This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

You are free to:

  • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

  • Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Modern Daoism: Only by Necessity Do You Get to Look Cool

(And Yes, Explaining This Is Already Suspicious)

Modern Daoism: only by necessity do you get to look cool.

You look cool only as a side-effect of not falling apart in a structurally honest way.

The joke:

The more we talk about this, the more it tries to turn into a brand.
The moment it becomes a brand, it stops being true.

File that under “problems we notice and then post about anyway.”

1. Wu Wei, Reloaded (Now with Algorithms)

Classical Daoism: wu wei – non-forcing.

  • Don’t force the river.
  • Act in line with the Tao.
  • Let form emerge from function.

Modern Daoism has to deal with:

  • feeds,
  • followers,
  • parasocial audiences,
  • and “authenticity” being a monetizable aesthetic.

So the update:

Don’t chase cool.
Don’t chase “relatable.”
Don’t chase “raw.”
Just do what your life actually demands.
Whatever looks good afterward is none of your business.

Necessary = “I will break if I don’t do this.”
Everything else is theater.

2. Performance Cool vs Survival Cool

There are two main species of “cool” now.

Performance Cool

  • Extremely aware of itself.
  • Lives on Reels, TikTok, and in LinkedIn humblebrags.
  • “Mindfulness journey,” “grindset,” “aesthetic healing arc.”
  • Always a half-step away from a course launch.

This cool is fragile.
It needs constant audience feedback to feel real.

Survival Cool

Totally different animal:

  • You slept like trash, but you still did the one thing that keeps you sane.
  • You built exactly the tools you needed to not relapse, not explode, not disappear.
  • You dropped habits, people, and identities that were killing you, even if they looked good from the outside.

From inside this life, you don’t feel cool. You feel:

“Barely held together, but honestly.”

From the outside, people see:

  • coherence,
  • seriousness,
  • lack of bullshit,

and they call it “cool” or “mysterious” or “disciplined.”

They’re just seeing the residue of necessity.

3. The Irony Trap: Explaining the Dao for Clout

Here’s the trap this piece is literally sitting in:

  1. You notice that real cool = unperformative necessity.
  2. You explain it clearly.
  3. The explanation itself becomes a performance object:
    • something to quote,
    • something to signal with,
    • something to build identity around.

“Modern Daoism: only by necessity do you get to look cool” is exactly the sort of sentence that wants to turn into:

  • a t-shirt,
  • a pinned tweet,
  • a “10 rules for realness” carousel.

And the second it does that, the logic flips:

  • People start performing necessity (“look how minimal / monk-like / unbothered I am”),
  • which is just a new layer of costume.

So yeah, there’s a built-in self-destruct:

The more energy you spend trying to show you’re not trying,
the more obviously you are trying.

Modern Daoism has to include that irony as part of the rule.

4. How to Not Overthink It (While Overthinking It)

Given the irony, what’s left?

Very small protocol:

  1. Start from necessity, not narrative.
    Ask: “What do I have to do today to not regress or break?”
    That might be:
    • take meds,
    • write 500 words,
    • create quite literally anything with some ounce of personal authenticity,
    • do 10 minutes of breathing,
    • answer a single email.
  2. Do that as quietly as possible.
    Feeling safe without witnesses does not equal “guilty by default.”
  3. Let aesthetics accumulate by accident.
    The routines, clothes, tools, and phrases that survive multiple bad weeks?
    That’s your style.
  4. Treat explanations as debug logs,
    • You’re documenting a pattern for yourself and a few others.
    • You’re not founding a new brand of “realness.”

If someone turns it into a brand later, that’s on them. And their children.

And their children’s children.
And their children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children…

5. Math Version (Very Short)

Let:

  • N = what’s necessary for you not to break.
  • P = what looks performatively good.
  • C = perceived “cool.”

Modern Daoism says:

  • Optimize N.
  • Let C = f(N) as a side-effect.
  • Treat energy spent optimizing P as noise or drag.

If you accidentally become an aesthetic in someone else’s head, fine.
Just don’t start living for that function.

6. The Punchline (and Its Built-In Joke)

So:

Modern Daoism: only by necessity do you get to look cool.

And:

Explaining this in public is already slightly uncool.

That’s okay.

We’re not here to win the aesthetics game.
We’re here to survive honestly enough that, if any style leaks out of that process, it’s at least anchored to something real.

If that costs us a few cool points?

At least we’re still in the game, no?
-BWU