Hypothesizing the Empty-ness

I think people generally have a hard time dealing with the fact that their lives don't matter in the grand scheme of things. This is something we all are born knowing, having an intrinsic awareness of our ultimately pointless existence. We are told from day one how to push this knowledge to the side. Our parents tell us how special we are, and early media tells us the same, along with how limitless our possibilites can be. They never tell you that you are one tiny life of 6 billion other homo sapien sapien lives, and 1 tiny life on a planet full of immeasurable life. Statistically speaking, your chances of mattering are close to nil. So, we subconsciously decide to deal with it in our own ways; we want to last, we want to be known, renowned, and we want, by the ened of our lives, to have mattered some in the world. To do this, to fill the void, we engage in the act of objectifying ourselves so that we can last, so that we can be remembered, documented. We want to be cool. We want people to say "hey- you know that guy? He's one cool motherfucker, that guy is."

So very many people are caught up in the cool syndrome; it is inescapable. There is no deliberate defiance to cool; to actively rebel against cool is to be cool. Plus, cool is so often a perspective thing, you're cool one way or another. If Tommy is the alpha-male all-american cool kid, then you might be the societal reject delinquent, who throws off an open "Fuck you" attitude just as a way to compensate for too many issues at home. Sport a leather jacket and you are automatically the bad boy; a letterman jacket gives you the notoriety of being a jock type. Based even on the slightest aspect of dress style, you can act as though you are one of the social models, or be the "edgy" guy who tries to satirize it all.

Think for a minute of the people in your life who you feel have impacted you; all the role models both seen and unseen. How much of them do you see in yourself? How much of what you see in them have you simply tacked onto yourself? Personally, I can see how I feel insignificant compared to the universe, and how I see my personal role models as heros of a sort, men who have largely defied the creeping sensation of emptiness and made something of themselves. These people are far from perfect; they've struggled and fallen from grace in their time. This demonstrates to me the phoenix ability, that no matter how far we stray from the path, it will always be there to come back to.

I think the best person to describe something close to this emptiness is here: What The Water Feels like to the
Fishes

Informal Research, HW 27

If you're looking for an easy way to ingest the dominant perspective on being cool, there's an easy media to turn to; literature. Specifically, teenage literature. No other group is as overtly concerned with coolness and being cool as adolescents. They have nothing really substantial to worry about most of the time and so they try to fill the vacuum with nonsensical concepts of coolness and flattery.

Seemingly in spite of this, cool fiction arises to suit the demographic.

A personal favorite author of mine, Ned Vizzini, wrote a book that initially seemed to challenge the dominant view of coolness, but still wound up coming back to a different dominant idea: being yourself. (It seems more and more like a disney-esque cliche). His book Be More Chill describes the stereotypically uncool teen as he tries to drop his uncool habits and become socially accepted. Unique to the otherwise typical story is the inclusion of a device known as a squip, an ingest-able supercomputer designed to literally make you more popular, to increase your social standing. In addition, it can write your papers for you, help memorize lines in a play, and give you the answers to questions as they come at you.

If you enjoy teen-angsty fiction, this is a good pick, though I would sooner recommend one of Vizzini's other works, "Teen Angst.....Nah" or "It's Kind of a Funny Story", the latter of which is one of my favorite all-time books.

Interview Snippet (From Cool Friends)

Who's Cool? from Tom O'Brien on Vimeo.