Stop Idolizing the "Cool Girl"

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1:48body um my life right now is all about finding pants that fit and you know as pregnancy is going along I don't I refuse to just wear the same stretchy pants like I don't want to be that girl that's like same outfit every single time so we're trying to make the bump look cute and wear the occasional cute outfit obviously that does not pertain to today today I could barely get it together um but when I tell you I am searching for cute pregnancy outfits because the minute here's the thing the minute I find pants I buy two sizes up um a lot of cute pants though do have a button and so I can wear them for about two weeks and then I sadly just outgrow them and so the strategy is constantly shifting but I will say I think I'm starting to get a hang of how to dress for the bump I am taking pride in some of my outfits but it is you know it's wild changes guys but I am having fun with it and I am enjoying myself what else is going on in my life right now I oh I was at my brother-in-law's house the other night with our whole family for his birthday and And all of my nieces and nephews were there.

3:10And it was so cute explaining to them that there is a baby in my belly and that they're going to have a cousin, aka a new friend coming soon. And my little nephew is like staring at my stomach incessantly with just like pure curiosity and excitement and asking like, what's the name going to be? And asking if like if he is allowed to touch my belly. it's all very cute um and so yeah i anyways life is lifing and all is pretty good

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5:17You won't find anywhere else. The ones popping up in every Get Ready With Me. Think summery fragrances like Kaoli, Eden, Plush Pair 23, Eau de Parfum, Next Level Makeup, the skincare that keeps you glowing like it's your full-time job. Shop the newest, hottest beauty only at Sephora. But enough about me. So I was thinking about something the other day when I was driving home from work. I feel like sometimes when I come home from work, it's either like I just fully listen to music or a podcast or I drive in silence. And I don't know why, but recently, you guys, I have nothing I wanna listen to, so I'm just driving in silence.

5:58And that silence has allowed me to really think a lot with my thoughts in my commute home. That is one of the positives I would say of like not working from home. It's like I do kind of like my commute because I'm like let's get inside this dome Alex. Like what's going on sweetie? Let's have a little therapy session together. And then what ended up happening was I kind of came up with a topic that I wanted to just quickly address with the daddy gang. Something I was thinking about is like why is it so cool to act like you don't care why is it so cool to act like you didn't even try it just happened like I think there is this huge lie I feel like we are all collectively participating in right now which is essentially the myth of effortlessness like why the fuck is it suddenly I guess and maybe it's not suddenly but like it's it feels like people think it's cool to act like you don't care when did trying become embarrassing or, you know, to try hard.

7:00Like if you go on social media, everything is curated to look like it just happened. Like you look at the cooking videos and, you know, these creators throw like three random ingredients into a pan. They snap their fingers and then it's like a Michelin star meal. And also their kitchen looks pristine and so clean, easy, breezy, beautiful, delicious. And what's obvious, what they do not show you is the three hours of prep that went into that food and the camera angles and the sink that is full of crusty dishes. And the fact that, you know, they probably burned the first batch, you know, we didn't get to see that part.

7:40Or maybe it actually ended up tasting like shit, but we just see the super quick, easy couple step meal to make after work. And that is annoying. Even the fitness videos, they look perfect. They're sucking in. The lighting is hitting perfectly. They don't show the gasping for air in between takes. I just, I know this isn't a new concept. I just feel like it's like shouting in my face recently. Like we're just constantly consuming content that says, look how amazing my life is. And oh, by the way, I barely even tried. Like, look how I barely even, like, I barely put effort into this. Look how easy this was for me.

8:22And I don't know. I just feel exhausted from it. It's toxic and it's just a filtered lie. And this isn't just obviously social media. It's definitely heightened there. But I feel like this goes back. It actually reminded me. It's almost like going back to childhood. Stay with me, okay? You're like, Alex, we don't always have to take it back to childhood. Yeah, we do. hold on. Do you guys remember the kid in school who would sit down for an exam, ace it and be like, oh my God, I didn't even study. For me, the kid was Connor. And I was like, Connor. And then meanwhile, you're up. You stayed up till like 2am, flashcards everywhere, sweating through your t-shirt on your way to the test.

9:05And maybe, maybe by the grace of God, you got a B plus. Maybe. Honestly, probably a B. Maybe even a C. Okay. And I was reflecting back on my drive home thinking about like whoa why did we grow up feeling embarrassed for being the person who studied why did we validate the person who bragged about doing the bare minimum and still had some success or the same level of success as the person who actually tried I feel like to some degree we have carried that exact same energy straight into our adult lives and yes most visibly onto social media. And then I couldn't help but think we've also carried it into modern dating for all my single girlies out there.

9:53This one's for you. I want to take accountability. Trust me. I was the number one culprit. I would say don't call her daddy. And it's not that I actually don't agree with it because it does work, but it was like, pretend you don't care. It looks so much cooler. I've literally said it before. The person who cares least in the relationship holds all the power. And it sucks because that shouldn't be the case, but somehow it is. In dating, we can get so caught up in playing these psychological games where whoever takes longer to text back wins. And if you show excitement, you're desperate. And if you plan a nice date, oh my God, well, you should just end it all.

10:35You're just doing way too much. so everyone then walks around wearing this like armor of like yeah we're just hanging out but like whatever I don't really care and it's a complete defense mechanism because if you act like you don't care then if it fails you don't have to face the humiliation of the rejection you can end up just saying like well I wasn't even trying anyways but as I've gotten older I've realized it is a very miserable way to live your life. Like, yes, without a doubt in dating, it does work temporarily. The guy may find you more interesting and elusive and confusing and distant.

11:13So it makes him want you more because the chase is so fun. Who doesn't love the fucking chase? But then in the end, you just played a game pretending to be something that you're not all to win the guy that now doesn't even really know who you are. And then to some degree, you have to keep up this facade that is by no means enjoyable or fulfilling. And I, listen, I have always, always said when it comes to dating, it is so important that you know your audience and you know what your end goal is. If I was watching this podcast and I was in college, I would be like, all I'm taking from this Alex is like, play the game, ignore him, make him want me.

11:52Because that is so applicable and relatable to your life in that moment. And And like, if you were just trying to get your friends invited by the hot athlete to the party, oh my God, without a doubt, honey, you should act away. You should be so cool. You should so act like you don't care. Get in there. It definitely works every time. But I do think it's important to note because I do think as the daddy gang, we are all, you know, evolving and we're growing. And I have some daddy gang that are older with me. Okay. It's not all just high school and college people watching this. even though I know you're here.

12:29So that's why I'm also saying like, girl, if you wanna get invited to the party, oh, leave him on red, then text him back the next day. Like make it so confusing for sure. But it is a very temporary solve. And when you are at a young point in your life, a temporary solve is the perfect solve because nothing really is actually, you want it to last. Like I don't actually fucking like the frat boy, but I wanna go to Kifi tonight. Like, hello? and so this temporary solve I just think you need to be like aware of because eventually you do need to live your life and most of us care about our life and our happiness obviously and the short term wins depending where you're at in your life and the circumstances when it does become all encompassing and it becomes a part of your life in this like really major way that's in my opinion when you actually start to lose because then you are just being disingenuous to a degree that is beyond unfulfilling.

13:29I feel like my college self would like slap me in the face right now. I'm like, shut up. I don't want to hear that. So fair, Alex, keep doing what you're doing. Lock in those extensions, put the self tanner on, put the fake eyelashes on and do your fucking thing, girl. But I'm just at a different place in my life, right? So that is not as applicable to me anymore. Me being cool and elusive and like doing all that, it doesn't, it's not helping me at all. I'm just I would just get annoyed and be like, why am I doing this? Like, I don't need to go to Chi-Fi tonight. I don't want to go hook up with the frat bro.

13:59Like, huh? Like, he's my husband and I want him to understand what I'm directly fucking saying to him. So it's circumstantial. Also, let's say you are that person who actually does just have things fall in their lap. Like, you win the game, you get the guy, you get the job, and you don't really have to lift a finger for certain things in your life. Totally great. to some degree. But what skills did you build? What resilience do you have? To some capacity, someone could argue nothing, zero. The person who tries, who sometimes fails, who gets their heart broken, who burns the dinner, who has to rewrite the resume five times, that person is inevitably building character.

14:46And I'm not saying, again, if you are someone where like something comes easy to you, like bitch, just let it go. But if everything in life is just like, I didn't really try to just have a sense of that. Like, okay. That's, well, that's also no fucking fun. Right? I don't know. I think when you focus entirely on making the outcome look effortless, because most of the time it is, you are essentially completely bypassing the actual point of life, which is the messy, uncomfortable, beautiful process of learning and growing. And so I think we need to stop glamorizing these people online and in life who are pretending it was just so easy and great if it actually was for them.

15:27But life isn't easy. So maybe the one thing that they're showing online, maybe it was actually easy for them. But you aren't seeing the other 10 things that they really struggled with. And I think it's important to talk about the psychological toll of all of this shit. because it is one thing to look at an effortless video and think, okay, that is objectively fake. It's a whole other thing. When you are lying in bed at 11 p.m., you are scrolling and you see someone launching a business or meal prepping for the entire month or doing a 5 a.m. workout routine and they look flawless, not a drop of sweat, no eye bags, just pure productivity.

16:12What does that do to our brains? It makes us feel like absolute fucking garbage. We look at them and we think, wait, why am I struggling so hard just to just do the bare minimum? You feel like a failure because your real life has friction. Your house is messy when you cook. You look like a drowned rat after you worked out. You actually have to cry sometimes when you are stressed about your career. You're not just girl bossing so fucking close to the sun 24-7. And so when other people make productivity look easy, not just possible but legit like easy work, it weaponizes their success against your self-esteem.

16:56It makes you feel like you missed the memo on how to be a human being who can just do it all and then some little sprinkle, boom. and so inevitably we start thinking that because it's hard for us we must be doing something wrong or we're just lazy pieces of shit why can't I get it together how are they doing that and I'll tell you why because you were at work all day and you had a hard day and then you came home or you were at home working hard all day and then work stopped and work could have been being a mother or work could have been a full-time job and then you had to feed yourself or you had to feed your family.

17:34And the last thing you want to do is cook an aesthetic meal. You just want something to literally feed your body and your hunger. You don't have time to put on the aesthetic cute workout outfit. Okay. You're throwing on your ripped college old t-shirt and some shorts with a couple holes in them. And you are just proud that you made it to the goddamn gym. And a lot of times maybe you're not making it to the gym because of the real day you had the emphasis on the real day. And yeah, it needs to end with maybe decompression on the couch and not the perfect meal and the workout and the matching fucking set that goes with it.

18:16You want to eat your snacks, you want to watch your favorite TV show, and you want to black out the hard day that you just had. That is closer to real life than almost anything. I also think, and I don't know this could be a stretch but I do think that this topic kind of ties into the mythical exhausting archetype of the cool girl the cool girl is just like the ultimate embodiment of effortlessness right she's hot but she obviously doesn't try that hard to wear too much makeup she's successful but she never talks about working and if she does like oh just happened easily. And by making it all look so effortless, she's never been busier.

18:57She is grinding it out. And again, like cool, great, but please can we not forget how much effort is going into the effortless image we are all consuming?

19:11Guys, I'm telling you, it was a really productive drive. Like I was like, boom, because I was like, I need to hear this. So then I was like, I think the daddy gang needs to hear this. So here's my opinion. Cause now it's like, okay, wait, so what do we do? My opinion, what is actually cool? What is genuinely attractive is trying and is evolving. And that can be so messy and unsexy and unglamorous and really hard and really exhausting, but it is so much cooler to meet someone who says, yeah, I am trying this new thing. And honestly, I kind of suck at it right now. Or like, it's really hard and I'm working through it, but I'm figuring it out.

19:47That takes a secure ego. That is someone I personally want to follow and learn from and be friends with. And so the next time you see someone making life look so effortless and you start to feel that wave of shame that we feel every time we open our phones and we see the perfect aesthetic and all the 10-step program, I want you to actually just flip the script. Just remind yourself that you are living in the real world. You are doing the heavy lifting. You are experiencing trial and error and you are actually changing and growing. You are not living to quickly capture something on your phone for everyone else to give you validation over.

20:27How do you feel about yourself? If you were never able to open the internet again, if you were never able to post a video again, how would you feel about yourself? Do you feel good? Are you happy with your life? that's all that fucking matters so I also think keeping in mind and maybe this is just like me getting older grandma Cooper coming through but this is not the shit that at 80 years old we are going to be showing our grandchildren or our friends and our families like guys look at this picture I took and like look how aesthetic my shoes were in this photo and it so gave cool girl oh my God, look at that.

21:06No. It will be the stories about life and living and failing and the struggles you overcame. When you think about the things you are proudest of achieving in your life so far, did they come from an effortless moment or did they come from a time where you worked your fucking ass off or you survived something really hard and now you get to look back and be so proud of yourself for all of the hard work you put in because you tried and you care and that is the least embarrassing thing I truly think you own it be proud of it be proud of who you are for putting yourself out there be proud of your life that is fucking cool and I think that makes you way more fucking interesting so again this isn't to like just shit on the internet but it is to put in perspective for ourselves of like what we are consuming is potentially causing us more anxiety and more harm than good.

22:02And you need to be able to differentiate your real life from just like something that you think maybe scrolling is going to alleviate your stress from the day. And it's actually only going to make you so much more stressed. And so I think that we have to force ourselves to wake up because like I said, when we're 80, we're going to look back and be like, fuck, I spent so much fucking time on that thing. I'm like, what? And so to make sure we're curating our pages of like people we actually feel like we get uplifted from and storytellers and creators. Again, I get it. We're not going to just fucking throw our phones into the ocean.

22:38And if you are that person, babe, honestly, so much power to you. But there is a line that I think we can start to straddle between being so more aware of like calling it what the fuck it is. Social media and all of it creates addiction. Most of us are living and breathing with an addiction. And it is not our fault. This has been a, these are billion, trillion dollar companies and an industry that is profiting off of this. And so I think when you, then when you zoom in to your life and you're sitting at home and you're miserable after work and you're just feeling like fuck my day was so hard my boss was an asshole I like I'm not making the amount that I want at my job or my co-workers are being assholes or am I at the right position and oh by the way I have to now go deal with my family this weekend and I'm so stressed about that we feel and I do believe in the beginning days of social media this was the truth we feel like Like the internet will actually bring us reprieve and it will cause us to feel so much relief because it will take us out of our day-to-day, just like sometimes we feel when we watch a movie or we read a book, but that is so different.

23:58It is endless, it is comparison, and you are watching essentially a version of your life just looking 10 times fucking better because of the curation, because of the people behind these machines. And so we have to try to remember that. And that's, I don't know. I know this is such a heavy, frustrating topic because then it feels like, and then we're gonna get in bed tonight and we're just gonna keep scrolling. But I do think if you are someone who is struggling with your mental health, if you are struggling with comparison, if you are struggling with jealousy, if you are struggling with self-worth, if you are struggling with not feeling great about where you're at in your career, your personal life, your financial life, any of it, the internet is only gonna make you feel worse about it.

24:41And so you really need to try to find a will and a way to disengage to some degree. Like I will say, so I deleted TikTok off of my phone for almost a month. And I re-uploaded it because I wanted to post these two videos that I was posting on Instagram. I wanted to post them there for work. And I posted them for work. And then I went to my for you page and I was like, I can handle this. Like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna. And then 30 minutes goes by. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, I can't handle this. And I'm telling you guys my dopamine levels. Like I, I was immediately more triggered in a bad mood.

25:29Things I was seeing, I was just like, oh, like, I don't like this. I don't like the way I'm feeling. And there was such a happiness. I realized I had been feeling from not engaging in that world. And I will say even TikTok versus Instagram, like for me, like TikTok, I feel like started as this really positive app. And now it's just like all these like really, um, like the comment sections are so hateful. I'll see a girl making a video about food and I'm like, really guys, I'm like trying to fucking cook. Okay. I like, I don't want to talk about it, but I'm like trying to cook and I've been trying to cook and I'm like getting into these so many reps to be.

26:08I saw this woman who made this like dumpling thing. Oh my God, you guys, it looks so good. It's like an easier way to make dumplings and I fucking love dumplings. Then I go to the comment section and I'm appalled. People are commenting on her shirt and her hair and her outfit and telling her that she's a fucking hypocrite because the last time that she had said that she didn't really like using soy sauce and she was more of a whatever sauce. And I'm like, oh my God, I need to get out of here. I literally need to get off the internet. Like I'm so scared. I'm so scared by these comment sections.

26:34It's so terrifying out there seeing this poor girl trying to make dumplings. And then all of a sudden she's getting crucified because like people are saying her hair looks electrocuted and they're saying that she is like, what? And I was like, I need to delete the app again. And so I was like, I'm just going to re-upload it every time I want to upload a video and then I'm removing it from my phone. And I have been reading, I've been rereading Throne of Glass. Oh my God, there's so many books in the series, which also like, pro tip, but like if you're really trying to get off of social media, find a series because that I'm just like in my series right now, I'm loving it.

27:15There's so many books in that series and I am like a kid in a candy store. Every night I get in bed, I don't scroll on social media and I'm just reading. And I'm not saying that I'm 100 % healed from all of the addiction that I too have in my veins, but I am trying to actively, I said this to my therapist, I would consider myself a smart person. And so shame on me if I have a situation in front of me that is essentially my own version of a study. When I am on TikTok and I am scrolling for longer than a minute, my mental health is not as positive as it was before I opened the app. That is a fact.

28:11When I spend more than a minute to an hour reading books, my mental health is five times better because I feel inspired and I feel intellectually stimulated and I feel like I'm in this brilliant world building that this author created for me and I'm vocabulary wise expanding my palate like all of this and so I would be an idiot then right if I then chose at night to pick up my phone and do the thing that makes me feel like shit rather than going for the book right so why is it so fucking hard why is it so hard then because it's not just the phone it is the social pressure that we feel it is so hard to feel like you are not in it it's so hard to feel like also you want it you have to put way more fucking effort into reading you you can be so brain dead when you are scrolling on social media but somehow you're brain dead so you're getting nothing out of it and although we say like no I got some for sure I've learned like a couple things off social media but the negative outweighs the positives right and so it's like how are we going to force ourselves to only engage with things that make us happy damn it's a cruel world out there daddy gang