The Mystic Ranger

I thought I was the only guy cool enough to think that this place wasn’t cool enough. Every­body, I’m sur­prised to find (well, quite a large num­ber, in any case) has the same prob­lem. That the other peo­ple are weirdly lame, hope­less and/or don’t do any work. So they’re all say­ing the same thing about each other. They’re also prob­a­bly think­ing that they’re cooler than the oth­ers. But more impor­tantly, they’re busy think­ing every­body else’s lame. When every­body thinks every­body else is beneath their stan­dards of cool­ness, you know something’s wrong.
This never hap­pened at school.
So rel­a­tive to school, let us ana­lyze. At school, there was no default rea­son to expect peo­ple to be cool. It was school. If we go by a rudely pre­sump­tious assump­tion that any given per­son is lame (which I, rarely if ever, indulged in. No, I am much bet­ter, I mean mod­est, than that.), my school (the stu­dents in it, that is) was rather cool. And we’re here. I think every­body expects every­body here to be bet­ter than them. Except for the few who don’t. And, wrap­ping this up pre­ma­turely because I have a con­clu­sion and I don’t want to for­get it, I think there are only two kinds of peo­ple who don’t think every­body else is lame.
The super lame peo­ple, who are so thor­oughly lame, they really pos­si­bly have no rea­son to think any­body else is lame. They may or may not believe every­body else is rather cool, depend­ing on whether they’re as lame as not to know what cool­ness means, or not.

The other kind are the peo­ple I care about. More like, idol­ize. They don’t care about whether every­body else is lame or not. Because their cool­ness is self-sufficient for them. They never had to rely on believ­ing oth­ers are, or ought to be cool.
The cool­ness of oth­ers, is up to them­selves, and it would not really influ­ence me. It is prob­a­bly arguable, but if there are not enough peo­ple around em to learn from, there is always the inter­net. And my head. And when I look for them, there are cool seniors, and teach­ers to learn from, as well.

Thing is, I had mostly stopped hop­ing to find cool batch­mates. I had prob­a­bly thought that (near ly all) my batch­mates are lame, quite some time ago. Lately I decided, to bind more to the ‘fact’, that I, am superbly cool. Doesn’t mat­ter, to me at the very least, how lame the oth­ers are. As is almost always the case, when I stopped look­ing, I have not only found mul­ti­ple cool peo­ple in my batch, I have dis­cov­ered ever more, how I am (exis­tent) in my own uni­verse, and inde­pen­dent of every­thing else, unless I idi­ot­i­cally bind myself to it. Peo­ple, sur­round­ings, noise, time (waste), every­thing. I make my own stuff, and con­trol it.

[A thing which helped… estab­lish this for me, was the Stan­ford ML and AI class. And how I man­aged to find lots of time to focus and do it, and almost rather well. They’re pretty cool. You should do them too. ]