frankie boyle's beanbag chair of death

Maybe it's a reflection of how our society supports maintaining the status quo? If you're detached, that means you don't care about how things are, so you are unlikely to threaten the status quo, so elevating your social class helps perpetuate that status quo

I always interpreted "cool" to be short for "too cool for blank", it's not that the person doesn't care, it's that they care about things so far beyond mundane everyday stuff that you can only wonder what those things are like. I do think that, as an affectation, this aspect of it was lost at some point, as higher and higher levels of "cool" were attempted, leading to more and more esoteric interests, and of course the phenomenon of ironically liking things basically acting as a prestige level where you can start over at the beginning without losing progress, and then it turns out there can be multiple layers of such, and the whole concept succumbs to irony poisoning, and the rest of us are kinda just like "what the fuck are you all doing over there?"

my (fittingly, somewhat detached and cynical) take on the popularity of "cool, detached, cynical" outlooks in the mainstream i think is at some level connected to the capitalist... uh... societal death drive? Or something like that?

I'm picking my words carefully here because I think this is a level of Philosophy that i am not particularly well-read-up on, but basically like: A capitalist society does not have a way to cope with the sort of crises that are now facing our society (climate change most primarily, but everything else that comes off of that as well: disease, collapse of the social functions of cities, more people living worse lives because of homelessness, lack of healthcare, etc etc) so instead of training people to SEE more and to OPEN UP the soft hand of capitalism instead trains people to detach, to individualize, to look away.

So of course it would follow then that the celebrities (& the popular trends) of such a culture would reflect that. it's not cool to care, because that means you have to feel emotional pain when things are going bad, which they are, often. the flipside of this is that it naturally breeds "aloofness" as a survival trait for people who are just trying to get by without feeling like they're completely overwhelmed by the world in general.

I mean like almost everything else, it is one of those things where I'm like "ok so the cure here is to talk to people and get involved with your communities more" but AS WE KNOW, that is also extremely difficult in a society that has made "connecting with your communities" often quite difficult, etc etc. Anyway that's my overwrought theory on it

My take on it would be that being able to meaningfully be "above" it all means that you have power. If you care, then you have stakes, a lever that someone else can grab on to and threaten you with. If you get to choose to be aloof of most concerns, then that's power you haven't given to others. Power, and the proxies of status and wealth, have an effect on how people see you.

Now, granted, actually being able to pull this off is way different from trying to pull it off.

Mind, I don't think this is any way to live, but I have a feeling this is some of the root?

Granted, in my case, I'm good enough at the things I'm a nerd about to be impressive to other nerds, and to non-nerds, so I don't feel a need to try to project status, so my understanding here isn't super deep, but I think that's a part of it.

people are projecting what they want out of others I think. no drama, no politics, no hobbies or conversations you struggle to have the context to understand...

people who are interested and curious and delighted and invested are always, for some reason, depicted as also being naïve and gullible and overly trusting. would love to see a more accurate portrayal of this kind of person: they aren't having So Much Fun because they are new, they are just like that. and they have seen your bullshit before. bad actors stand no chance

oh and also SA was BIG on the "caring about anything too much is bad" culture