Cool. It glides off the tongue with the promise of eternal acceptance. But chasing cool will get you nowhere, it’s a desperate pursuit of an elusive goal, and the closer you get the further it slips out of reach.
Spending obscene amounts of time and money on becoming cool and obsessing over every little micro-trend that gets forcefully shoved down our throats through the screen, will not achieve the results you’re hoping for. Because ultimately, cool is not a performance, and therefore a cool person cannot be performative. Coolness is derived from authenticity and originality - think about the type of person who walks past you on the street or sits opposite you on the tube that makes you go ‘oh my god they’re soooo coooool’. Usually, they’re unique, unique in how they look, what they’re wearing, what they’re doing. However, in this instance, they’re also a total mystery to you, and mystery is powerful because it offers controlled stimulation and the excitement of the unknown triggers your curiosity. You see their outfit or hair or the book they’re reading, and then your brain fills in the gaps, all of a sudden they’re on a pedestal of unachievable coolness handcrafted by you.
And yet, on the contrary, the coolest people that I know are my closest friends, purely because I know so much about them. Having the full picture of someone - their personality traits, hobbies, passions, skills and even weaknesses and flaws - allows you to form a full opinion of them, your brain is not allowed to paint pretty pictures of who they could be in the gaps of your knowledge, because there are no (or at least very little) gaps to be filled.
So where does that leave us now? The coolest people are the people you know nothing about but also the people you know the most about? Or do I just have cool friends? And what about the entity that engulfs everything and everyone now … social media, which at its core is about being relatable but somehow also aspirational, and everyone is relatable until they’re not.
The ins and outs of social media is a never-ending discussion, and I do think that modern day coolness hinges entirely on the content we consume, but the issue I have with writing about social media is that I can’t seem to pick a lane or stay in it. The more that I research, the more I agree and/or disagree with everyone and their often very valid arguments. Social media is bad - yes. It’s ruining our attention spans, yet it allows everyone everywhere access to and the ability to share most of the information in the world so surely it’s making us smarter? It’s giving too many people with harmful and toxic opinions a platform, but it also gives the smartest and most healthy minded people a platform too. It causes unrealistic ideas around body image and beauty standards, yet you can find communities of people who look like you or are going through the same struggles as you that you never could have met without social media - and lets be real, mainstream media like film, TV and magazines have always been terrible at encouraging body positivity and representation - influencers earn too much money for the amount of effort influencing requires … yes, but influencing isn’t the only field of work where this happens, and this made me wonder if hating influencers is actually just hating women.
Initially I wanted explore the topic of influencers, their influence on ‘being cool’ and attempt to expose people’s inability to think for themselves. Everybody is always looking to people with social influence to tell them what they should be wearing, eating, and essentially doing all the time, we’re all so afraid of appearing uninteresting that the easy solution is to latch on to things that the confident, unique and largely followed people, tell you are cool. But as a career it is a predominantly female industry and women’s work has always been undervalued. Influencing was pioneered by women in the early 2000s and when you think of your stereotypical influencer, the image that pops into most people’s head is of a woman. Yet, in 2025 the top earning influencers were men, and of the top 50 channels with the most subscribers on Youtube only 3 were adult women. So influencing isn’t actually even female dominated, and if it is, the men are still earning more - so why is it that people are so judgemental of it as a career? Men often reject the title ‘influencer’ and I think it’s because it is most commonly linked to lifestyle content created by women. Men with an online presence and following, prefer to be called ‘content creators’ - and other women do too, but this just feels kind of like the people who say “I’m not like other girls”. Because actually, you’re all influencers and you can pretend that you’re somehow different because your content is more intellectual or of a higher calibre, but everybody who is posting regularly on social media, gaining a following and earning money from their videos is influencing an audience in some way - so why do you (men) think this title doesn’t apply to you. And so, I’m aware that I’m making a massive generalisation when I say that influencer hate is just misogyny disguised, but the title ‘influencer’ has become embarrassing to hold because ultimately it is linked to one style of content produced predominantly by women, content that men don’t want to be associated with; which doesn’t make any sense because these people are earning fucking millions, money has always been an indicator of success and power and men all look up to very rich and successful male figures so why are we all hating on the pioneering women of social media?
So ultimately coolness, and all which pertains to the idea of being “cool” is a much more subjective topic than I originally thought. At its essence, a cool person is an unknowable platform for us to cast our hopes and desires onto, a representation for everything we are and could hope to be. And I’m sorry if you read this in the hopes of being given a ‘How To’ guide on the ins and outs of coolness, because unfortunately it cannot be defined or chased or bought. Cool is decided by each individual based on many different sources of inspiration, and many different pockets of culture, so everyone should just stop trying to be cool and focus on being authentic. But I’m aware that this is wishful thinking because fundamentally, we as a society are not programmed that way.