5 ms·

It's cool to care (2025)

111 points by surprisetalk 7mo ago

Geste 7mo ago
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.
- card_zero 7mo ago
  "It's a story about friendship", and it's moving. Everything else, and the reason for seeing it twelvety times, seems in fact to be about communing with real-life friends, and only incidentally about the show. What's that line from Saki ... to whom anything was thrilling and amusing if you did it in a troop.
- dcminter 7mo ago
  The author says: > I’d recommend you go to the show if you haven’t already, but that’s not really the point of this post. So while I agree that it is good to contemplate why you like things, that wasn't the topic of the post at all. The author quite explicitly say so.
sharkjacobs 7mo ago
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.
- Jtarii 7mo ago
  So if someone enthusiastically shows me some crazy game mechanic they made and I say "that's cool", I am using the word "cool" incorrectly?
  - skeeter2020 7mo ago
    "cool!" (especially for the uncool) has always meant something that resonates emotionally with you - keep using it that way. "cool..." means the flat, disconnected response - we don't need any more of that. This post is definitely about the former, and we can double down by not letting the wet blankets in the comments use the latter to tell us "you're doing it wrong".
  - HardlyCognizant 7mo ago
    No, you are using it ironically. The connotation of a word is entirely contextual.
- card_zero 7mo ago
  Sangfroid, even. I wonder what criticisms could be leveled at the virtues of proactive energy, passion, and incessant curiosity. I notice that they make me feel slightly nauseous. This is something I'm curious about. What really is a dork?
  - balamatom 7mo ago
    >What really is a dork? Someone who might not be very smart per se, but whose mind has not yet been murdered and replaced by a sort of mandatory prosthesis made out of complex conditioned responses (after the operation, they'd be more properly an ork). Yeah, turns out the uncanny valley effect works in both directions.
    - aquariusDue 7mo ago
      Found the dork 8) j/k we're all dorks here
yesbut 7mo ago
A good book in this topic, Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/ https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/ https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Forerunners_-Ideas-First-Catherine-Liu-Virtue-Hoarders_-The-Case-against-the-Professional-Managerial-Class-University-of-Minnesota-Press-2020.pdf https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Foreru...
- keybored 7mo ago
  You’re just going to drop a book against 80% of HN like that? What is the context?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
keybored 7mo ago
Went to the theatre and liked it.
- dcminter 7mo ago
  Yes. You should try liking things too instead of being dismissive of those who do. Kind of the author's point.
  - keybored 7mo ago
    Obviously I’m saying that the article’s content is trivial considering the word count. You know this. But by criticizing the article I have proved it correct. Which tells us a lot about society.
- jodrellblank 7mo ago
  "Naysayers say nay" - newspaper bulletin, Sim City 2000.
  - keybored 7mo ago
    It is a fact known far and wide, from the highlands, to the plains, to the frozen tundra, that only poopieheads disagree with me.
SyneRyder 7mo ago
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.
- nickburns 7mo ago
  Fonzie absolutely cared about being cool, too. It's why he jumped the shark after all. (Pun fully intended.)
- hedgedoops2 7mo ago
  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-everything-else-a-review-of-the-lifespan-of-a-fact-at-timeline-theatre-company/ 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/0393340732 https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Fact-John-DAgata/dp/03933407...
sharadsee 7mo ago
Thank you for sharing this! Given where the world is, this posts make me hopeful!
throwanem 7mo ago
Welcome to your thirties! Believe me, if you think it's getting interesting now, just wait.
justonceokay 7mo ago
“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
JSR_FDED 7mo ago
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.
didgetmaster 7mo ago
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.
- tpmoney 7mo ago
  This is both the best and the worst thing about the internet. On the one hand, it's amazing how many completely niche things a person might really care about that they can find a community for online. The MAME project doesn't just capture the arcade games everyone thinks about, but it captures things like the old Tiger LCD handhelds, and mechanical games like coin pushers and pinball machines, and even those old bartop trivia games. All because the internet allows a small group of people who really care about those things and preserving those things to coordinate and work with others who care just as much as they do. Heck most of the retro gaming world works on this. But at the same time, the internet massively amplifies the effects of a niche being taken over by its most extreme members. The middle between "dabbling interest" in a topic and "this topic is my life and I all I do is eat, drink and sleep this topic" erodes very quickly. If you only care a little or only care about a part of a topic, the internet can be almost as isolating or dismissive as the real world around you too. Some of that is a lot of internet communities are actually a small handful of people who are growing together, so they've already covered the same topics over and over that newer entrants might want to cover. But some of it is also just a level of care or obsession that many people won't ever reach. Popping into a "Show HN" thread, especially about something that was built that has either A) been built before or B) isn't clearly built with a business case can be a very depressing experience as "super carers" tear the thing being shown off to pieces for choosing the wrong language, or the wrong library or the wrong security model. And I get that some of this is just people trying to covey hard won knowledge, but it does sometimes feel like the equivalent of having an astronomy club where half the people are amateurs with back yard telescopes and half are people working at and with mountain top radio telescopes all having discussions about the best equipment to buy.
vonnik 7mo ago
As Alex's story illustrates, really caring about something and acting on that can be a great way to find community.
jonjacky 7mo ago
"Keep cool, but care" - McClintic Sphere, ca 1959 (fictional jazz musician in V, the 1963 novel by Thomas Pynchon)

111 points by surprisetalk 7mo ago

Geste 7mo ago

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.

card_zero 7mo ago
"It's a story about friendship", and it's moving. Everything else, and the reason for seeing it twelvety times, seems in fact to be about communing with real-life friends, and only incidentally about the show. What's that line from Saki ... to whom anything was thrilling and amusing if you did it in a troop.
dcminter 7mo ago
The author says: > I’d recommend you go to the show if you haven’t already, but that’s not really the point of this post. So while I agree that it is good to contemplate why you like things, that wasn't the topic of the post at all. The author quite explicitly say so.

sharkjacobs 7mo ago

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.

Jtarii 7mo ago
So if someone enthusiastically shows me some crazy game mechanic they made and I say "that's cool", I am using the word "cool" incorrectly?
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  "cool!" (especially for the uncool) has always meant something that resonates emotionally with you - keep using it that way. "cool..." means the flat, disconnected response - we don't need any more of that. This post is definitely about the former, and we can double down by not letting the wet blankets in the comments use the latter to tell us "you're doing it wrong".
- HardlyCognizant 7mo ago
  No, you are using it ironically. The connotation of a word is entirely contextual.
card_zero 7mo ago
Sangfroid, even. I wonder what criticisms could be leveled at the virtues of proactive energy, passion, and incessant curiosity. I notice that they make me feel slightly nauseous. This is something I'm curious about. What really is a dork?
- balamatom 7mo ago
  >What really is a dork? Someone who might not be very smart per se, but whose mind has not yet been murdered and replaced by a sort of mandatory prosthesis made out of complex conditioned responses (after the operation, they'd be more properly an ork). Yeah, turns out the uncanny valley effect works in both directions.
  - aquariusDue 7mo ago
    Found the dork 8) j/k we're all dorks here

yesbut 7mo ago

A good book in this topic, Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/ https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517912253/virtue-hoarders/ https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Forerunners_-Ideas-First-Catherine-Liu-Virtue-Hoarders_-The-Case-against-the-Professional-Managerial-Class-University-of-Minnesota-Press-2020.pdf https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Foreru...

keybored 7mo ago
You’re just going to drop a book against 80% of HN like that? What is the context?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

keybored 7mo ago

Went to the theatre and liked it.

dcminter 7mo ago
Yes. You should try liking things too instead of being dismissive of those who do. Kind of the author's point.
- keybored 7mo ago
  Obviously I’m saying that the article’s content is trivial considering the word count. You know this. But by criticizing the article I have proved it correct. Which tells us a lot about society.
jodrellblank 7mo ago
"Naysayers say nay" - newspaper bulletin, Sim City 2000.
- keybored 7mo ago
  It is a fact known far and wide, from the highlands, to the plains, to the frozen tundra, that only poopieheads disagree with me.

SyneRyder 7mo ago

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.

nickburns 7mo ago
Fonzie absolutely cared about being cool, too. It's why he jumped the shark after all. (Pun fully intended.)
hedgedoops2 7mo ago
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-everything-else-a-review-of-the-lifespan-of-a-fact-at-timeline-theatre-company/ 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/0393340732 https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Fact-John-DAgata/dp/03933407...

sharadsee 7mo ago

Thank you for sharing this! Given where the world is, this posts make me hopeful!

throwanem 7mo ago

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

justonceokay 7mo ago

“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

JSR_FDED 7mo ago

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.

didgetmaster 7mo ago

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.

tpmoney 7mo ago
This is both the best and the worst thing about the internet. On the one hand, it's amazing how many completely niche things a person might really care about that they can find a community for online. The MAME project doesn't just capture the arcade games everyone thinks about, but it captures things like the old Tiger LCD handhelds, and mechanical games like coin pushers and pinball machines, and even those old bartop trivia games. All because the internet allows a small group of people who really care about those things and preserving those things to coordinate and work with others who care just as much as they do. Heck most of the retro gaming world works on this. But at the same time, the internet massively amplifies the effects of a niche being taken over by its most extreme members. The middle between "dabbling interest" in a topic and "this topic is my life and I all I do is eat, drink and sleep this topic" erodes very quickly. If you only care a little or only care about a part of a topic, the internet can be almost as isolating or dismissive as the real world around you too. Some of that is a lot of internet communities are actually a small handful of people who are growing together, so they've already covered the same topics over and over that newer entrants might want to cover. But some of it is also just a level of care or obsession that many people won't ever reach. Popping into a "Show HN" thread, especially about something that was built that has either A) been built before or B) isn't clearly built with a business case can be a very depressing experience as "super carers" tear the thing being shown off to pieces for choosing the wrong language, or the wrong library or the wrong security model. And I get that some of this is just people trying to covey hard won knowledge, but it does sometimes feel like the equivalent of having an astronomy club where half the people are amateurs with back yard telescopes and half are people working at and with mountain top radio telescopes all having discussions about the best equipment to buy.

vonnik 7mo ago

As Alex's story illustrates, really caring about something and acting on that can be a great way to find community.

jonjacky 7mo ago

"Keep cool, but care" - McClintic Sphere, ca 1959 (fictional jazz musician in V, the 1963 novel by Thomas Pynchon)