I recently encountered the phrase, “The Cool Zone.” This is a term that has gotten a lot of popularity and usage in the last 2 years for obvious reasons, and I’ll talk about it briefly here. The following is a portion of an Urban Dictionary definition for it:
“In leftist spaces, a time period marked by a massive political, social, and economic emancipation as a result of a crisis arising from the failures of capitalism. i.e. , a revolution.
Often preceding widespread abject poverty, increased socioeconomic inequality, an obscene accumulation of wealth by the rich due to their ownership of the means of production, a distrust in the current political process under which people live, and other social issues arising therein.”
To put it in simpler terms, a Cool Zone can be understood as a very specific and unique turning point in history in which the conditions of life and the treadmill the average person is forced to run on is no longer deemed worth it logically speaking. It’s the moment in history in which the carrot being dangled in front of someone is no longer appealing in the face of insurmountable problems other than hunger, or it’s become so out of reach it’s too absurd to even try. Property ownership, for instance, is one carrot being dangled in front of people that is, quite frankly, almost impossible. You have to be a millionaire to even think about owning a home these days, so that dream has sort of collapsed for most people.
As mentioned, the reasons why this term is being used regularly now are obvious overall: rising gas prices in a world with an infrastructure that still depends on gasoline for most people, income level for most people staying the same, inflation of everything, little to no upward mobility for young people, impending climate apocalypse, covid still running rampant, the possibility of the bat AIDS mixing with another virus (perhaps avian) and creating a new type of an even weirder bat-bird-AIDS hybrid that kills people even faster. To sum it up: we are living in a world that is not what it used to be, and it is getting worse every year. I’m not saying this to complain or whine, I’m just putting how it is in simple, truthful terms.
I’ll give you another example from my own life/experience. I was recently in a slight car crash due to snow. I worked all day for an average wage, and on the way home I was involved in an accident that cost me more than I made all day. It sucks, but then when you think about it, you realize: this is how shit is for everyone. We’re all one thing away from having to spend a bunch of money and ruin our whole lives. It can be tough to be happy in the face of such financial anxiety and impending doom, and it’s never felt this way before in history (IDK if that’s true, I’m just throwing that sentence in there because it sounds smart and cool, haha).
Now, the point in me bringing all this up is to ask the question: when will we reach our official “Cool Zone” period? What will be the real moment in history when everyone quits their jobs (if they have one)? Will various marches on streets occur, or will mass protests become even more intense than what we’ve already seen recently? Will there be unprecedented looting at some point? Will “eating the rich,” so to speak, become a real thing and not just an internet catchphrase?
Personally, I don’t think this “Cool Zone” is going to happen or lead to any kind of meaningful change. What I think is going to happen is basically a more accelerated version of what we’ve already seen happen: things will continue to get better for a certain segment of the population, and things will get shittier for others. Even if things get so shitty for a certain segment of the population they become desperate and reach a point of having nothing to lose and act out, etc, I think the average person living in a so-called “developed” country will still have it just good enough that they think twice about acting out so they don’t lose the little they still have.
Take my situation, for example: I am 30 years old. I live with my parents. I have never been able to afford to move out, and I never will be. My entire 20s just went by without that happening. Aside from getting pussy from time to time and becoming a successful artist who makes a living off their art, living in my own property was always the biggest thing I’ve ever wanted for myself. Now that I’m 30 and it is now impossible for me to have my own place in my 20s like I always romanticized, it bums me out even more. But it gets worse: I’m not sitting around doing nothing. I literally work a job, and I don’t spend the little money I make foolishly. And yet, I will still never be able to afford the one thing I want, which is to live alone in an apartment in my own city I grew up in (Toronto). I know I’m repeating myself here, but I cannot stress it enough: living Downtown Toronto is something I have always dreamed about and wanted for myself, and I am now living in a world where that simply cannot happen because of something as dumb and meaningless as money.
All of that being said: I have every right to be upset. And so do so many others just like me who are faced with the same situation and reality of having watched their dreams fall apart in real time. I’ve experienced this in slow-motion: I went to University and got a Bachelor’s degree, and figured out it was useless after it was too late. I did all the things I was supposed to do and listened to all the boomers, and in the end I got absolutely nowhere. Despite all my efforts, my progress is basically non-existent. I live with my fucking parents at the age of 30, and will live here for the rest of my life. This situation is slowly killing me little by little every day, and my mental health suffers at times because of it, ngl. I am so unhappy at times I feel like my living situation is straight up giving me cancer: I don’t have the peace and quiet in my life I would like, it’s unhealthy for me, and I can’t do shit about it other than what I have already been doing, which is working and creating shit on the side. If you told me when I was 14 this is what my life would’ve been like when I was 30, I would’ve probably killed myself, to tell you the truth. This is definitely nowhere near what I wanted my life to be.
I’m bringing all of that up to illustrate my point: if life right now is kinda shitty, and everything feels so hopeless….why haven’t I just killed myself yet? Why haven’t I quit my job and become some kind of hedonist? Why haven’t I told my parents to fuck off and spent all my money to go cavorting with some blonde call girl in the Bahamas for a final hurrah or whatever? I could easily find a hot working girl off Twitter and make that happen for myself, and every day I don’t do it. I go to work instead like everyone else and make tiny amounts of money that can’t get me what I actually want in life. I am working to afford groceries and shit like that, but nothing tangible other than that. It makes no sense for me to keep this lifestyle up when you think about it because it’s leading nowhere really. I’m living day to day, and there’s no future for me: I know what’s coming, and it’s nothing good. So why the fuck am I still here? The answer is easy: because things haven’t gotten so hopeless yet that I feel death is better. I guess it’s safe to say that many people probably feel the same. Despite not being millionaires and being forced to work shitty jobs they probably don’t want to be doing, the alternative is not more appealing yet. We’re all trapped in this two steps forward, one step back cycle and we don’t seem to be doing anything about it.
And that’s basically where lots of people are. It’s just like how I’ve talked about how distraction is the key to curing my unhinged phases and depressive, dark days. We’re basically all running around in a distraction mode constantly. I don’t think life has gotten bad enough for people to turn off their various distractions yet. There is always the possibility that they could potentially buy a lottery ticket, and become one of the winners on earth overnight. Or maybe their artistic ventures might pay off one day in their 80s or some shit and they become a massive success and the last few years of their life makes all the suffering worth it. It’s highly unlikely, but still not impossible. We’ve all heard the capitalist propaganda stories millions of times: stuff like JK Rowling being down to her last dollar and writing ideas for Harry Potter on a napkin at a restaurant one day. Or Jay-Z selling crack and then becoming a wealthy man and ending up in Beyonce’s crack😂😂. These possibilities still seem very real to us, and I don’t think anyone is fully ready to let them go.
The other thing to note about these so-called “revolutions” that no one ever talks about is that they do not happen because people caused them to happen. I believe they happen because the system that led such a sentiment to occur was already eroding in the first place, and the people involved with revolutions get more credit than they probably deserve. Look at what is happening now, for instance: shit is not so bad that anyone should kill themselves. Because who knows, you could become a rich YouTuber one day or make a million dollars off an ape NFT or some shit (I have no clue how that works). But like I said: it’s also pretty bad for most people. Many people don’t even have tangible savings to fall back on; most Americans are living day to day and taking things piece by piece. There’s no “future,” so to speak for most people, and it’s way more likely they will remain poor than suddenly luck out and become rich one day. But still….no “revolution” yet. I still have to go to work, and so does anyone else with a job in a pandemic.
I think what will happen is that this era we’re in will continue to go on as long as it possibly can. It will continue to get shittier and shittier until things seem particularly hopeless one year. But always in a compartmentalized manner that doesn’t create a perfect harmony among people that agree on how hopeless everything is. There will never be a “George Floyd” type of watershed moment in which everyone realizes in unison that the system is fucked beyond repair and it’s hopeless. Instead what will happen is the system will continue to go on and on until it self-destructs in some manner, at which point, there may be some kind of real “change” in a certain area. This could be in the form of widespread UBI by governments everywhere, for example (like the covid payments we’ve already seen). Whatever happens though, I doubt there will be any significant movement that destroys capitalism or anything outlandish like that. There might be movements antithetical to the goals of capitalism that gain traction, like minimalism, but it will just be small sects. Capitalism will keep going, the Cool Zone will get colder, people will even freeze to death, but still, as long as it’s good somewhere out there for at least one other rich person: no revolution. Most people are dumbasses who somehow think one day they might become Bezos, and everyone’s gonna take that belief to their graves.
There’s one more thing I want to say about this revolution stuff, and the “internal implosion” idea I’m trying to describe. I will conclude by mentioning the ideas Tolstoy presented in War & Peace. (This also goes back to the stuff I said about free will before). If there’s one thing I learned from that book it is: free will isn’t real past a certain point, and this is especially very clear when it comes to matters of war. The phenomenon of war is described by Tolstoy as something unfolding that’s beyond us, in a way. It’s something that would have happened anyway, with any other group of people. Whatever happens is what would have happened because that’s how nature works and how things crumble over time. In some ways I believe this “revolution” stuff is the same thing: it’s a phenomenon that arises from something that was already broken. A real revolution would be if things were fixed before they were allowed to get this bad in the first place, and that obviously doesn’t ever happen. So to sum up: revolution is a myth, it’s fake, people are whack haha.