alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Fonzie absolutely cared about being cool, too. It's why he jumped the shark after all. (Pun fully intended.)
People will pressure peers to not care about theatre?
I mean opera I would get :p. Kidding.
I'm not a theatre expert but I feel like recommending the play "The Lifespan of a Fact":
https://www.newcitystage.com/2023/11/21/truth-lies-and-every...
It's based on a true story; the details are unreliably narrated here:
https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Fact-John-DAgata/dp/03933407...
When I read the phrase "it's cool to care", the first thing that popped into my mind was this line from the recent Superman movie: "Maybe that's the real punk rock". Like Alex's story landed for you, that phrase really landed for me, especially in the backdrop of how non-badass the Corenswet Superman was compared to the Snider character. (Spoilers follow) He allows himself to care enough to a point that would make him vulnerable: he gets flustered when aggressively questioned by Lane, he feels despondent during captivity, and he loses his temper when the dog is abducted. But the important thing is that he recovers quickly and shrugs off the experiences rather than brood on them. Perhaps the lack of that skill is what leads some people to adopt being aloof/disinterested as a defense mechanism.