Whenever I am worried about being "cool," I am caught up in the capitalist configuration of social relations and turning my consumption, my efforts to sustain and "reproduce" myself, and even my efforts to concretize and express my identity into labor on capitalism's terms. I am regarding social relations as intrinsically competitive with the reward being not reciprocation in the abstract but validation as a zero-sum thing -- I win the exchange when I am seen as cool relative to someone else, who is less cool. And the cool I have produced in my person, through my mediation of my everyday existence, will extend the tyranny of cool over social life that much further (I've enhanced the "value" of other commodities in symbolic terms, in terms of their coolness); in exchange I get to feel a little more secure in my status. I get to feel a little better about myself by feeling better than someone else.