The \u201ceffortless cool girl,\u201d the term used to describe the perfect, straight out of a pinterest board, mysterious girl who somehow looks like she\u2019s straight out of Paris fashion week when she throws a random outfit together or somehow doesn\u2019t look awkward whenever she\u2019s alone. A mysterious vibe combined with a perfect-shade of green matcha has become the ultimate trend all over social media apps such as Pinterest and TikTok. The internet has essentially told us the coolest thing you could do is to not show yourself\u2014to be nonchalant. But is being nonchalant just a new, cool term for being lost?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout our lives, specifically primary school, we\u2019re told that if we want people to like us, we should be ourselves, be confident, and be kind. However this new \u201ccool girl\u201d trend has popularized the direct opposite idea; to not show yourself; be mysterious, don\u2019t talk to others; attract, and there\u2019s no need to be kind when you\u2019re just a walking Pinterest board; be loud and rude when you want.
The ultimate Cool Girl monologue of the past decade has been an excerpt from the movie adaptation based on the book Gone Girl, what used to be a mockery of expectations laid out by a system has now snowballed into whatever the self-love girlies are parroting. The OG Cool Girl is effortlessly hot, she listens to underground bands, annotates philosophical books and will never notice how much people really admire her. See, I get the hype\u2014to a certain extent I do, the constant objectification turned itself into a romanticised personification that gives us confidence, the power to reclaim the cool girl status. Great philosophy indeed, but is that what we are really doing?
We have a ground to build something\u2014an embodiment of our deepest desires that could come alive, but why are we all building the same person?
Where did our essence to create something new go? It is ironic, the desire to express an effortless personality\u2014one that exhibits nonchalance, a sort of indifference and subtle rudeness that others find hot, has turned us into slops with no creativity. We jump onto the next trend that the influencers deem worthy and turn into shopaholics with no restraint. We need guides to teach us what is cool, \u2018thought daughters read this now\u2019, \u2018zebra prints are so in\u2019, \u2018hot siren office wear\u2019, \u2018how to be disgustingly over educated\u2019 you\u2019ve seen these before\u2013the epidemic of being perceived as boring makes us latch onto the loudest portrayal of what is deemed good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In our lives, we may face something a lot of us fear; rejection. Whether it\u2019s being made fun of for a shirt you wore to being rejected by your crush, we all have felt some form of rejection in our lives. Some of us may face rejection more than others, making us turn to other means of wanting to be accepted. We may desire quietly, drown your desires so even our biggest dreams aren\u2019t rejected. We may try to say that we \u201cdon\u2019t care\u201d about our former interests, about school\/work, about our entire lives. We learn to be nonchalant about everything because of our fear of being rejected. Our justification for this type of thinking is \u201cIf we never admit to wanting something, we can never lose it,\u201d or \u201cIf you don\u2019t care, you can\u2019t fail.\u201d But, if you also can\u2019t lose, you can\u2019t win. You\u2019re stuck in the safe zone where you haven\u2019t yet lost but you feel that if you leave you\u2019ll immediately be out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We want to latch on to the one thing that people haven\u2019t judged yet, and in doing so we lose it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What has nonchalance really done for us besides telling us to bury away ourselves? Sure, maybe you have gotten an Instagram dm or two from posting a mysterious cafe picture, but is this attention really worth yourself? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
However Pinterest hasn\u2019t exactly caught onto this idea, and instead of backing off, it romanticized it. It told us that pairing chunky sunglasses with an iced latte to drown your personality is what will get people to absolutely love<\/em> you! There\u2019s all kinds of names for it; \u201cchic new york fashion,\u201d \u201cswag london girl chic,\u201d heck anything with the name chic in it, Pinterest will eat right up. Pinterest and Tiktok\u2019s algorithms are essentially telling you to get rid of your identity and replace it with a persona made online. We\u2019re literally being told to disconnect from ourselves to fit in with the platform\u2014to give up self expression in favor of trend following. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All the creators call this insane Cool Girl epidemic just a trend\u2014a hype that people will forget about in the next 6 months. They call this soul-ridding virus an aesthetic. But can you really be nonchalant about your own life? The job you want? The person you actually really like? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe the cool girl on our feeds was never effortless like she seems; she was just afraid of expressing her true self in favor of a false persona.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The \u201ceffortless cool girl,\u201d the term used to describe the perfect, straight out of a pinterest board, mysterious girl who somehow looks like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":2031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion-pieces","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2032,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030\/revisions\/2032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueandread.asbarcelona.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}