In this essay I will: There's no such thing as a cool person

What is “cool,” exactly? Is it wearing the newest uniform the algorithm spit out this week? Getting into the restaurant with the impossible reservation? Waiting in a two-hour line for a club where no one actually dances? Or is it pretending you don’t care about anything at all?

My take: nobody is cool. Not really. “Cool” is just performance with good lighting.

The Cool Delusion

Gen Z grew up bottle-fed on perception. We learned early that attention is currency, and wealth is whatever looks expensive on camera. Our media obsession and celebrity worship turned “cool” into a moving target you chase but never catch. And to keep up, we micro-edit our personalities: a bit of irony here, a limited-edition sneaker there, a curated indifference stitched on top. It’s exhausting. 

What Do You Actually Like?

Here’s the question that cracked something open for me: What do YOU like? Not your group chat. Not your For You page. You. Brittany Broski posed that question on her podcast “The Broski Report,” and it kind of ruined me, in a good way. If you can’t answer it, that’s not a moral failure–it’s just a sign to take a break from the feed and let your own taste talk again.

Think back to your childhood, before an algorithm told you what to want. What did you reach for without thinking? What movies did you rewatch? What did you talk about at dinner? That unedited gravitation is still in there; it’s just buried under a decade of “recommended for you.” So why not make time for it, instead of another night of doom-scrolling your way into nothingness?

The Night Out That Proved the Point

Earlier this year, my friends and I went out specifically to dance. We picked the wrong club. It was one of those “stand and be seen” places: blank faces, uncomfortable shoes, Very Important Bottles delivered to people who looked allergic to joy. At some point I asked myself, is anyone actually having fun, or are we just pretending?

Hours later, I saw an Instagram story from one of those frozen-faced tables. The frame said “best night ever.” The room had said otherwise. Did they have fun, or did they need you to know they were there?

Optics Eat Everything

This optics obsession bleeds into every corner of culture: music, fashion, restaurants, even the way we log our opinions. I’m not innocent here. I’ve listened to an album once, hated it, then saw a viral thread christening it a masterpiece and suddenly felt pressured to “get it.” I’ve softened a Letterboxd take because the crowd said I was wrong. That’s not taste; that’s peer pressure with a comments section.

Restaurants aren’t immune. A certain Manhattan spot skyrocketed after a celebrity sighting. Suddenly the waitlist became lore. The food? By most accounts, fine. But the magnetism wasn’t flavor, it was proximity to a narrative: I was there. That’s not dining; that’s collecting a stamp.

Fashion is just as cooked. Golden Goose sells pre-scuffed sneakers for the price of rent, and somehow distress became prestige. A Bathing Ape can print a logo on a tee and convert fandom into “fit.” If you genuinely love it, gorgeous, wear it out. But many of us don’t even stop to ask if we like the thing itself, or the attention it buys.

The Invisible Camera

A lot of us live like there’s an invisible camera trained on us 24/7. You feel it when a stranger your age passes and you straighten your posture, adjust your oversized jorts, slide on AirPods Max you don’t even need at that moment. The bit must be maintained. The character must stay in costume.

But here’s the quiet truth: every character goes home. The logos come off. The cool kid takes off their shoes and scrolls in bed like everyone else. Nobody has it all together. No one is cruising through life in perfect taste and total certainty. We are all improvising, sweating, second-guessing, and trying to be liked by people we don’t actually know.

So What Is Cool, Then?

If “cool” exists at all, it’s not a look, it’s a posture. Not the kind you fix when someone walks by, but the internal kind: confidence. The kind that lets you like things loudly without needing backup from the group chat. The kind that keeps your opinion the same whether it gets ten likes or ten thousand. The kind that says: I’ll dance even if no one else is dancing.

Being “cool” isn’t about not caring. That’s just apathy with sunglasses. Real confidence is caring about the right things and not needing applause for it. It’s ordering the dish you want, not the one you saw on a carousel. It’s wearing the shoes that fit your day, not your feed. It’s keeping your five-star review of the “uncool” movie because you meant it.

Steps to Reclaiming Taste

• Make a list of ten things you’ve always loved, no internet allowed. Do one this week.

• When you catch yourself asking, will this look good on my story?, try asking, will this feel good while I’m doing it?

• Before buying the Thing Everyone Has, go see it alone in a mirror (or a fitting room) and ask: Would I buy this if no one ever saw me wear it?

• Let an opinion stand for seven days before you post it. If you still feel it, it’s probably yours.

The point isn’t to become a contrarian. It’s to stop outsourcing your taste. Once you stop chasing “cool,” you can actually experience your life instead of staging it.

So no, there’s no such thing as a cool person. There are only people, some of whom are brave enough to be themselves in public. That’s the only version of “cool” that has ever mattered.

Curious about what else Steven is into? Get real-time updates at shelf.im/stevenmorea