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greatest reward of becoming successful, making an incompetent cool person work late.

THE PITIFUL PLOY OF THE BAD BOY
    For most of us, high school is the first site for the battle between good and evil. Between the stable and the shallow. Between cool and uncool.
    I’m not a parent (unless you count the dolls I made from coconut and twine and named after members of One Direction), but I have often witnessed firsthand how cool operates on kids and forces them to do things that purposely mess with their internal instruction manual. Trying to be cool, as a goal, forces you to ignore any lessons ingrained by the people who made you. It takes a special, smart kid to resist and endure the torment that follows when you kick the cool to the curb.
    The cool hate nothing more than when a genuinely original thinker rejects them. The cool need recruits to survive. Teens that reject them with a smile on their face destroy the most destructive movement in modern civilization. Rejecting cool, these brave kids help build the muscles of their ego and self-esteem that will be invaluable when they hit the real world. And when—inevitably—the real world hits them.
    I have a friend who has two kids, both on the front lines of cool. One is seventeen, the other nineteen. Together that’s thirty-six, or around the average age of a miserable divorcée.
    Every day, teens weaker than these two succumb to the power of cool. They engage in behavior that they might otherwise find silly and destructive. Cool is a weapon created by creeps to obliterate the morals that good parents instill in their children.
    My friend Tom and his wife have done a bang-up job raising their kids, but even I know that that isn’t enough. Good parenting, from my perspective, is like building a three-foot retaining wall against a four-foot wave. The kids have to make up that extra foot. That wave wants to drag them into an undertow where sound judgment is suspended, where the valueless, uncaring, and ultimately nihilistic cool reigns. In other words, where the Kardashians are royalty.
    I’m talking about prom night.
    Back in April, I was out west, visiting my feisty mother. (She’s eighty-eight and ornery.) Sitting in our backyard, Tom’s daughter, a senior in high school, was asked by her mom about the prom. “I’m not going,” she responded, without any emotion. This came to her dad and mom as a shock, but the daughter, Mary, could have been describing a lost scrunchie. She’d already moved on. Because she’s smart.
    But wait: She had a cute boyfriend! She had picked out a dress! She was going to get her nails done! (All twenty-two!) Her mother asks her about her boyfriend, and she says, “He’s not my boyfriend anymore.” Then she started texting (a habit that has now replaced breathing for anyone under twenty-five).
    We didn’t press her for details, but I realized that I was witnessing a banal routine that plays out every year around the prom. It goes like this:
     Girl gets asked to prom by guy, who may or may not be her boyfriend at the time. He’s probably a year or two older. If the gap is wider, look into it: He may be her teacher.
     Boy sees prom as a “milestone”—an opportunity to take whatever you call a high school relationship to the next level. I remember this well, even at forty-eight years old. The prom was all about getting booze and a hotel room off the highway and getting lucky. It’s weird to observe this play out with your friend’s kid. You want her to do the right thing, even if thirty years ago you were rooting for the wrong thing.
     The girl is forced to make a choice: go along with his plan, or else lose out on this special night and spend that evening surfing the Web for cat videos, listening to Justin Bieber, and eating Häagen-Dazs in her jammies. (Which I recommend, by the way—always relaxes me after doing
O’Reilly
).
    Boy applies pressure to girl as the prom approaches. The big day is the big payoff for her—and