Cool Paper- Rough Draft

The "cool" people are the temporary elite of a group that people tend to look up to. It is often you find many people are looking to be "cool." Trying to follow the complex and nearly impossible steps to being cool. Coolness is a delusional tragic trap that convinces people it will solve problems of meaning and significance but only worsens them.

Paradoxes and contradictions to the general idea of what cool prevents us from having a clear understanding of how to attempt being cool and does not allow us to attain coolness. One paradox is that if you are cool, you cannot look like you are trying to be cool, it has to be an authentic coolness. An excerpt from the show, The Simpsons, is used as an example to show this paradox.

"Lisa: That song is so lame. /Homer: So lame that it's... cool? / Bart+Lisa: No./ Marge: Am I cool, kids?/ Bart+Lisa: No./ Marge: Good. I'm glad. And that's what makes me cool, not caring,right? / Bart+Lisa: No./ Marge: Well, how the hell do you be cool? I feel like we've tried everything here. / Homer: Wait, Marge. Maybe if you're truly cool, you don't need to be told you're cool./ Bart: Well, sure you do./
Lisa: How else would you know?"

It seems as though if you admit you're cool you are uncool because being cool is not caring. But if you're uncool, admitting that is cool--the song can be so lame that it's cool. But then how can you know if you're cool without asking and sounding like you're trying too hard? We all seem like we try so hard, trying different tactics of attaining coolness to get others to like you and according to the paradox, it leaves us uncool for trying too hard. This paradox of cool is a trap to make us think that reaching coolness will make us feel more significant thus a happier person but the reaching coolness is unattainable.

Another paradox of cool is that being cool is being "real" and authentic. But especially as teens, we are all going through the struggle of finding ourselves so how can we be our authentic selves if we do not know what that is. In class we read an excerpt of Our Town by Thornton Wilder where two of the main characters, Emily and George were having a conversation about their feelings for each other, in this scene, the two characters were being sincere because they were not playing the "cool" role. We then compared this to the moie Rebel Without a Cause starring James Dean who was an icon of cool. In this movie, the group of cool kids at the high school are constantly being ironic and trying to be funny and making jokes so they will be accepted by the others. In this comparison, the group of kids who are clearly trying to be funny are seen as the cool ones and the sincere couple are seen as just average teens. This is another paradox as a trap to coolness.

On a wesite titled "How To Be Cool" there are several steps in attaining coolness. Number one is not caring what others think. Being indifferent, but still having a general view of how others percieve you. You have to be confident, be different, say what you think, laugh at yourself. Individualism is also an important aspect, be relaxed, and be social without coming on to strong to other people. There seems to be many regulations in being cool. One must be a unique individual, but unique isnt always "cool", someone you can call unique can also be seen as weird in a negative way. And in one of my interviews, a girl is considerd cool but she was not unique. There does not seem to be a clear way to differenciate the two, trying to be cool has many contradictions that prevent coolness leaving people feeling disappointed and insignificant because they were unable to become a cool person.

Capitalism influences competition and consuming commodities, it is a way of presenting what cool is and is a trap to make us run in circles following the trends spending money. The film, Merchants of Cool, portrays the message that the corporations manipulate teens because they are vulnerable. They take advantage of teens as an easy target for their profits. Capitalists find the easiest way to make the most profit, even if that means creating these roles and norms for teenagers and influencing them to be cool highly affecting their lives. Media holds huge role in our lifestyles, "the average teen in 2001 sees 3000 advertisements a day," so we fall into the trap that the newest item to purchase is cool because it is one of our main resources.

Capitalism convincing us to be cool for our money tells us to be a leader, not a follower. Being a leader according to capitalism is being able to get a large amount of people to like what you like and buy what you buy. Without followers there would be no leaders. If everyone wants to be the cool leader, the majority of them will not be able to reach coolness because only a select amount of people can be temporarily cool. Coolness is a trap that deludes people into believing anyone can reach coolness and become someone of importance but in reality only a select amount can.

Based on Friedman's lecture on the Psychology of Cool (12/8/09), giving others the power to determine your coolness makes you vulnerable, because teens are influenced by the idea of being cool, the vast majority of teens are insecure. Corporate companies take advantage of this and use it as a technique to target teenagers, "Teens are like Africa" (Merchants of Cool) they colonize our consciousness. We all want to be valued so the marketing companies use that and flatter the chosen audience (teens) to get their attention.

Running after coolness despite the traps of paradoxes and competition, it leaves you falling under the larger trap of emptiness. 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. This is the idea of absurd; the world does not make sense.

We feel emptiness because we are always looking for happiness and significance and coolness 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 and this leaves you with a feeling of emptiness.

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. Trying to be cool and failing at that attempt leaves us in the trap of emptiness. We try to be cool to feel important and cool but it only makes us feel unhappy and insignificant when we realize coolness is unattainable.

We try to find our meaning in the world and we aggrandize ourselves to prove this meaning but often times the positive attention we want to recieve is not always given to us. For example, tattoos can be seen as an addition or an extra part of someone's role they perform. It is a representation or immitation of part of their identity. Girls get small tattoos on their ankle, showing their gender (the ankle being seen as a feminine body part I guess) or the tough guy getting a tattoo on their tri-cep. It is part of the costume of their perfomance. They adjust what they wear to show off their tattoo so it can be shown as apart of their character. Almost like a more permanent accessory, like the thick chain for boys and the thin for girls. Accessories of a character's costume are designed as signifiers to show gender, character and personality. Tattos can be seen as a tactic to attract people into questioning their character. Trying to get people's attention and approval of "coolness," but even is someone is seen as "cool" because of the way one might aggrandize the self, it only lasts for a short period of time and when that period of time ends it often times leads to emptiness.

Trying to fit into the archetypes that best fit ourselves leaves us feeling empty when we cannot completely fufill that role. For example in the movie The Breakfast Club, all of the general stereotypes are stuck in detention together, each of them playing the role that they fit into, "a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, a criminal...". They eventually become friends with each other despite the expectations of not associating with people outside of their social group.

This film showed the dominant views of what is cool in a typical high school, the jock, the princess, and the rebel, and what is uncool, the geek and the basket case. Each character fulfilled their archetype. In the beginning, "the princess," "the criminal" and "the athlete" think they are better than the others, "the brain" obediently sitting at his desk and "the basket case" in the back kind of just doing whatever she wants. Throughout the movie they escape these norms by admitting that they don't fit them.

The Brain:
I can't have an F, I can't have it
and I know my parents can't have it!
Even if I aced the rest of the
semester, I'm still only a B. And
everything's ruined for me!

The Princess:
I hate having to go
along with everything my friends say!...
You know, you just don't understand
the pressure that they can put on
you!

The Athlete:
it's all because of me and
my old man. Oh God, I fucking hate him!...
"Andrew, you've got to be number one! I
won't tolerate any losers in this
family... Win. Win! WIN!!!"...
sometimes, I wish... he
could forget all about me...

The Basket Case:
My home life is un...satisfying...
[my parents] ignore me...

The Criminal:
(as his father)
Stupid, worthless, no good, God
damned, freeloading, son of a bitch,
retarded, bigmouth, know it all,
asshole, jerk!
(as his mother)
You forgot ugly, lazy and
disrespectful.

They all come to the conclusion that,"we're all pretty bizarre! Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all." We all have problems and being "cool" or trying to be, is just a way of pretending that we are happy and avoiding/denying the fact that our lives are not perfect and we our lives do not hold as much of a significance in the world as we would like them to. Each character in this film has felt some sort of emptiness because they feel that they were unsuitable for the "box" or the label they are in. No one can always be accepted by everyone, people are deluded ot expect this so people fall under the trap of trying to be cool and not being able to reach it and thus feeling sadness or emptiness.

Overall we all look for the approval of others because of we are insecurities and our own perspective of ourselves are not enough. We place our trust in other peoples' judgements of ourselves and are faced with feeling empty and insignificant because we will not always hear positive feedback about our character or identity. Coolness is a tragic trap that convinces people being cool will make you important.