Disclaimer: This article is for humorous purposes only. That being said, any resemblance to the opinions or ideologies of real persons, living or dead, is probably not coincidental.
The following essay constitutes a mathematical, sociological, philosophical, economic, and psychological inquiry into the nature of cool. I have wanted to write this for a long time. You might ask why this belongs in The Huffington Post. What could this possibly have to do with pop culture and faux news? Well, perhaps I should pitch it differently. In understanding the essential nature of cool, you too can learn how to become cool. So in effect, this is a how-to guide.
I am cool. That much is obvious. For example, I write for The Huffington Post. I am probably putting my volunteer blogger position on the line by writing this article. That is considered dangerous. One might suggest that I live on the wild side. Cool people often do that. That is because cool people are unconcerned with what uncool people think of them.
That is not to say that all people who are unconcerned with how other people regard them are cool. That is a propositional fallacy. This is an example of mathematics, in which all cool people dabble. For example, at the biennial salons in pre-revolutionary France, all of the cool people would gather and discuss amateur mathematics. Back then they would say things like, "Oh, my dearest Madeleine, the cyclic group of order 101 is isomorphic to the set of integers under addition modulo 101. It is a most banal fact. I am suddenly weary; catch me before I faint."
Nay, one can cite a number of uncool people who are unconcerned with their public image. These include people from the U.K., bodybuilders, Dr. Seuss, Stephen Hawking, and orangutans [See: Great Ape Personhood Movement].
But what is it essentially? Is cool an imagined construct like race? I venture to disagree, since if I assert that something is cool I am more than just endorsing it with my opinion. If I were merely doing that, I would just say that I like it. By saying that my friend Kati's new Ray-Ban sunglasses are cool, I am demonstrating that I believe the majority of people's beliefs are aligned in endorsing Kati's Ray-Bans. This is the philosophy of cool. Cool people are superficially interested in philosophy. This means that they can spell Friedrich Nietzsche's last name.
Moreover, cool people are invested in a sort of social currency. They collect and trade this currency in order to accumulate extra cool. Some of the coolest people, like Harvard's most famous duo, the Winkelvoss twins, are so cool that they hoard non-negligible percentages of the entire currency supply. This is the economics of cool, designed by the super-secretive economist of cool, Satoshi Nakamoto. He is so cool that he is able to fool everyone into accepting a weakly divisible currency with limited supply and deflationary tendencies.
Finally, one does not simply walk into Cooldom. Cool is an intensely psychological phenomenon. It requires exceptional focus on everything except trying to be cool. The moment you even think about being cool, you revert to inescapable lameness. As a cool person trying to write this article, I have to develop partitions in my mind. This process is called dissociation. It is also called waving your arms in the air like you just don't care.
If you found this short piece eye-opening, passive aggressive, and slightly frightening, then I have been successful. Later, dudes.