Being “cool” is a commodity that is traded among teenagers. As soon as you locate other kids who have a lot of coolness, you negotiate to share it with them so that you can both become even cooler. You start by accumulating as much coolness as you can. And if you ever encounter a child who is significantly less cool than you, you should tell that geek to fuck off and quit being such a loser so that the other cool kids won’t see you, like, actually talking to each other. How cool you are affects how much someone wants to be in a relationship with you. There will be less demand for your friendship if you are terrible at sports and others still like sports. The majority of the foolish mental games and crap that teens engage in are a result of this coolness economy. They mess with one other’s heads, boast about things they didn’t do, pretend to love people they actually despise, and pretend to despise people they actually love because it gives them the appearance of being cooler than they are, increases their Snapchat following, and gets them a blowout from their prom partner. Relationships at the high school level are by their very nature conditional. They are I’ll-do-this-for-you-if-you-do-this-for-me connections. The same person who is your best buddy one year because you both enjoy the same DJ becomes your biggest enemy the following year because they teased you in biology class. These connections are unstable. also brief.
