One of the most universal aspects of various subcultures in the Western civilization is appreciation and pursuit of everything that is “cool”. There are dozens of different kinds of cool: Steve McQueen cool, Miles Davis cool, Snoop Dogg cool, James Bond cool, Bjork Cool, Steve Jobs Cool, Kaurismäki Cool etc. The difficulty to precisely define what makes something cool is in fact one of the most certain signatures of all cool things.
A lot of people devote countless hours in trying to improve their personal aura of coolness. There are two factors that usually work in all scenarios and many people concentrate on them. First of all you need to have some sort of secret and hard to obtain knowledge that can be shared with your peers as valuable drops of trivia to be used in their own quest for coolness. The second important thing is to appear to maintain your composure and remain under control in all situations. Freaking out, messing around, raising your voice or waving your limbs uncontrollably will likely make you “lose your cool” in the eyes of your peers.
The pursuit of coolness may hinder your learning process in other elements of life. Sometimes people who have plenty of cool do not have much else. The willingness to make a fool out of yourself and let yourself make mistakes will help you obtain other individual and valuable characteristics. Embrace erros and failures as an integral part of success.
Even if you don’t initially enjoy a new style of music, a new art form or the way that some people interact or lead their life, do not condemn them and put them in a mental wastebasket just for not being cool. By doing that you will gradually lose your understanding of the big picture and drown in your own increasingly shallow pool of approvable ways of doing things. It is an ever present danger for all connoisseurs of subcultures.
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