There is something embarrassing about trying to explain coolness.
The truly cool never announce themselves. They exist somewhere between detachment and devotion, moving through the world with a kind of quiet certainty. Not arrogance. Worse. Instinct.
You know them immediately.
They are never dressed for the camera, though photographs seem to belong to them anyway. Their apartments are imperfect in expensive ways: books collapsing off shelves, sunlight staining old wood, music playing from another room like memory itself forgot to leave. They wear cotton because polyester feels spiritually incorrect. They disappear for days and return with new thoughts instead of new content.
The internet cannot manufacture people like this, though God knows it tries.
Entire ecosystems now exist around the performance of effortlessness. Everyone is cultivating a self. We are no longer people moving through life naturally but archivists of our own existence, endlessly selecting which fragments deserve preservation. Breakfast becomes identity. Taste becomes branding. Desire becomes algorithmically optimized.
Even rebellion arrives pre-packaged now. Buy the correct linen pants. Drink wine under amber lighting. Read Russian novels beside an untouched matcha. Romanticize your life. Heal. Curate. Perform. It is exhausting.
Somewhere along the way, coolness stopped being cultural and became economic. It became tied to visibility, aspiration, exclusivity. Social media transformed taste into currency and identity into labor. Every image asks the same desperate question beneath its filters and grain:
Do you perceive me correctly yet?
And maybe this is why genuinely cool people feel increasingly rare. They remind us of a version of humanity untouched by optimization. Their lives seem assembled slowly, accidentally, through experience instead of performance.
There is a reason old photographs feel more seductive than modern ones. In old photographs, people still belonged to themselves. A cigarette balanced between fingers in some late 70s apartment. Someone laughing too hard at a party no one documented properly. collapsing across velvet furniture with the beautiful exhaustion of a man who has actually lived. speaking softly about spirituality while the modern world accelerated around him like machinery. turning reinvention into something poetic rather than market-tested. None of them felt optimized. That was the point.
Coolness has always depended slightly on mystery. On withholding. On the understanding that a human being should contain rooms inaccessible to the public.
The internet hates inaccessible rooms. Everything must be visible now. Legible. Explained. Content-ready. We are encouraged to transform every fleeting emotion into captions before we have even fully felt it ourselves. Nothing lingers privately anymore. Interior life has become increasingly externalized, flattened into aesthetics consumable at scrolling speed.
Even intelligence became aestheticized.
People want the appearance of thoughtfulness now more than thought itself. Books arranged by color beside expensive candles. Philosophers reduced to Pinterest quotes. The performance of depth replacing the discomfort of actually confronting complicated ideas. But real intelligence is never clean. It does not lie in eating bite sized portions from 5 smol tin boxes.
Real intellect wanders. It contradicts itself. It listens to at 2 a.m. while reading with half-dried hair and unanswered messages. It falls in love with strange details. It notices things carefully. It develops taste not through consumption, but through attention. And attention, perhaps, is the rarest thing left.
This is why authenticity remains so powerful despite everything. Not because authenticity itself is new, but because modern life increasingly discourages it. To remain sincere in a culture built on performance almost feels rebellious now. Not the loud rebellion tho. Nothing so obvious. The quieter kind.
The kind that reads slowly. Dresses instinctively. Loves things wholeheartedly without converting them immediately into social capital. The kind that still believes beauty deserves contemplation rather than extraction.
Coolness, at its core, has never really been about trends. It is about self-possession. About moving through the world without begging to be witnessed every second. About resisting the pressure to flatten oneself into something instantly understandable. About preserving a small interior wilderness untouched by markets, algorithms, and endless public display.
Perhaps that is why cool people still haunt culture the way old songs do. Not because they are perfect. But, because they remain slightly out of reach.
love,
aanchal vachhani,
the literary econ.
so we are accepting niche is cool not bc its niche but its you? also i reallyyy wanna get into fashion econ [devil wears prada is on my head rn] get ready to see more of dat.
v relevant go read this after you read mine you prolly have read mine if you made it so far tho.
read these articles of mine as well pls, thx.
https://theliteraryeconomist.com/7-reasons-everything-feels-like-recession/
The concept of cool transcends mere trends, encapsulating an authenticity that resists commodification and superficiality. It is this elusive quality that invites individuals to embrace their unique identities, fostering a deeper connection with culture and, by extension, the evolving landscape of fashion economics. [seo shit pls let it go]