There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen
Jacob Collier, the multi-Grammy-winning composer known for turning entire audiences into human choirs, once described it as the best advice ever received. Don’t be cool, be warm. The world is full of people trying to be cool, but the world needs warm people.
It is a simple thought, yet it hit me in my core. For most of the past sixty years, “cool ” has been the currency we traded in. The 1960s counterculture took it and ran with it: detachment, irony, the unbothered posture, the sense that caring too visibly about anything was faintly embarrassing. That was the aesthetic of rebellion. Don’t let anything bother you. Keep on trucking. The 1970s, the generation I came of age in, was in full swing with the 60s migration off the beaten path. Dressing in original clothes, expanding music, stretching into the unconventional. Underlying it all, the 60s logic held. Be Cool- be hard to read and a little hard to reach; it was armor, disguised as style.
That armor made sense then. It pushed back against conformity, against the buttoned-up establishment that demanded compliance. But armor has a cost: distance. And somewhere in the last decade, that cost has started to outweigh the benefit.
We are now living through what public health officials have called a loneliness epidemic. The U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on it in 2023. The internet, once a novelty of connection, has become oversaturated with irony, curation, and performance to the point where audiences are visibly hungry for anything that reads as unfiltered or real. And now artificial intelligence can outperform, outproduce, and out-optimize almost any human skill you can name. What it can’t do, what it structurally lacks, is care about you. That gap is where warmth lives. And it is becoming the last differentiator we have left.
So maybe that’s the real shift underway; cool was a defense mechanism built for an age that demanded toughness. Warmth is what was depleted. Now, in an overstimulated, lonelier age, it is what is needed. Warmth is not a show of weakness or naivety. It is just people willing to be reachable.
The interesting question isn’t whether Collier’s “mentor” or whoever he heard the quote from was just being clever. It is whether we are brave enough to take it. Being cool costs nothing because it asks nothing of you. Being warm is a risk. It means someone can actually find you.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection.
~ Brené Brown
