The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe #577 is out. While listening, I was agog at the notion that scientists could, with a straight face, attempt to determine if cool was a real thing. This is the kind of thing a nerdy scientist thought that they might be able to prove.
It’s a game of superficially rebellious status-chasing, centered on consumerism.
qz.com
What then followed was Cara Santa Maria trying to convince the rest of the panel that there was a difference between being edgy and posing. All of that is coded language. Cool is coded language. Cool used in any other way than to describe the temperature of something is creating a meaning for the word other than what the word really means, the relative lack of warmth of an object or area. Cool has no meaning aside from temperature unless you want to try and find the shallowest surface of existence, to give deep meaning to what marketing types want to try to sell you next.
Edgy is always posing. People who get tattoos and piercings because they want to be seen as cool or on the edge really don’t understand what damage that kind of real life living entails. When your normal day involves scrounging food out of a dumpster, scoring a high so that you can get through another suck-ass day, those scars paint themselves on you without you having to go looking for the edge of normalcy.
When you live that kind of life on a day to day basis, you aspire to be normal. You aspire to have what some external observer might call a normal day. Meals prepared from food you bought in a store, eaten at a table with real chairs, with all the family present. Getting through a day without breaking things in anger. What a relief normalcy can be, when normalcy is something that you just vaguely remember seeing on TV once, a long time ago.
