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death of cool
Oct. 4th, 2025 11:38 pm“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
—J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
A little over a year ago, I created a community blogging platform called howdoyouspell.cool, powered by Write Freely, an online space wherein anyone could sign up, create a blog, and write about whatever they wanted. Back then, I told myself that I was inspired by this concept of the “open internet,” a sort of return to the wild-west era of the Internet in which I grew up, beyond the reaches of devious corporate overlords and money-making algorithms, where people could express themselves however they wanted, no matter how weird or vile that expression might be. But as of yesterday, October 4, 2025, I have retired the domain name and am now in the process of shutting the platform down for good. And now, on this eve of the platform’s obliteration, I find myself analyzing my true motivations for having created it to begin with. Was it really to provide a place for people to express themselves unfettered, or was it something else?
Well, I've come to the conclusion that it was indeed something else, something performative and superficial. I've come to the conclusion that it was all ego, ego, ego. I just wanted to be cool, pretty much. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious. I mean, the word “cool” is right there in the damn domain name.
To be honest, before I had even created the blogging platform, I kind of knew it was a bad idea. For one, I had tried creating online communities in the past but had always ended up abandoning them a few months after creation because being an administrator just doesn’t suit me, because people annoy me very easily. And for two, I don’t usually get along with my fellow writers to begin with.
This is a sweeping generalization, I know, but I think most writers are pretentious, narcissistic know-it-alls who are desperate for validation. They want people to read their stuff and be like, “holy shit, this is the most deep and thoughtful thing I’ve ever read, this author is a genius.” Writers seem to get off on impressing others and cultivating airs more so than the actual act of writing itself. I mean, why even publish anything for public consumption if, one, you didn’t want it to be read by other people, which indicates some level of validation-seeking, and two, you didn’t think your writing had some sort of academic or artistic merit worth someone else’s time, which suggests a certain level of pretentious arrogance that contributes to the whole know-it-all thing. I mean, what do you think this whole journal you’re reading here is, exactly? Some sort of selfless practice of the art of writing? Some sort of altruism? No, it's an effort to put myself out there in some sort of vain attempt at validation and like-minded community building. As they say, it takes one to know one. Do note, however, that my wife says my biggest character flaw is that I project myself onto others and have a hard time relating to the thoughts and feelings of other people because of this, so maybe this should all be taken with a nice, heaping pile of salt.
By the time I had created the howdoyouspell.cool platform, I had written something like twenty essays and two short stories, all of which tried to marry my love of video games with philosophical and societal concepts that I admittedly understood very poorly, and I had electronically published two full-blown magazines also, both of which I had done all the editing and graphical design for. I thought, at the time, that all of my stuff was very well-written and intelligent. I was trying very hard to make a point with my writing, and I wanted very much for someone to read my work and say something like, “holy shit, this is the most deep and thoughtful thing I’ve ever read, this author is a genius.” But of course this praise and validation never materialized, because barely anyone read my stuff, and those who did were more interested in the video game aspects than the philosophical, societal aspects, so I began to resent the audience that I had cultivated, seeing them as shallow and vapid, only seeming to care about playing video games instead of thinking about video games. So I decided, hey, you know what, what if I make a writing platform, position myself as some sort of writing authority figure, and then, by using this facade of “I’m just a passionate writer who wants to provide you the chance of hosting your own blog wherein you can say whatever you want without fear of being banned,” I would maybe attract the sort of high-minded audience that would appreciate my stuff. I’m not sure if I was consciously thinking about it like this at the time, but using the forty-twenty power of hindsight, this was certainly what was going on. Ego, ego, ego. I wanted to be perceived as a cool writer. I thought my writing was incredible, and I believed that if people just read it, I would become this sort of online writing folk hero of sorts. In short, I was desperate for attention.
Probably needless to say, but this whole scheme did not provide the attention I craved, mostly because my writing wasn’t actually very good, but also because, by advertising my new blogging platform as a sort of haven for free-speech absolutists, I had once again attracted an audience that I immediately grew to resent. Because upon advertising my platform on Mastodon, a defederated social media network of which I no longer have a profile, the first person who reached out to me was this one guy who wrote erotic anime-inspired fiction that almost exclusively featured unrealistically well-endowed chubby women who battled and performed sexual acts on each other, because his characters were all like mixed-martial artists or something, and in all of this guy’s stories, the women vocally expressed hatred for one another but always had this sort of repressed sexual attraction bubbling underneath the surface, so they’d be in a fighting arena for whatever reason and they’d start off all like, “Do you think you’re better than me? I hate your fucking guts, you nasty tramp. I’m the best fighter in the world.” But by the end of the story, they’d be rolling around completely nude in the middle of the arena, making out and fondling each other or whatever. This is how all the guy’s stories went.
This author’s work was inherently offensive to me because he very obviously treated women as mere sexual objects, so I didn’t want this guy to create a blog on my platform, but I had advertised the platform as a sort of free-speech haven where anyone could post anything, so from the very start of this whole attention-seeking endeavor, I was faced with a sort of ethical dilemma. Am I really in support of absolute freedom of expression if I’m unwilling to allow this misogynist objectifier of women to post his nasty smut trash on my blogging platform? I felt sort of ethically committed to the bit, so to speak, in that I had advertised the platform as a free-speech platform, and but what would it look like if I suddenly told this guy that actually no, you can’t post on my platform because your writing is disgusting and offensive to me?
In hindsight, this was an egotistical concern on my part, because I was more worried about how people would perceive my shifting stances on the free-speech thing than I was about actually following my own moral, ethical gut code, which told me that by no means should I allow this guy’s awful smut garbage on my platform. But I ended up caving to my ego and letting this guy create his smut blog, because I didn't want to make an ethical 180 on the free-speech thing I had originally committed to, out of fear of being perceived as some sort of hypocritical phony.
As of today, there are like ten users, not counting myself, on howdoyouspell.cool, nine of whom only posted a few entries before vanishing without a trace, but this guy, this misogynist objectifier of women, has stuck around. In fact, I believe he just posted something last week, another chapter in his Beat, Prey, Love series, the title of which follows the annoying format of all his other titles, that being taking an existing movie title and altering it somewhat to vaguely suggest something erotic going on, which is a play-on-words trend that makes my eyes roll into the back of my head even when not used in a sexualized context, as it's never as clever as the author likes to think it is, and it's frankly low-effort and offensively unoriginal.
The smut author has been consistently posting his drivel on howdoyouspell.cool for like a year now, and considering I had stopped posting to the platform several months ago, that makes this one nasty guy the sole contributor to the site. So ultimately, at this point, I don’t feel too bad about pulling the plug on the whole platform. In fact, I might even do a villainous little laugh when this guy sends me a very sternly worded email after he attempts to log in only to find his disgusting porn writing completely wiped from the internet because his blog no longer exists.
So yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about the death of howdoyouspell.cool, considering the platform was born primarily out of a desire to satisfy my own ego, and it really only attracted one very nasty guy. For one, I don’t want to provide a platform for smut, and for two, I’m kind of through trying so hard to be cool. I want to be the death of cool. I'm done pursuing projects driven solely by my own ego, because my desire to be perceived as distinguished and interesting and cool has only produced within me feelings of anxiety and phonyism.
But is this truly all that my ego has produced?
A couple of months ago, I read this novel by J.D. Salinger titled Franny and Zooey, which is sort of like a Socratic dialogue between two siblings. Franny is a young actress attending college who is fed up with the ego-fueled intellectual phoniness of her peers and has become obsessed with shedding her own ego through the practice of a repetitive mental prayer she learned by reading an old religious text. Franny is also the source of the quote at the beginning of this journal entry. Zooey, Franny’s brother, disagrees with Franny that ego is the root of all her problems. At one point, about a hundred and sixty pages in, Zooey says something that kind of opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe ego isn’t such a bad thing. He said,
“What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away?”
Much like the creation of howdoyouspell.cool, my entire body of writing has been largely the product of my own ego, which on the surface is a fact that seems to taint the writing, but does it really? Looking back at everything I’ve written, even though much of it is hot garbage, I’m proud of some of it and grateful to have written it all. Even the writing I now think is hot garbage, I don’t regret having written it, because it helped me become a better writer and led to work that I feel has real, meaningful value, however hard that is to actually quantify.
So the whole thing has me thinking about ego in a deeper way, like, is ego really all that bad? It seems to me that most human behavior could probably be tied back to ego in some way. I mean, even a super generous person who donates to charities probably gets some sort of personal satisfaction from others perceiving them as a charitable person, which is a sort of ego-stroke, in a way. But is that a bad thing? I mean, even if that’s the case, that the charitable person is driven by ego, does the motive even matter at that point? The charity is still happening, regardless of whether the ego was involved or not. Isn’t the charitable person’s ego producing good outcomes in this hypothetical situation? And if we concede that this egotism does indeed produce good outcomes sometimes, then is ego really all that bad?
Like Franny, maybe I've been looking at ego the wrong way. Perhaps ego is more like this neutral power within us all, this driving force that is neither good nor bad, and what really matters is how we choose to use our egos and the outcomes of those ego-driven choices.
A sort of like Ego-Driven Consequentialism or something.
—J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
A little over a year ago, I created a community blogging platform called howdoyouspell.cool, powered by Write Freely, an online space wherein anyone could sign up, create a blog, and write about whatever they wanted. Back then, I told myself that I was inspired by this concept of the “open internet,” a sort of return to the wild-west era of the Internet in which I grew up, beyond the reaches of devious corporate overlords and money-making algorithms, where people could express themselves however they wanted, no matter how weird or vile that expression might be. But as of yesterday, October 4, 2025, I have retired the domain name and am now in the process of shutting the platform down for good. And now, on this eve of the platform’s obliteration, I find myself analyzing my true motivations for having created it to begin with. Was it really to provide a place for people to express themselves unfettered, or was it something else?
Well, I've come to the conclusion that it was indeed something else, something performative and superficial. I've come to the conclusion that it was all ego, ego, ego. I just wanted to be cool, pretty much. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious. I mean, the word “cool” is right there in the damn domain name.
To be honest, before I had even created the blogging platform, I kind of knew it was a bad idea. For one, I had tried creating online communities in the past but had always ended up abandoning them a few months after creation because being an administrator just doesn’t suit me, because people annoy me very easily. And for two, I don’t usually get along with my fellow writers to begin with.
This is a sweeping generalization, I know, but I think most writers are pretentious, narcissistic know-it-alls who are desperate for validation. They want people to read their stuff and be like, “holy shit, this is the most deep and thoughtful thing I’ve ever read, this author is a genius.” Writers seem to get off on impressing others and cultivating airs more so than the actual act of writing itself. I mean, why even publish anything for public consumption if, one, you didn’t want it to be read by other people, which indicates some level of validation-seeking, and two, you didn’t think your writing had some sort of academic or artistic merit worth someone else’s time, which suggests a certain level of pretentious arrogance that contributes to the whole know-it-all thing. I mean, what do you think this whole journal you’re reading here is, exactly? Some sort of selfless practice of the art of writing? Some sort of altruism? No, it's an effort to put myself out there in some sort of vain attempt at validation and like-minded community building. As they say, it takes one to know one. Do note, however, that my wife says my biggest character flaw is that I project myself onto others and have a hard time relating to the thoughts and feelings of other people because of this, so maybe this should all be taken with a nice, heaping pile of salt.
By the time I had created the howdoyouspell.cool platform, I had written something like twenty essays and two short stories, all of which tried to marry my love of video games with philosophical and societal concepts that I admittedly understood very poorly, and I had electronically published two full-blown magazines also, both of which I had done all the editing and graphical design for. I thought, at the time, that all of my stuff was very well-written and intelligent. I was trying very hard to make a point with my writing, and I wanted very much for someone to read my work and say something like, “holy shit, this is the most deep and thoughtful thing I’ve ever read, this author is a genius.” But of course this praise and validation never materialized, because barely anyone read my stuff, and those who did were more interested in the video game aspects than the philosophical, societal aspects, so I began to resent the audience that I had cultivated, seeing them as shallow and vapid, only seeming to care about playing video games instead of thinking about video games. So I decided, hey, you know what, what if I make a writing platform, position myself as some sort of writing authority figure, and then, by using this facade of “I’m just a passionate writer who wants to provide you the chance of hosting your own blog wherein you can say whatever you want without fear of being banned,” I would maybe attract the sort of high-minded audience that would appreciate my stuff. I’m not sure if I was consciously thinking about it like this at the time, but using the forty-twenty power of hindsight, this was certainly what was going on. Ego, ego, ego. I wanted to be perceived as a cool writer. I thought my writing was incredible, and I believed that if people just read it, I would become this sort of online writing folk hero of sorts. In short, I was desperate for attention.
Probably needless to say, but this whole scheme did not provide the attention I craved, mostly because my writing wasn’t actually very good, but also because, by advertising my new blogging platform as a sort of haven for free-speech absolutists, I had once again attracted an audience that I immediately grew to resent. Because upon advertising my platform on Mastodon, a defederated social media network of which I no longer have a profile, the first person who reached out to me was this one guy who wrote erotic anime-inspired fiction that almost exclusively featured unrealistically well-endowed chubby women who battled and performed sexual acts on each other, because his characters were all like mixed-martial artists or something, and in all of this guy’s stories, the women vocally expressed hatred for one another but always had this sort of repressed sexual attraction bubbling underneath the surface, so they’d be in a fighting arena for whatever reason and they’d start off all like, “Do you think you’re better than me? I hate your fucking guts, you nasty tramp. I’m the best fighter in the world.” But by the end of the story, they’d be rolling around completely nude in the middle of the arena, making out and fondling each other or whatever. This is how all the guy’s stories went.
This author’s work was inherently offensive to me because he very obviously treated women as mere sexual objects, so I didn’t want this guy to create a blog on my platform, but I had advertised the platform as a sort of free-speech haven where anyone could post anything, so from the very start of this whole attention-seeking endeavor, I was faced with a sort of ethical dilemma. Am I really in support of absolute freedom of expression if I’m unwilling to allow this misogynist objectifier of women to post his nasty smut trash on my blogging platform? I felt sort of ethically committed to the bit, so to speak, in that I had advertised the platform as a free-speech platform, and but what would it look like if I suddenly told this guy that actually no, you can’t post on my platform because your writing is disgusting and offensive to me?
In hindsight, this was an egotistical concern on my part, because I was more worried about how people would perceive my shifting stances on the free-speech thing than I was about actually following my own moral, ethical gut code, which told me that by no means should I allow this guy’s awful smut garbage on my platform. But I ended up caving to my ego and letting this guy create his smut blog, because I didn't want to make an ethical 180 on the free-speech thing I had originally committed to, out of fear of being perceived as some sort of hypocritical phony.
As of today, there are like ten users, not counting myself, on howdoyouspell.cool, nine of whom only posted a few entries before vanishing without a trace, but this guy, this misogynist objectifier of women, has stuck around. In fact, I believe he just posted something last week, another chapter in his Beat, Prey, Love series, the title of which follows the annoying format of all his other titles, that being taking an existing movie title and altering it somewhat to vaguely suggest something erotic going on, which is a play-on-words trend that makes my eyes roll into the back of my head even when not used in a sexualized context, as it's never as clever as the author likes to think it is, and it's frankly low-effort and offensively unoriginal.
The smut author has been consistently posting his drivel on howdoyouspell.cool for like a year now, and considering I had stopped posting to the platform several months ago, that makes this one nasty guy the sole contributor to the site. So ultimately, at this point, I don’t feel too bad about pulling the plug on the whole platform. In fact, I might even do a villainous little laugh when this guy sends me a very sternly worded email after he attempts to log in only to find his disgusting porn writing completely wiped from the internet because his blog no longer exists.
So yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about the death of howdoyouspell.cool, considering the platform was born primarily out of a desire to satisfy my own ego, and it really only attracted one very nasty guy. For one, I don’t want to provide a platform for smut, and for two, I’m kind of through trying so hard to be cool. I want to be the death of cool. I'm done pursuing projects driven solely by my own ego, because my desire to be perceived as distinguished and interesting and cool has only produced within me feelings of anxiety and phonyism.
But is this truly all that my ego has produced?
A couple of months ago, I read this novel by J.D. Salinger titled Franny and Zooey, which is sort of like a Socratic dialogue between two siblings. Franny is a young actress attending college who is fed up with the ego-fueled intellectual phoniness of her peers and has become obsessed with shedding her own ego through the practice of a repetitive mental prayer she learned by reading an old religious text. Franny is also the source of the quote at the beginning of this journal entry. Zooey, Franny’s brother, disagrees with Franny that ego is the root of all her problems. At one point, about a hundred and sixty pages in, Zooey says something that kind of opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe ego isn’t such a bad thing. He said,
“What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away?”
Much like the creation of howdoyouspell.cool, my entire body of writing has been largely the product of my own ego, which on the surface is a fact that seems to taint the writing, but does it really? Looking back at everything I’ve written, even though much of it is hot garbage, I’m proud of some of it and grateful to have written it all. Even the writing I now think is hot garbage, I don’t regret having written it, because it helped me become a better writer and led to work that I feel has real, meaningful value, however hard that is to actually quantify.
So the whole thing has me thinking about ego in a deeper way, like, is ego really all that bad? It seems to me that most human behavior could probably be tied back to ego in some way. I mean, even a super generous person who donates to charities probably gets some sort of personal satisfaction from others perceiving them as a charitable person, which is a sort of ego-stroke, in a way. But is that a bad thing? I mean, even if that’s the case, that the charitable person is driven by ego, does the motive even matter at that point? The charity is still happening, regardless of whether the ego was involved or not. Isn’t the charitable person’s ego producing good outcomes in this hypothetical situation? And if we concede that this egotism does indeed produce good outcomes sometimes, then is ego really all that bad?
Like Franny, maybe I've been looking at ego the wrong way. Perhaps ego is more like this neutral power within us all, this driving force that is neither good nor bad, and what really matters is how we choose to use our egos and the outcomes of those ego-driven choices.
A sort of like Ego-Driven Consequentialism or something.
