Sitting At the Cool Kids' Table
Who the hell do you think you are?
Sitting at the cool kids’ table
I was fourteen once. Like most kids that age, I was trying to navigate myself through adolescence with no clue of where I was trying to get to.
I watched cluelessly as something called a pecking order developed. There started to be such a thing as cool kids, geeks, and jocks. We all needed to find our ‘place’, where we fit in that order. We all needed to be part of something instead of just a bunch of kids randomly intermingling. It’s a tough time, adolescence. Full of self-doubt and confusion, at least for some of us anyway. One way to alleviate that self-doubt was to earn a spot at the cool kids’ table. If you are there, you have arrived.
I made it through adolescence, although I never sat at the cool kids’ table. I’m on the other side, now, of the self-doubt, confusion, identity crisis and ‘finding my place’. Back in the day, we had to work our way through without the internet. No Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.
So, are kids better off with social media, or worse off? It certainly is not the same anymore. Now we have the social pressure, not just locally, but nationally. I remember the first time I read an article about ‘thought leaders’. Initially, I thought it was some sort of parody, but then I realized they were serious. There are people who feel entirely comfortable appointing themselves to be in charge of what we think. It reminds me of the cool kids’ table.
To what extent is our goal in life to find a way to conform, to fit in? To what extent should we instead expect others to conform to us? I consider those cool kids. Some, I think, were naturally cool. They made no effort to lead or to follow. They were comfortable in their own skin, just how they were. But there were the other cool kids. They worked at it. They socially engineered others around them, creating coalitions, and setting arbitrary barriers to entry into their perceived realm of coolness. If you wanted to be part of their clique, you had to follow their rules. And the rules changed continually.
I was fourteen. I was trying to figure out things that I easily comprehend now. I made an occasional foray into the realm of coolness, but I just didn’t get it. What was any of it supposed to be for? Even then, as I confusedly contemplated how much of my individual identity I was willing to give up in order to fit in, I couldn’t see the point. In a baseball game, you try to get a hit. You try to field the ball and throw to first. But what do you get as a result of sublimating your sense of self? Of sublimating yourself in order to successfully fit into a clique that demands fealty. And with no reward other than you get to keep doing it? I gave up trying.
I see cool kids on social media. I see kids trying to be cool. Some of those kids are well into adulthood. A few are quite old, still trying, still pledging their fealty. I see much of what I left behind, years ago. I see people whose opinions are carbon copies of what the cool people tell them they should be. They hate who they are told to hate.
That’s a key element of artificial coolness; hate. Being able to sit at the cool kids table doesn’t count for much, unless you get to tell others that they aren’t good enough, aren’t the right sort of people, to be able to sit at that table with you. Sitting at the cool kids’ table means you get to feel superior, innately better, than those that you reject. And so, you must find people to reject, even if those people don’t know you’ve rejected them, and couldn’t care less.
This wasn’t going to be a political piece, but I guess it was bound to end up being one. Donald Trump is the geek that never even tried to sit at the cool kids’ table. He ran for president on his own terms. “Here I am, take me or leave me.” He didn’t equivocate, he didn’t pledge fealty.
The cool kids attacked, of course. Most of politics is just one big cool kids’ table, regardless of party. How dare Trump run for president without seeking the endorsement of the cool kids at the table?! He must be taught a lesson, before anyone else gets ideas.
Too late. Those of us who never understood the attraction of the cool kid’s’ table, and still don’t, tend to support Trump. Those who have continually jockeyed for position at that table, who have sublimated themselves, who have little sense of identity beyond whatever it is that they get from sitting at that table, are incensed that someone would run for office and simply laugh at their insecurity. Of course they hate him. He is a threat to their curated sense of worth. He must be destroyed. The ends justify any means whatsoever.
I could turn this into a book, but I promise I won’t. Let’s leave it at this: We geeks, we people who never saw any point to the cool kids’ table, tend to support Trump. It’s not that he is the greatest statesman ever (but really, not bad), it is that he is genuine, the real deal. We can easily see that he is not a Nazi, not a fascist, not a racist, homophobe or xenophobe and didn’t destroy the economy or start WWIII. We can easily see that these claims are just the hate speech of the insecure people at the cool kids’ table. They desperately cling to the belief that the cool kids’ table is inherently better than anybody else’s table. We are laughing at them, so now they hate us, too.
I have said, I was never drawn to Trump, I was pushed to him. I will not comply with the social pressure of ‘thought leaders’ and ‘influencers’. In fact, I flat out reject them, even as others desperately follow them. I pretty much had this figured out by the time I was seventeen. Yet, some people never get it.
I seem to have established a tradition of posting songs that don’t quite fit my narrative. But at least they come close, and are great songs!
At Seventeen :
The Heart of the Matter
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We also still have the Mean Girls Table, of course, AKA The View, and the Hall Monitor, AKA MSNBC.