Stop playing it cool!
you're braver than that
First off: yes, I decided to restart this Substack! No, I won’t bore you with explaining why I stopped and why I’m starting again! Hello! :)
One of the liberating things about being over 30 – especially as a parent – is that nobody expects you to be cool any more. You discover the latest slang from Guardian articles, and embarrass the hell out of your kid just by dancing in the living room. I doubt I’ve ever been described as cool, but now any residual pressure has disappeared. It’s finally time to relaaa… or is it? Just as one type of social pressure falls away, another seems to have sprung up in its place. As I drift (slowly, careful now) towards middle age, the desire to seem cool is steadily being replaced by the imperative to play it cool. Perhaps it has nothing to do with age: it could be a purely Millennial phenomenon, or a symptom of our apocalyptic times. Either way, it’s on the rise. Playing it cool shows up in dating, with friends, at work, in our politics. It is a widespread reluctance to wear our hearts on our sleeves and just say the damn thing like you mean it.
Let me be more specific. There isn’t much I miss about my teenage years – but I do miss the unfiltered mess of teen conversation. Our parties back then were full of puking and unadvisable snogs (if you were lucky, on different nights) but they were also full of frank confessions. People shared their childhood traumas and eating disorders and heartbreaks and existential dread with the ease that us grownups complain about the weather. We were all a mess, and we knew it. Nobody was trying to pretend otherwise.
Here’s the thing: we’re all still a mess, aren’t we? How can you live on this planet today and not be? But these days, everyone is trying to hide it. I’ve killed countless conversations by mentioning the unmentionables: divorce, genocide, climate change. There are glorious exceptions, of course, but most conversations with most people are governed by an unwritten code. Few people want to risk raising the emotional temperature above lukewarm, or to reveal any of their own mess. To seem sane and normal means being seen to care, but not too violently. To rage, to grieve, to fantasise about a wildly different world: these are sure signs that you’re losing the plot.
Talking of conversation no-go zones, here’s an uncomfortable confession about AI. Whenever someone I respect expresses enthusiasm for generative AI, I die a little inside. (I’m sorry, friends, but it’s true.) Outwardly, I smile and nod with polite curiosity. Inwardly, I’m screaming: “Et tu, Brute?! Why must everyone I love betray me?!?” Before you dismiss me as both stubborn luddite and raging drama queen, hear me out. Do I believe AI and automation have their legitimate uses to better the world? Sure. Do those uses include reading and thinking and writing on our behalf? Making music and art and videos? Offering advice on matters of the heart? My God, once you’ve escaped the drudgery of human creativity and human connection, what will be left to optimise? Eating? Sleep? Sex? As the poet Joseph Fasano puts it: “what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?” While I’m lucky enough to be alive, I’ll keep grappling with the contradictory mess of being human using my own damn brain, thank you very much.
No rant about the dangers of playing it cool would be complete without a mention of modern dating. Much has already been said (I recommend Liz Plank’s piece on situationships for starters) so I’ll sum up here by saying: playing it cool is deeply unsexy. (Crushes of my past, present, and future, take note!) I’m part of a generation that has always jumped into bed with people like it’s no biggie, but often baulks at emotional vulnerability. Relationships happen, but only when they neatly fit into the box we’ve reserved for them. Right place, right time, right future aspirations – these things matter, of course, but somewhere along the line we seem to have closed the door on the unexpected. I look at my grandparents, who moved across continents to be together, and the emotional temperature of my romantic history feels downright icy by contrast. What happened to love that upends plans and reshapes your future, rather than slotting neatly into a predetermined plotline? Are we so afraid of being changed by each other?
Therein lies the rub. It is this impulse – to remain unchanged, to resist transformation – that connects the seemingly unrelated targets of my rant today. By avoiding charged or heated conversations, we can cocoon ourselves safely in our existing opinions or emotional state. When we lean on AI to digest, to analyse, to create, to think for us, we bypass all the small but significant transformations those processes entail. Each new idea we encounter – whether out there or in our own minds – carries the risk of changing us, even if only a little. And when we fall into bed but never in love, we guard our best laid plans from ever being tampered with. Don’t disturb me, don’t hurt me, don’t change me. At root, keeping our emotional and cognitive distance is a form of risk aversion. We’ve got to be braver (and sexier) than that.