Oh, to be cool.

To be “cool” or to be “not cool”, is that a question or a goal in life? People go out of their way to be 'cool', that is clear; but people who are apparently “not cool”, do they go out of their way to stand out as someone not making an effort to stand out?

Do me a favour for this little musing: ignore the generalising (I know it's being hypocritical by generalising. I'll write some day about why I hate generalising and why it's the worst thing in the world short of murdering your younger siblings favourite pet etc.) and I'll do my best to make my point no matter how blunt my argument seems to appear.

Coolness is an opinion; it's the opposite of “uncool”. It's also a standard set by someone or a group of people. If I took an example to set the standard I would be alienating the rest of the standards because it's far from universal. Jocks, goths, hippies, society bumpkins, the whole kit and caboodle all refer to things as “cool” and “not cool”. There are things some people see as universally cool and then we have the things we differ over.



I think I've always based my idea of being cool on Easy Rider. Let’s take it from here: two men, Wyatt and Billy, are riding to Mardi Gras in New Orleans from L.A. with money and bikes that they got from a big coke deal at LAX. They meet lots of different folk in the middle of the dried up South - there are the hippies starving but exuding free love in a desert commune, the fertile and apparently virile farmer, the lawyer George Hanson who is memorably played by Jack Nicholson, the local men who beat and kill him not long after, the two prostitutes who they take around the town and later take acid with in a graveyard and finally the men who shoot and kill both Wyatt and Billy at the conclusion of the film.

While the film itself is all about freedom and how to obtain it and with the eventual result that they attain neither freedom nor a happy-ever-after ending. The scene above which I included is a good place to begin this analysis. The sixties and seventies was when "cool" began to spread across the world as a status of desirability outside the normal constraints of class and education. "Cool" is a definition that has come and extended it's reach over every aspect of life that now separates those who are, those who are not, and also those who strive to be "cool".

If I suggested that class and education had an effect on the level of "cool" I don't think there would be several people who would disagree - but then there are people who try and step outside or above or below these standards in the pursuit of "cool" which confuses everything. "Cool" is itself a class and status. There are those who want it, there are those who can never have it, and there are those, like we saw in Easy Rider, who hate it more than anything.

Is being "cool" being different or is it something else? What it is, is an opinion. What I want to ask is why do some people want to be "cool" and others want to keep so far away from it? I think it is like comparing them to members of a pack of animals (I won't say flock of sheep) and then there are the individuals that want to be far from the main pack. Being different and being "cool" and being normal (for want of a better word) are all different ways that we grow as individuals who gradually want to become part of a group - be it the larger normal group, the tiny different group and of course the always popular and always growing cooler group.

Who we decide to be is part of our natural desire 'to be something', it's the same reason we go to school, find careers, travel and find love. How we are perceived by our peers shapes how we develop as individuals. Perhaps some people are naturally different and naturally cool. But is it as glorious and glamorous as that? Are we not who we are and the world that forms around us is what conceives us as different or normal or “cool” or “not cool”.

Look again at the characters in Easy Rider that I mentioned earlier. If we took each of them from their elements, would they be normal or different or would they be “cool”?