In Praise of Uncool

So I have finally made peace with the reality that I am simply not a cool person - not in the sense that I'm an uptight asshole, but that my approach to life and the world, my character and personality, fundamentally differ from the what typically makes a person "cool". I mean, I'm writing a blog entry, that should tell you all you need to know about how far from cool I am. For context, when I write about "cool", I mean the cool that originated with the cool jazz of the late 1940s / early 50s, an ethos that valued artistic restraint and detachment in opposition to the "hot" jazz of bebop. Over time, that "coolness" extended beyond an artistic/aesthetic value to the encompass the comportment and image of the artists themselves - a little aloof, a little mysterious, unconcerned by the considerations and conventions that motivated others, with maybe even a touch of condescension or superiority thrown in.

With what is "cool" out of the way, lets look at the many ways I am uncool. First off, I feel DEEPLY. I can't read the Wikipedia synopsis of Grave of the Fireflies without being practically incapacitated by the suffering of the everyday people who survived the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. I am chronically empathetic, and I have to work to cultivate ANY degree of detachment, even just to protect my own mental health. My default setting is to FEEL wholly and completely, and I worked for a lot of my life to suppress that because I could sense from my peers that it was "uncool." The kid who melts down at the slightest provocation is the antithesis of cool. Now that I'm old though, I revel in emotions. They're inexpensive, they're exciting... I can be happier than anyone off the smallest things, just hearing the right song or getting something done. For those negative emotions, I've got lots of practice with sorrow, despair, hopelessness - and I've internalized that, like everything, they will pass. Also, the contrast truly makes the positive emotions that much sweeter. I know "emotional lability" is a a big marker for mental illness or even brain damage, so to be clear, I'm not out here flying off the handle because someone got my Taco Bell order wrong. Letting myself feel an intense emotion doesn't correspond with a wild or inappropriate behavioral shift - it's more like I am at peace with feeling more intensely than other people, admitting to it, and talking about it even when I know that, from an intellectual standpoint, it's unreasonable.

Another one of my uncool character traits is being reactive or impulsive. This one is actually a mixed bag when it comes to whether it's really worthy of "praise", because it does take a bit of "cool" (namely restraint) to utilize it productively. To this day, I can still leap to the odd inaccurate or unfair conclusion when faced with something unexpected. The obvious praise-worthy part comes in when I'm right (it happens, lol), but, counterintuitively, a little impulsivity/reactivity also helps me when I'm working in a team setting - though it definitely goes down smoother if there's strong trust and mutual respect. In that environment, I've found that blurting out the occasional hot take can actually help you get where you want to go much faster. First, it breaks the ice to being dead-ass wrong. Lots of teams, even good teams, can get chilled by their own cool. Experts want to be expert, everyone wants to contribute the deep insight that impresses the group and moves the needle. Nobody wants to waste time or lose face, so people hold back -- sometimes to the point of making the team ineffective at whatever you're trying to accomplish. When throw a big dead fish of abject incorrectness onto the conference table or into the group chat and satan doesn't immediately appear to snatch me down to hell, it lowers the stakes to being wrong. Maybe some corporate types are out there doing that kind of thing on purpose, but I'm talking about me just failing to grasp a situation and sincerely offering trash like I'm making a meaningful contribution. Regardless, suddenly people are okay offering their own half-baked or partial solutions, and there's dialog and interaction, and we're moving forward. Another benefit to impulsivity is that it can quickly and succinctly highlight something significant from my perspective that might not be on others' radar ("bro, did you forget about x?"). I've seen folks so concerned about couching criticisms or suggestions in terms so innocuous that nobody knows what the hell they're talking about -- that's honestly the other side of my wild degree of empathy, so this "blurt it out" piece is a relief sometimes. Lastly, the it can also provide a seed crystal for the team to form a more considered response or solution around ("ok... KTF's idea is actually pretty good, but now we need to account for..."). So yeah. If everyone's trying to be too cool, you just sit around looking cool and don't get stuff done.

The third uncool trait I have is a hyperdeveloped sense of, and attachment to, justice. It's really an outgrowth of the crazy empathy thing - being able to feel, deeply and viscerally, the injustice visited on someone else is something that I personally can't ignore. When I say justice, lets boil it down to Justinian's "the constant and perpetual will to render to each their due" (Swapped out the his b/c fuck patriarchy. Don't like it? Get your own blog). So it's always ("constant and perpetual"), it's something that needs to be chosen ("will"), it concerns what is given ("render ... his due"), and its presence or absence is evaluated on an individual level ("each"). It's a blog post, I'm not going harder than that. So. I'm a cis white guy, right at the top of privilege mountain in American culture today. I could court and marry the type of people I'm attracted to, I can perform the gender I find most comfortable with total acceptance everywhere, and I can pursue the opportunities/skills/trades/etc. that I please, knowing I will be judged chiefly on my ability (ostensibly, but that's another blog post). So that's my baseline, other people like me enjoy it, I take it as my due, it feels just. Yay for me. If you took any of those things away from me, I'd be livid and wouldn't rest until I had it back. For gay marriage or trans kids or whatever, my imagination has me immediately in their shoes, being told who I can or can't marry, what gender I can or can't be? Fuck that. If the prevailing culture told me I had to As a kid, I visited Mount Vernon, George Washington's slave plantation, with my family. It was just another historical President's home until I made a comment to my mom about wanting a stone road like the one we were walking on. My mom knelt down to my kid level and said "you do not want a road like this, these stones were all laid by slaves, men and women who were owned like property and couldn't choose what they did with their lives, who they married, or what happened to their children". Props to my mom for that; it set me on an irrevocable "Fuck George Washington" every path day since.

So what makes sticking up for justice uncool? If being "cool" is to be detached, frictionless, and aloof, generally unconcerned with the doings of others, justice entails getting all up in peoples' business, literally passing judgment on their actions, all because of how it impacts a third party who might not even want you to intervene.