimes truly interesting people might be considered the coolest among us. Wealth can play a disproportionate role, of course, but a lot of cool people just have something, a nonchalance and social suaveness and seeming comfort in their skin. But that’s all in the land of the grown ups — where I really want to start from today is kid world.

Schools, and the childish dynamics that permeate middle schools and high schools in particular, undoubtedly shape how we conceive of the concept of cool later in life. It’s one of those things that isn’t talked about much, for reasons I haven’t quite sorted out. Maybe it’s just uncomfortable for a lot of people, or maybe it’s too nebulous, but whatever the reason I think that in failing to understand these dynamics we’re failing to understand one of the underpinnings of the ways we interact with each other, and thus with culture and politics and more.