1. Starting off this week is a case against “cool” and a sweeping permission to be “cringe.” What is “cool”? “Cool” is elusive. Just like trends, what or who is deemed as “cool” is ever-changing. Take, for example, the panicked debate over denim pants. The once popular Millennial skinny jean (grudgingly) died to the Gen Z “mom” jean that then surrendered to the “dad” straight-leg and “vintage” wide-leg jean. Common slang like “YOLO,” “bae,” or “lit,” became “full send,” “simp,” and Oxford’s 2023 word of the year, “rizz” (just typing YOLO makes me cringe). What was once “cool” a year ago, heck, even a month ago, is deemed overused, dated, and embarrassing. Unfortunately, as Harrington brilliantly addresses in her Substack, the trend cycles are not the only things affected by this idea of “cool.” The need to be “cool,” or at the very least perceived as such, inhibits our ability to build lasting and purposeful connections:
[A]s long as you operate under the sign of “cool”, you can’t build anything lasting, or broad-based — because the moment you do, it stops being cool and the glamour migrates somewhere else. By the same token, ordering your social life around “cool” requires a certain ruthlessness: a willingness to exclude old friends, ditch old haunts, or cut someone dead, the moment they no longer have the magic fairy-dust. It’s anti-loyal. […]
It will deter you from taking the emotional risk of friendship with those who have different perspectives, or whom others might look down on. Above all, “cool” enjoins you never, ever to let on that you need other people. There is nothing less cool than needing.
“Cool” is starting to sound like another grab at justification. But the place brimming with people in search of justification outside of themselves? According to Harrington, that’s the place that makes you the cringiest:
Probably the most cringe thing you can do is going to church. There, you show up regularly to join a group of others you didn’t choose, and some of whom are probably old, or weird, or awkward, or otherwise uncool. The purpose of showing up is prayer: again, the opposite of cool, because to pray is to declare, openly, that you are not completely self-contained.
There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is trying. Here’s the thing though: data consistently show that the happiest people — those who feel that their lives are most filled with purpose and fulfillment — are not necessarily those with kids — it’s those who go to church. Those, in other words, who are not just to be indifferent to cool, but actively anti-cool. The first step to a happy and fulfilled life, it appears, is cringemaxxing.
There are, no doubt, a great many reasons for this. But I am convinced that whatever your relationship to religious worship, a central reason why religious attendance is associated with happiness is that in order to make that commitment you need already to have abandoned the pursuit of cool. Perhaps, for committed non-believers, there are other ways to do so. But for those who believe, why reinvent the wheel? And, unsurprisingly, when you abandon an anti-loyalty, anti-dependence, anti-friendship social edict that privileges the judgemental gaze of the other over an honest assessment of their own needs, the result seems to be a nicer life. […]
A culture that valorises “cool” sets us up to fail as social beings — and then sells us myriad forms of “self-care” to make up the shortfall.
If being uncool means letting everyone know how lonely and lost we really feel but, in turn, creating enduring connections and dependable friendships, then by all means bring on the cringe! Our attempts to remain cool are tired and futile. Allowing ourselves to be “cringey” frees us to ask for help, no matter how embarrassing it may be. Or to admit our faults and receive forgiveness, no matter how humbling.
2. Next up is yet another justification spiral spun by the world wide web. Twitter, Freddie deBoer specifically mentions, is an inescapable landscape of gamification fraught with writers, journalists, and editors. In a culture of differing opinions, morals, and political views what is perceived as the freedom to write about what you want is not actually freedom at all. Yes, you “technically” can spout whatever you want on Twitter but if you want to 1) make money, and 2) move up in the industry, you will find yourself under several societal pressures.
This terrain is, of course, not specific to writers or bloggers. In an effort to fit in, everyone at one point or another has exchanged pleasantries or held their true views close to their chest (no one is better at such passive tendencies than Midwesterners, but more on that later). The desire for belonging can be a powerful tool to keep people within the status quo. There is no better example of this than the vacuum of the internet:
You see, it turns out that when you put everyone together in the same space all the time, all of the bad dynamics of in-group behavior are suddenly applied to vast populations. A high school cafeteria might house the entire school at one time, but everyone breaks out into different tables that are social divisions as well as physical ones. This is natural; a ceaseless cacophony of innumerable voices is unpleasant in and of itself, and it leads to a kind of overt social conditioning that’s creepy and unhealthy. Being aware of everyone’s thoughts means being aware of what they praise and what they criticize. And when you’re always aware of the opinions of your peers (or, even more, the people you aspire to see as yours peers) this can’t help but influence how you act and what you believe and what you write about. […]
There have always been peer-group pressures that breed conformity, at any time and in any industry. What the rise of the social internet did was to a) scale up the number of people applying those pressures, b) make the application of pressure a potentially all-day affair, and c) pull not only professional values and concerns into consideration but also artistic tastes, slang, sense of humor, and similar. […]
Every crevice of the web (and increasingly our lives) is gamified. Dating apps have famously become sites of intense gamification and subject to the influence of various exploits, as people undertake a kind of amateur Big Data approach to affairs of the heart. Such behavior fundamentally stems from the understanding that the variation of human behavior and circumstance expressed in a given online system, while influential, is not necessarily more powerful than the ability to manipulate that system itself. […]
People may not be A/B testing with the same dedication as a Twitch streamer, but they still put stuff out there, see what receives quantitative and qualitative approval through likes and engagement, and adjust their method. I suspect that some people do this consciously, but I’m even more confident that many people do it subconsciously.
The only reason the occupation of “Influencer” exists is because of the social media vacuum. And if you scroll long enough, you may discover that the most popular and highest paid influencers are great at playing the social media game of conformity. In the end, the famous influencers of TikTok and the celebrated journalists of Twitter are just extreme versions of you and me. We are all looking for belonging. We are all clinging to the validation of others, and if not that, then we are holding onto our pride with an iron fist. But in the kingdom of God, nothing is gamified, not one crevice. The game has been won with no manipulation necessary.
3. To bring up Midwesterners again, because eh, why not — I’ve heard through the grapevine that the season five finale of Noah Hawley’s anthology series, Fargo was downright beautiful. Spoilers ahead:
At the end of the tenth episode, aptly titled “Bisquick,” and after fighting a season long battle of mysterious pasts, owed debts, and plotted revenge, Dot (played by Juno Temple) is greeted by Ole Munch. It appears as if Munch, a centuries old sin-eater, has returned to enact his revenge and collect a debt from Dot. What the audience expects to be a continuation of action-packed fights and inevitable deaths turns out to be a simple, yet powerful, scene of a family dinner with freshly baked biscuits. Josh Wigler for the Hollywood Reporter interviewed Hawley about this peculiar biscuit scene:
NH: Yeah. I really am struggling, the way so many of us are struggling, with how we move past what feels like this entrenched enmity between Americans for other Americans, where everyone feels aggrieved, everyone thinks the other one has injured them, and you have this sort of Hatfield and McCoy thing that’s going on. How can we ever move forward if constant retribution is the only solution? Or, is there something else? In this case, it’s an acknowledgment that both people in this have been hurt, and a big part of trauma is blaming yourself for what was done to you. There’s a process you go through, and the only way to really forgive yourself is to be forgiven. That act of someone else forgiving you, it’s liberating.
That was my hope with the scene. It was really rewarding in the writing of it, and then of course the filming and the editing of it, that we get the story from Munch about his origins and where he comes from, and the fact that he was starving and a rich man paid him to consume his sins, and now all that’s left is his sin. And she says to him, “Well, it doesn’t have to be.” I just think right or wrong, that’s a beautiful idea.
JW: We don’t have to eat what they feed us, basically.
NH: Right. The solution is to eat something made with love and be forgiven.
“To eat something made with love and be forgiven” sounds an awful lot like Communion, eh?
4. For kicks and giggles, here’s the Hard Times‘ “Bartender Has No Idea Regulars Consider Him a Close Friend“:
“People in the service industry often face this situation,” said Lopez. “Bartenders don’t know that they’re the emergency contact for the winos they serve, waiters don’t know they’re de-facto emotional support animals for picky eaters, and most therapists don’t realize that their clients have fallen in love with them, like my gorgeous and brilliant Dr. Pritchard-Smoot. The important thing to do is to set clear boundaries with these people to let them know that they’re just a client and not a close friend, confidante, advisor, mentor, protege, or someone who cares if they live or die.”
Could the same be said for hairdressers? Or maybe even the pharmacist who fills my monthly prescriptions? Also, for the bad texters/emailers out there, here’s Reductress‘ “‘Sorry, I Thought I Had Responded!’ Says Woman Who Has Thought About Responding Every Day for a Month.” And last, but not least, a New Yorker cartoon that happens to tie into the next article …
5. As far as advice columns go, this one from Dan Kois of Slate is surprisingly grace-filled, if not liberating. A couple, hoping to start a family one day, find themselves bogged down by all the parenting advice in op-eds and TikTok videos. With the constant noise of “gentle parenting,” “momfluencers,” and strangers’ comments about the do’s and don’ts of child rearing, it’s no surprise that potential parents feel overwhelmed, paralyzed, and discouraged. After helpfully summarizing the whole parenting advice genre, what else could Kois possibly offer amidst all the clatter? Stop listening to it.
At ages 29 and 30, thanks to both your own interest and the pernicious algorithms that punish even a passing interest with more content, you are suddenly drowning in this terrible online parenting environment. Everywhere you look, someone is either showing off their impossibly perfect parenting, explaining why parenting in the 2020s is a hellscape of climate fear, or explicating a philosophy that, if you don’t follow, you’re probably dooming your child. I totally understand how off-putting it is. As Slate’s Ruth Graham wrote way back in 2014, “For overwhelmed parents, I imagine the relentless stream of realtalk is comforting. As a possible future parent, it’s utterly terrifying.”
But I’ve got a secret for you. You can just straight-up ignore all that shit.
As a general rule of thumb, the more Online you get about something, the more miserable that thing will make you. Do you enjoy watching sports? Great, you’re probably happy. Do you spend hours in the comments of YouTube soccer highlight videos arguing with idiots who say Ronaldo is better than Messi? Congratulations, you’re probably unhappy. I wish I was one of those people who pay attention to politics only to the extent that, before voting, they research the candidate whose positions most closely align with theirs. They are definitely happier than I am.
This rule holds true, above all, for parenting. Online parenting content has its uses — commiseration, laughs, research in a crisis — but the less of it you consume, the happier a parent you will be. The less you expose yourself to the flood, the less likely you are to be washed away. Click away from the gurus; click away from the diagnoses; click away, even, from the beautiful essays about the doomed world.
In a culture scrambling for answers in the deep recesses of curated content, maybe it’s good to close the reddit tabs, set aside the pregnancy books, look away from that momfluencer from Utah, and go hug your kid.
6. To close, Sarah Reardon’s essay in Plough is a timely reminder that our bubbles of conformity (even our good, Christian, bubbles) can keep us from really connecting with our surroundings and others:
Though not a term of endearment, “bubble” is not an entirely inapt description of the classical Christian school subculture, for classical Christian education creates educational ecosystems distinct from the world. Yet, when functioning properly, Christian schools should not close themselves off to the world, cloistering away teachers and students: though distinct from the surrounding culture, a healthy Christian school does indeed engage with the world from the perspective of the wisdom of the centuries and from the locus of a Christ-centered community. […]
Christian schools — and all Christian communities — must welcome our human lot: we are frail and needy. We are dependent creatures who still sin, and no withdrawal from the world will rid us of our natural frailty. Even as we are agents and citizens of the City of God, constructing our communities among the cities of men, we cannot forget that we are not yet in the City of God but remain here in the earthly realm. If we try to shake off our share in this world and its sin, the pressures and pains brought by sin will only become starker and sharper to us. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” writes the apostle John. And yet, John continues: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The virtue of humility is not limited to a Christian’s involvement in the church but must extend to all of life.
We can avoid Christian bubbles, then, not only by retaining a sense of our purpose as lights to the world but also by retaining a sense of our own lingering darkness apart from the grace of Christ. […] As we seek to honor Christ’s lordship and live as the family of the church in every realm of life, we would do well to remember Martin Luther’s last words. As Luther lay dying, a friend asked Luther if he stood firm at death. Luther gave a decided “Yes,” and then allegedly said, “We are beggars. This is true.”
Strays:
- Jordan Castro for Harper’s on exercise culture and the resurrection of the body.
- Lori Ioannou for the Wall Street Journal on the research that suggests people would trust Alexa or Siri more if the assistants sounded like themselves.
- Bluey and the ethical importance of play.
COMMENTS
2 responses to “January 13-19”
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I’m so uncool I don’t even know what YOLO , bae, or simp mean. But then I’m old, have chronic health issues, and struggle financially, so that settles my credential for uncool from the get-go.
Cali, saw this a week late but what about corporate buzzwords like collaborate and innovation. Can we stop! Here’s a new word…collaborHATE, when associates are gathered around the water cooler discussing that annoying associate who can’t stop blowing their nose or vexed about the latest dumbed-down benefits package.