You're Cool

People have a need to feel that they are special. I'm not sure excactly where this comes from -- especially since we're all different anyway -- but I have a road I want to go down with this that makes some sense.

It might be a survival issue. If we feel special, we feel indispensible. We feel needed. This provides us with a sense of security in the social fabric.

Some people pursue "specialness" by following popular trends. There's social security in being "in with the 'in' crowd". These people make sure they wear the right clothes, listen to the right music, watch the right TV shows, eat the right foods, buy the right products at the right stores, maybe drive the right car.... you get the picture.

Then there are people who view those people with disdain, and they persue their specialness by being NOT in with the 'in' crowd ... by wearing the WRONG clothes, listening to the WRONG music, liking the WRONG TV shows, and NOT eating the right foods, buying the WRONG products, and not at the RIGHT stores

But wait... there's a little more to it than that. There are all these little sects of the second type of person. And each one of them has the RIGHT wrong clothes, and the RIGHT wrong music, and the RIGHT wrong TV shows, the RIGHT wrong foods, the RIGHT wrong products at the RIGHT wrong stores.... which... sounds a lot like our first group, doesn't it? As a matter of fact, the only real difference is what each group thinks is the right stuff and what they think is the wrong stuff.

They think that everyone else should be like them -- only they secretly don't ever want that to happen, because they would lose their percieved "I'm better than you" status. In fact, as soon as the "mainstream" embraces one of their tenets, they abandon it as being passé. So much for principle.

Further, even within those groups -- the hyper-culture groups the counter-culture groups call "mainstream" are really a collection of smaller hyper-culture groups, each of which feels somehow more special than the others. The same is true of the counter-culture groups. In the end, all of them are just different flavors of hyper-culture.

It brings to mind Groucho Marx's

"I would never belong to a club that would have me as a member."

The fact of the matter is you're perfectly ok not being a part of any of those groups. You don't have to be a preppie or a goth or a punk or a greek or a jock or a vegan or a hippie to be cool.

Once you actually get this, you'll want to throw off the schackles of all this pretense you've piled on yourself. And the cool thing is, you don't have to go anywhere else to "find" the person you are. It's inside of you. It's been there all along.

To be cool, you just have to be you. And you have to like yourself (if you don't, you're not being you!) And being you doesn't mean identifying with any group. You are the ultimate exclusive group, a group of one!

Find the you underneath all that other stuff and be free.