Not Being Cool

Caring is Hot, Wild, and Strong

All the words below are written by Joan Westenberg. I highly recommend her newsletter, which is here: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-embracing-cringe/

We curate ourselves into something safe. We smooth out our rough edges. We keep things palatable, we stay detached, we’re less invested, we’re dedicated to avoiding embarrassment at all costs.

That’s the mantra.

Be cool. Be aloof. Don’t try too hard. Don’t try at all.

To hell with that. To hell with all of it.

Cool is a cage. Cool is a waiting room where nothing ever happens. Cool is an excuse to sit on your hands while the world burns. Cool tells you not to raise your voice when something feels wrong. Cool makes you hesitate before speaking out, before creating, before showing up. Cool is watching the world unravel and deciding the safest response is to smirk and crack a joke and look away. Cool whispers, What if they laugh at you? What if they think you’re overdramatic? What if they call you cringe?

I’m going to rip that bandaid off: if you do anything worth doing, they are absolutely going to laugh. They are going to sneer. They are going to roll their eyes and say you’re embarrassing yourself.

Putting your heart into anything—your work, your politics, your activism, your art, your writing, your life—makes you vulnerable to the smug assholes in the back row who’ve never risked a thing.

The Very Online crowd would have called every social movement cringe before it became history. The abolitionists? Cringe. The suffragists? Cringe. The labor organizers who got beaten to death so we could have weekends? Cringe. Stonewall? Cringe. Climate activists gluing themselves to roads? Ridiculously cringe.

To these folks, caring is cringe. Passion is cringe. Daring to stand for something is cringe.

And yet.

And yet...

Every bit of progress we have came from people willing to be loud, earnest, and annoying in the face of apathy and resistance.

We don’t need more detached, ironic spectators. We need people who actually give a shit. People who are willing to stand up, speak out, get knocked down, and come back swinging. People who don’t let the near-universal fear of looking foolish stop them from doing something that matters.

If you believe healthcare is a human right, say it. If you think billionaires (aka wealth extremists) shouldn’t exist, say it. If you want to burn this exploitative system to the ground and build something better, say it—scream it, organize for it, fight for it.

The powerful benefit from your aversion to the cringe. They feed on your silence. Every time you bite your tongue, every time you shrink back, every time you let the fear of embarrassment hold you hostage—they win.

That’s why they spend billions propping up social platforms that homogenize pop culture into something safe, predictable, and unthreatening. They don’t want art that disrupts, movements that grow, ideas that catch fire. They want content. They want trend cycles that move so fast no one can focus long enough to demand anything real. They want a world where “going viral” is the highest achievement, and where nobody has the guts to risk getting dragged in the comments.

Let the cool kids laugh. Let ‘em scoff. Let ‘em tweet their little dunks. While they’re busy being “too cool to care,” you’ll be out there actually doing the work. The work that makes a difference. The work that matters.

History isn’t made by the people who sit back and mock. It’s made by the folks who show up, give a shit, and are directionally okay with looking ridiculous in the process. The folks who understand that trying is the only way we’ve ever changed a good Goddamn thing.

That's what I want to be in 2025.

I want to be earnest.

I want to be loud.

I want to be cringe.

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The photo above is by Ross Findon on Unsplash. Find them here: tinyurl.com/3kk37w3s

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