At what point is ‘not caring’ what’s cool, still deemed cool?

I’ve recently gotten into board games. I don’t mean Monopoly or Cluedo, I’m talking about the ‘never heard of outside of the inner circle’ crap. I like them, they’re fun and deep down I think I’ve always wanted to play them. Like most though, I’d always viewed them as being more suited to the dimly lit, Lynx Africa misted basements of the sexually handicapped. When I talk to my girlfriend about it, she looks at me with a suitable look of pity and contempt, especially when I reveal this to her friends. My point in all of this though is that I really couldn’t give less of a shite about what is deemed to be ‘cool’ anymore. Usually, that would mark the end of an article, but the quandary that I have found myself in, is that ‘not caring’ used to be the marker for being cool.

When I was growing up, the coolest kid was always the one who would go hell for leather into everything. Not a care in the world as they set fire to a shopping cart and threw themselves down a hill into the local syringe riddled stream. The coolest kid was the guy at the back of class who gave less of a shit about their GCSE results and more about how many actionless fingers they could get people to sniff at the next Malibu fuelled house party; the answer was always ‘all of them’, they made very sure of that. The coolest kid was a renegade, they went against the grain, they were James Dean, Pete Docherty and Lemmy all rolled into one awful, awful human being. They certainly didn’t play board games.

If there is one thing that I’ve learnt in my late 20’s, it’s that hobbies aren’t cool. If you haven’t turned your hobby into a career by the age of 25 then it is deemed pointless; a weird waste of time where you could be reliving ‘Magaluf 2007’ or smashing your mates at Fifa. Besides exercise (pass), video games seem to be the only thing which has escaped the nerdy shadow of the hobby world. Ninety percent of the time, playing video games is an escape from reality, where someone can sit down in their pants, pierce a Capri Sun and swear at a child with little or no social consequences. Unless you’re a woman, female gamers are still viewed as nerds. As with most things, Women have gotten the shitty end of the deal there. Sitting down and playing Xbox is, by and large, a lone activity. Why then is sitting down with 4 friends and a board game, in a social environment deemed to be for losers?

It was a lot simpler when you were younger. Did you have glasses and/or IBS? Yes? Uncool. Nowadays I don’t know. If the fingerblasters of yore were the cool ones for not caring what people thought, then surely Goths were the cool ones all along. They never gave a crap about you or anything, other than the new ‘Mortiis’ album and whether PunkyFish jeans were too ‘conformist’. The goalposts have been moved and anyone over the age of 25 is stuck playing golf. Hobbies are uncool; until you hit 40, at that point an allotment becomes the equivalent to a 16-year-old having a fake ID, a ‘free house’ and a ten deck of Mayfair.

Is not caring about your love of things that are synonymous with geekdom, seen as being a marker of a care free rebel? Am I in the same boat as the ones who don’t care if skinny jeans are on the way out? Or am I in fact floundering around in the deep with the ‘I don’t care if I’ve not showered’ squad?

I love board games and I love craft beer, two things that are pretty divisive in the hipster stakes. I don’t really care if that makes me cool or the opposite. Being cool might just come down to a certain comfort and certainty within your own self-identity or it could in fact just be down to having a clear complexion when you happen to hit puberty. It could be down to being into the newest music or fashion trends, it could be about being relevant in the bohemian world of food and drink. It could be about having a presence in the theatrical scene or it could be as simple as being funny.

One thing that I’m certain of though, is that writing an article about what constitutes being cool is definitely not ‘it’.

I changed my mind, I want to be cool.