I have never really told anyone how I feel about clouds. It's cliched, and mainstream and so embarrassing but I love the sky. I love that this arch that ties us all together is the constant that never looks the same from two different places or at two different times. I love how I can stare at it for hours and never figure out which combination of colors could capture it perfectly and knowing I don't have the skill to frame these eternally shifting and merging hues anyway. Whether it's the deep dark Ethiopian sky that makes me feel like I have to concentrate on gravity or the indecisive sky of late evenings that races to catch up with my mood, it feels so enormously pretentious that I love something so normal, so much. And yet it's a meaningless love, because I can love the sky as passionately as I wish but I can never hold, never have it, never be a part of it. It's admiration without possession, and it is frustrating and exhilarating.

It's also a secret.

Because you can't posses the sky, you can't make it yours. You can't prevent other people for Instagramming #skyporn, even though it feels like exclusivity would make it purer and better. We all know we should share beauty, but there's something about great things that makes you want to show everyone but still say, 'You can admire this but you can't have it because it's mine. If I didn't create it, I found it, and if it's always been there, I discovered it and frankly, you didn't work hard enough for it.' And obviously it's wrong and it's childish, but it's true nevertheless. So I'm ashamed to say I like the sky because I think every silly fan fiction that writes of characters watching the sunset has sullied the idea of what it means. But I shouldn't be, because universal acknowledgement of a things' beauty doesn't make it better, but it also doesn't make it worse. I think I struggle with that: trying to justify what I like and what brings me joy, and how that makes me different from everybody else. And I don't think it should.

See popular doesn't mean best (as every teen movie will tell you). But it also doesn't mean worst. We're rebelling so constitutionally against anything that identifies as a part of society that we're forgetting we are society. Society seems like this intangible force personified in your very tangible and very preppy neighbor but like the sky, it also includes you, whether you acknowledge the fact or not. I think we've corrupted the message of embracing all that's different so much that we can't realize that a million quotes floating on the internet don't make John Green more profound, but they don't erode the meaning of his words either. And it's okay to want to be a part of something and there's no need to try so hard to be different. I'm not advocating for conformity, because I know that there are still people in the world who strive to be accepted for their differences. But that's not the culture we're promoting.

This new found obsession with being a hipster is less about standing outside the mainstream, and more about staying ahead of the curve. It's that distinction that makes it so dangerous; we aren't preaching acceptance, we're trying to be trendsetters. It's not about being radically different because that can be uncomfortable and unsettling; it's about being quirky in ways that are accepted and not at all radically different. Maybe trying to rebel against the accepted is a step forward but it seems like this obsession with unique and out of the box has reached a grotesque level. It's hypocritical how hard we try to not be 'ordinary' and how that makes us so much more human than any other endeavor.

So I don't care if Ayn Rand says otherwise, and I don't care that even now my every instinct is telling me to include a paragraph on my own eclectic taste despite liking pop culture. I understand that subscribing to popular opinions can be a lot like selling your soul, but in those few moments where something popular truly does mean something to you, don't fight it for the sake of some fantasy of being an outlier. We shouldn't forget that the best part of enjoying something can often be the moment where it helps us connect to something larger than life, and craving that connection is so human. We bash teenagers for having obsessive passions and we mock people who lose themselves to something they love, but is this really the actions worth mocking? To me it really seems like the idea of 'ironic detachment' as the only way of being cool is so sad because that's such a terribly inconclusive way to live life! I may be a teenager and Ed Sheeran may be pulling my heart strings with the same note as that of a million others, but that doesn't mean the truth I found in it is any less of a truth. The Arctic Monkeys and Tumblr may be fashion statements of teenage angst in the new age where sadness is the new rage, but nobody should be shamed for what they love, especially because someone else loves it.