“You're so afraid of being somebody's foolNot walkin' tough, baby, not walkin' coolYou walk cool, but darlin', can you walk the lineAnd face the ties that bind….Now you can't break the ties that bind.”Bruce Springsteen, “The Ties That Bind”These lyrics from Bruce Springsteen describe the aching ambivalence that many people feel about romantic relationships. To me, they also describe how many people feel about finding their life purpose. On the one hand, they’re looking for the ties that bind—the commitments that will define them and give their life direction, the ones that they can’t break away from because to do so would be to break with themselves. On the other hand, they can’t break the ties that bind them to whatever keeps them from finding their life purpose. As Springsteen describes so eloquently, they can’t break the tie to their fear. Sometimes, as I discussed in my recent blog posts, the fear is fear of humiliation, “of being somebody’s fool”. But sometimes the fear is a fear of not being cool enough.In my last post, I talked about how you may have come to feel that there is something wrong with you,that you are somehow “bad” and need to fix yourself before you can find your life purpose. As I said in that post, there are many ways that people can feel bad about themselves. Often, these have to do with very specific qualities that, they believe, make them inadequate. They’re too fat. They’re not good looking enough. They’re not successful enough.However, there is another way of feeling bad that, in my experience, is just as common as the belief that some specific quality they have or lack makes them bad. This is the belief that what’s most wrong with them is their own feelings.This belief can take many forms. Among people in their 20’s and 30’s, one of the main forms it takes is the belief that their feelings mean they’re not “cool”.I once worked with a man who really wanted to be an English professor.* Instead, he worked in financial services. When we first started talking about his career choice, he explained that the money in business was simply too good to walk away from. He had fully intended to go back to graduate school once he felt he had made enough money to feel financially secure. But, as his thirties began to turn into his forties, he felt increasingly that it was too late to make this change—that he had become too accustomed to the money and the lifestyle to give them up.The more we discussed his choices, however, the more it became clear that there was another fear in the room and that this fear was at least as powerful as the fear of taking a pay cut. “Dan”, as I’ll call him, had loved books and reading from the time he was in elementary school. He was also good looking and a good athlete. When he started to be included in the activities of the “cool” kids, he came to feel that showing that he cared about reading and intellectual pursuits in general could rapidly banish him to the ranks of the uncool. He started to pretend that he didn’t care. He continued to do well in school but he no longer felt or displayed the passion for learning that he had had when he was younger.When Dan went to college, he allowed himself to major in English and to recover his passion for literature. However, as he neared graduation, he applied for jobs on Wall Street instead of to graduate school. Consciously, he feared that he would never get an acacemic job. But unconsciously, we discovered, his deeper fear was that being a professor would consign him to the ranks of the permanently uncool.I don’t want to deny that there are realistic limitations to pursuing your life path. Sometimes people have to find a way of supporting themselves before they can turn their attention to what they really want to do. But I think it’s important to know when realistic concerns are keeping you from doing what you’d love to do and when you’re being driven by fear, including the fear of not being cool. In the end, our lives are poorer if we forsake the ties that bind.*I want to repeat here what I say on my home page: I would never write about an actual person I’ve worked with in these pages. Therapy relationships are confidential. These vignettes are meant to illustrate issues I’ve encountered in my work. They are not descriptions of specific people.