Mature into Childhood
“Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The author Mary Harrington had a recent essay in which she makes the connection between loneliness and the pursuit of cool.
She writes that cool is “anti-loyal” in that it means excluding old friends “the moment they no longer have the magic fairy-dust.”
She continues, “Above all, ‘cool’ enjoins you never, ever to let on that you need other people. There is nothing less cool than needing.”
Young kids can't hide their neediness, but the closer we get to middle school, the more we often pursue cool.
It often makes us miserable.
Thankfully, middle school is in the rearview mirror, and we don’t have to stay stuck in the cool-loneliness doom loop.
Harrington argues that the opposite of cool is “cringe” and that we should be “cringemaxxing.” She writes:
Probably the most cringe thing you can do is going to church. There, you show up regularly to join a group of others you didn’t choose, and some of whom are probably old, or weird, or awkward, or otherwise uncool. The purpose of showing up is prayer: again, the opposite of cool, because to pray is to declare, openly, that you are not completely self-contained.
Kids are the opposite of self-contained. The wisest among us are those who similarly recognize their neediness and mature into childhood: