The Tradeoff Between Being Cool and Being Healthy
This is not very brat of me.
I wake up at 11:47 am on a Monday, go through my WhatsApp, then Slack, then Instagram — plug in my earphones and play something loud so that my mind does not have time to comprehend any feelings, and then I decide I am still tired even though I slept for a good 9 hours.
So I put on a shirt, take my earphones with me, walk 5 minutes to the nearest open stall (they call themselves a “cafe,” btw) and ask for coffee and a cigarette. I think to myself, wow, this is so cool of me.
Except it’s not.
Having coffee and a cigarette on an empty stomach is basically the worst thing you can do to your gut. I know this. Yet I consciously choose to appear cool rather than actually do something that would make me feel good.
After a lot of thinking (very rare of me), I have pinned the reason I — or rather, we — subtly harm ourselves every day to one word:
Consumerism.
Not the word you might expect in this context, but most of life’s problems can be pinned down to this.
In contrast to Oxford Dictionary’s definition of consumerism, I believe it is not only about “the acquisition of consumer goods” — consumerism is also about depriving yourself of enjoyment or health to “consume” a feeling of being superior or being part of a group you consider superior (or, I would say, cooler).
Since eons, culture has promoted us to chase a sense of belonging.
In the context of pop culture, I am a victim of the “brat” culture — which makes me drink more, call myself a “365 party girl,” while thinking I am cool as fuck when I am literally killing myself.
Other examples can be a sort of “sad girl” culture I have noticed in my friends — they romanticise their sadness while consuming Bojack Horseman and reading Sylvia Plath, while their Pinterest is flooded with quotes from Charles Bukowski, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. They consciously make the decision never to get better, since it’s “cool” to stare at the abyss while the abyss stares back.
My most controversial opinion here might be about our Hindu culture — which originates from the Vedic society (c. 1500 — c. 500 BCE), dominated by caste. Even centuries ago, there was a chase for belonging that everyone wanted to attain; all castes wanted to be higher than themselves — a process coined as “Sanskritization” by M.N. Srinivas, where individuals and groups made deliberate changes to their way of life to imitate the dominant upper castes, including dietary, lifestyle, and economic changes.
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Sounds familiar, right?
All of it — brat culture, sad-girl culture, caste imitation — boils down to the same thing: a modern form of consumerism. We’re constantly choosing to seem better rather than be better.
Cool over healthy. Belonging over individuality.
The loss of individualism is really something, lol.
Now, how to save yourself from this?
If I knew, my screen time would not be more than 7 hours a day.
I spend most of my day trying to find ways to be cooler, thinking of situations that would make me cooler, and consuming videos that tell young women how to be cooler.
But I recently read a book — Intuition by Osho — where he says:
“The stupid mind thinks only in terms of possession. The man of insight thinks of utility.”
I guess that’s a good place to start.
Think about your actions in terms of utility.
So the next time I reach for a drink or a cigarette, maybe I’ll think about what purpose it serves.
Not the aesthetic gain, not the social image — just the utility.
Because at the end of the day, the real cool people are the ones who are comfortable in their own skin.
And maybe that’s the kind of “cool” my gut can finally live with.
