Some More Insight Into The Gen Z Coolness Crisis

There are four sort of low-level generational discourses circulating the web right now that I want to try and synthesize into a larger idea. There’s the weird backlash around the word “demure” going viral after a trans TikToker popularized it. There are millennials panicking that Gen Z thinks we all spent the 2010s talking like ermahgerd le epic bacon YouTubers. There are lines going down the block in New York City right now full of people waiting to try the viral Olympics muffin. And, my particular favorite, there is a hilarious argument happening on X at the moment about whether or not Julia Stiles’ character from 10 Things I Hate About You would have listened to Chappell Roan.

The core conflict at the heart of all of these various conversations is about coolness. Is it cool to learn slang words from viral videos? Whether we’re talking about TikToks now or Vines 10 years now. Is it cool to spend two hours in a line to eat a muffin you saw on Instagram? Would a notoriously cool character from an old movie like the new cool thing now?

And my takeaway from these and other little generational skirmishes this summer is that, unless something drastic happens to the way we consume information, millennials may very well be the last generation that remembers what coolness looked like before virality was attached to it. The YouTubers that Gen Z accuses us all of talking like were, at the time, largely regarded as child predators and loathed by their peers. Waiting in a line for anything that wasn’t nightclub in New York pre-cronut was an offense punishable by eviction and banishment. And, yeah, a teen girl in the 90s that listened to bands like Hole and Sleater-Kinney, if she were magically transported to 2024, would probably have some issues listening to Chappell Roan, simply because Roan is very popular right now. Source: I knew (and lived in fear of) cool teenage girls in the 90s.

I’m not saying this is inherently bad, but it does seem to be confusing! And it seems particularly disorienting for Gen Z who, time and time again, have demonstrated that they want to be cool, but still don’t realize that nothing can truly be cool if it is judged by the number underneath it that tells you how many people liked or shared it. Nevertheless, I wish them the best on their ongoing journey of cultural discovery.

The crystal cube of agony