Am I cool enough?

I’m on the ugly side of my 30s now. I have a bad knee and an okay knee. I get excited about new kitchen cleaning apparatus compared to timely project completions. So there is no ambiguity as to where my ‘feeling of youth’ meter is at, since it’s now measured in the frequency of chronic back aches.

And yet, when it comes to comprehending social hierarchies and interacting with people, my brain still functions like a 17 year old. “Am I cool enough?” still reverberates around in my head at times while I go on to claim social validation through online and offline means.

Now, the funky business here is the fluid definition of cool. The “coolness” quotient is probably derived from the amount of peer cred you gain through your activities and personality. There is an implicit flowchart of the cool points scoring system that gets mentally distributed among us while forming social contracts.

Everybody still has a custom implementation (to a degree) of how they would judge and score someone and thus allot different cool points to you as opposed to …well… your mother perhaps. And in our age of pervasive social media dynamics it often leads to how you represent yourself online.

Yes, there are going to be plenty outliers of this system. The ones who either ran out of shits to give on how they are represented externally because they are scarily headstrong to the ones who are basement dwellers immune to the misery of isolation.

But I’m here concerned about the system that I presently am in. An implied scoring system constructed around me with no bearing on my desires at times.

• +30 points for that international trip
• +15 for that before/after transformation after you subscribed to the “fitness is my passion” pill, bonus +5 if you’ve started running (+1 per run medal)
• +20 for the new sweet ride/flat you bought, bonus +15 if it inspired a new “success” quote
• +10 for being a connoisseur of everything from fine wines and coffee to vada pavs cause you once searched “best places for x” on reddit
• +25 for that critically acclaimed artists’ gig you attended (-5 is it’s Imagine Dragons)
• +15 points per famous friend/acquaintance in your circle

Why are the points so? I don’t know. And they keep changing every season with major modifications so that I’m always chasing the new thing.

If I ever (through some wormhole time travel logic) bump into my 17 year old self, I’d readily whip out some unsolicited advice on how you should not care about what others think of you, cause ultimately what matters is in there *points to heart*. But what I’d be terrified of is when that idiotic 17 year old me would ask me on how much of that advice I’ve followed.

So despite being alarmingly close to being eligible on having a mid life crisis. It still bothers me that there still exists some degree of mental priority on the question

“Am I cool enough?”