My insides are so weird that I need to make my outer shell look beautiful enough so people will accept it.
- Frank Yang
Okay let me confess, I just fucking love aesthetics. Sometimes I have too much fun with outfits, I got this majestic tiger stripe jacket at a street sale at an art crawl.
The Cool Guy is nothing without his sunglasses, “the most universalized item of Cool”. If “the eyes are the window to the soul”, then the Cool Guy has occluded the contents of his.
The Cool Guy is kind of like The Clone, but a bit more advanced. He has spent enough time immersed in a culture that he can blend in, but he feels more at home. His inner world is beginning to show, he’s beginning to feel comfortable “showing his stripes”. But he still wears the sunglasses.
The COOL GUY might be a callback to my first real alter ego, SHIRT GUY, my nickname senior year of college.
Yeah it’s just me in a fun shirt that looks like an Arizona Iced Tea can. But sometimes you can put on an outfit and feel like the life of the party. A bit of performative narcissism never hurt anybody, just a touch of “fake it til you make it”.
There’s something about a patterned shirt and a pair of shitty sunglasses that just made me feel good. Going to parties, I felt like an outer shell where I could really be myself. A Fursona Light. Now I’ve gotten past the point of needing to wear sunglasses.
Reader Question: do you or did you have an outfit that just makes you feel cool?
THE SHADOW OF THE COOL GUY.
One of my formative memories was an early birthday, probably 8 or so. I got a toy rocket. Our backyard is surrounded by trees, and we had a wooden sandbox square. I really liked the idea of launching the rocket from the middle of the sandbox, so it would look like a real life launchpad. My more practical father and uncle suggested we go down to the park where we could launch it from an open field, and it wouldn’t get stuck in a tree.
But no! I don’t care about the trees, I want it to look like a real life launch. I want a sense of symmetry (proper theology and geometry, if you will).
And what happened? It got stuck in a tree on the first launch.
Dammit. I just wanted it to look cool.
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The cool guy is the part of me that goes to Home Depot and instead of learning something functional he just soaks in the beauty of all the different tile patterns or the chandeliers.
This is some real Ego is the Enemy shit. It’s too much focus on aesthetics and external appearances. It’s Tom Haverford, going bankrupt with Entertainment 720. It looks cool, but it’s not functional.
Reader Question: have you ever let external appearances negatively impact your effectiveness?
Counteracting the ego
If I had to name another character to counteract the Cool Guy, it’d probably be something like The Monk or The Stoic.
Some time back in the autumn/winter of 2015, I wore the same gray sweater every single day, to avoid Decision Fatigue. The Monk/Stoic is the guy who is in full-time Tim Ferriss productivity mode. Don’t make too many decisions by just wearing the same terrible gray sweater every day. Just focusing on results. All steak, no sizzle.
Those formative times when I put in the work make it feel like I have the right to show off a little bit.
Hell now I wish I could just make art that looks good… but realistically that takes a lot of work and practice. If The Cool Guy and The Monk/Stoic serve as polar opposites on the “sizzle vs. steak” dichotomy, then what is their synthesis?
The above animation is a nice little example of a bridge between “sizzle” and “steak”. That jacket I’m wearing is all sizzle. But then I used my nerd skills, built on years of practice to bring the fancy aesthetics of clothing into a realm I can control, that of the Computer Bit!
Reader Question: how can you bridge the gap between your fantasies and reality?
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> how can you bridge the gap between your fantasies and reality?
Using my eyes.