HW 30 - Psychological and Philosophical Theorizing of Cool

In life we try to make sense out of everything, like what happens after death and why the world is unjust. We make excuses for the world to make ourselves believe that life has a sensible value for us. But according to Camus, there are things in this world that simply don't make sense. The world is unjust, there is love and hate and peace and war and all of it doesn't exactly fit together in a perfect globe like it does in our minds. This is the idea of absurd; the world does not make sense.

"In his essays Camus presented the reader with dualisms: happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. His aim was to emphasize the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality...While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless)"

We feel emptiness because we are always looking for happiness so we are disappointed when we are faced with unhappiness. "Emptiness as a human condition is a sense of generalised boredom, social alienation and apathy. Feelings of emptiness often accompany depression, loneliness, [or] despair. " As Matt Fried says, humans are built with the ability to feel negative emotions as well as positive ones. We can't expect other people to determine our emotions when we give them the power to decide whether we are "cool," or not. Our insecurities lead us to wonder if we are accepted by others. Fried says we should find this happiness from within ourselves because we can rely on ourselves. Relating to Camus, we need to accept the dualisms in our lives but not delude ourselves with the paradoxes of cool.

Also relating to Ralph Ellison's, Invisible Man, the main character goes through a similar routine of cool and emptiness. He joins a brotherhood and feels a sense of importance, being "Introduced as a kind of hero"(358) that people care about. Over time he realizes that they were only using him as a tool, "a material, a natural resource to be used."(508) for their group and he says "I felt suddenly empty...Up to now I had felt a wholeness...wholeness that guaranteed that it would change the course of history."(406). He thought he would be a significant figure in the world filling/covering up his emptiness but lost that cover up over time. The connection between emptiness and cool in this case is being cool does not last for as long as you would want it to because things change and people move on (is that absurd? or necessary?) and this leaves you with a feeling of emptiness.

The people you depended on are no longer there to make you feel confident. Connecting back to Matt Fried, he says; even when people leave people expect to get this feeling of okay ness from an external source. It seems as through, trying to be cool is looking for confidence from other people because we are so insecure with ourselves we have to convince ourselves we are "cool" from what other people say and as a response to the absurd, trying to make sense of things instead of our own opinions and realities, but because external sources are not always reliable, they do not last forever, and absurdities exist we often find ourselves feeling "empty" when the people we depend on to make us feel better about ourselves are not there anymore or when things simply do not make sense.



Works Cited:
"Albert Camus." Wikipedia. 13 Dec 2009. Web. 17 Dec 2009. .

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Second Vintage International Edition, 1980. Print.

"Emptiness." Wikipedia. 29 Nov 2009. Web. 17 Dec 2009. .

"Existentialism." Wikipedia. 17 Dec 2009. Web. 17 Dec 2009. .

Fried, Matt. "Psychology of Cool." Social Studies Class. 127 e 22nd, New York. 08 Dec 2009. Lecture.