It's cool to care (2025)

I think some comments here are missing what the blog post is trying to say. This is my read on it.

It's "cool to care" - if you like something, don't be afraid to keep liking and caring about it. With some interests (like theater here), there's external pressure to stop liking what you like, because your interest isn't "cool".

If you pursue what you like on your own, repeatedly, you sometimes find there's people with the same interests. You start to recognize each other. And traveling around the world to participate in the thing you like can have lots of value.

It's the last part, the seemingly ridiculous travel, that I think is a key part of Alex's story. There's something about the kind of people who would travel overseas to see a musical, repeatedly. They really care about what they like. That's an extreme dedication to the interest, and that's how you find people who are also extremely passionate and motivated about their interest, or maybe even just about the community that has arisen around that interest.

That's the part of Alex's story that landed for me. I feel I experienced something similar 15 years ago in my own niche interest, flying from Australia to see Eurovision (before Australia was part of the contest). I traveled alone, but found ~20 other Australians doing the same thing, and some of them attended every year. That shared interest & shared experience became decade+ friendships. And for us it evolved into getting backstage, meeting artists, running local nightclub events with Eurovision artists flown in from Europe to Australia, and somewhat accidentally creating a national fanclub community of hundreds of people.

Crazy ideas around niche interests can spiral and snowball, as you provide ways for the crazy kids to find each other. And that seems to be what's happened here with Operation Mincemeat.

Cool does mean detached and aloof and unpeturbed. And theater kids (and Eurovision fans) "unpeturbed"? Yeahhh... probably not.

But the original cool would not have fallen to peer pressure of what others think either. The Fonz is cool, but The Fonz absolutely cares about his friends too.

I agree with the sentiment, it is good to care, it is admirable and perhaps virtuous to care.

But it is not cool to care. Cool does mean detached, offhand, poised, aloof, unperturbed. That's why it's called "cool".

We don't need to hijack the term and pretend that it's cool to be enthusiastic and dorky and to talk too loudly when we get excited about something. The point is that those things are good even if they're not cool.

Sometimes, I feel like conversation is just a way to talk to oneself, by using others as mirrors of what we want to believe. That article had that vibe.

I don't care about the show, the author doesn't know why she cares that much about the show, and I really, really don't understand what caring has to do with seeing the same show several times.

>Whenever somebody asks why, I don’t have a good answer.

I'll suggest the author (and everyone reading this) to really, really sit down and think of why they like the things they like. What are the variables that clicked for me when I interact with X ? The theme ? The way the thing is made ? The echo and specific resonance it has with my inner life ?

I would have gained much more from that article if the author had gone to the trouble of making me connect with the show in that way.

A good book in this topic, Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/

https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Foreru...

I think some of the reason that the whole aloof thing has crept in is for self-protection. If you proclaim loudly you love something and others ridicule you for it then you quickly adopt the aloof persona yourself as a defensive mechanism against getting hurt.

Funny thing, looking at the handful of friends I care about - every single one of them, without exception has something they’re deeply passionately into. Photography, or Tour de France, or Design… None of these are interests I share, but the type of personality that can get deeply obsessive about something I find very appealing.

One thing the age of the internet brought us, was the ability to easily connect with people over a broad area, who have an interest in something very niche.

You might be the only person in your neighborhood, school, or even town to have a deep interest in something. Others might think you are weird because 'nobody' else thinks that thing is cool.

But post something here on HN or other forum, and suddenly you find out that hundreds or thousands of people around the world also have some interest in it.

“You can’t have good taste without bad taste”

If everything you like is acclaimed/in vogue/politically correct then in my estimation you have no taste at all and you just wait for others to tell you what’s good

Thank you for sharing this!

Given where the world is, this posts make me hopeful!

Welcome to your thirties! Believe me, if you think it's getting interesting now, just wait.

Went to the theatre and liked it.