Hi, and welcome back to Monocycle, a podcast by Manrepeller hosted by Leandra Medine Cohen.

You may remember in last week's very disjointed episode about essentially everything and nothing all at once.

I mentioned that it was Chit a Changes Month on Man Repeller.

I also mentioned that I was not going to

make that episode about Changes Month, and I'm still not going to do that. But there's a story that

went live on Man Repeller about two weeks ago, and it ended up being called why I stopped caring

about being cool, even though originally it was called Is Cool the best we've got? And before that,

it was why do we aspire to be

cool? So at the top of the month, we had a conversation among the team members at man

repeller, and we were talking about pitches for the month and what kind of stories we were

planning to write, what the programming was going to look like, essentially. And one of our

editors mentioned something along the lines of, why am I still aspiring to be cool?

Of course, she's 25. So her navigation is not quite over, but she's, she's approaching the,

she's approaching the end of the aspiration, particularly if she's asking the question at 25,

which I was doing too. And I thought to myself,

this is a great opportunity to reopen this conversation. I think that a lot of the concept of

being cool and how important it used to be for me has a lot to do with the fact that I was

constantly trying to improve. I feel like I spent the greater half of my 20s, or at least the very early part,

trying to figure out what makes someone cool, what it means to be cool.

I really wanted to be it, right?

I know you're not supposed to be able to turn coolness into a math equation because if you were, everyone would be it.

And being cool is all about that jeanise qua.

...