Cool kids are not online

r/AmITheAssHole*

Aug 11, 2025

Dear friends,

An old friend left a comment under a Threads post complaining about recent visuals of a local fashion brand.

I took a screenshot and shot her a message.

“Remember the last time we bumped into each other was in front of its flagship store,” I wrote.

“OMG, you’re wrong. I saw you coming out of a kickboxing session sometimes after that,” she replied a couple minutes later.

“Are you in Hanoi at the moment? Let’s grab lunch,” she added.

We ended up at a bún mọc (meat ball vermicelli) stall hidden deep inside an alley near her office the next day. The friend, who I met the first time at a documentary making workshop when I just moved to Hanoi for college roughly 12 years ago, now works for a public financial institute after studying abroad. She is also a mom to a 10-month old baby – a super mom, indeed.

The majority of the conversation was not a reflection on the past and updates, although once in a while small details of her private life slipped into stories to remind us we are no longer at the tender age of 18.

I asked for her raw opinions of the country’s current financial state, whether my parents should keep their Degree 178 severance in cash and when it would be possible to permanently move back to my hometown regarding the upcoming North-South high speed railway project.

She showed me some indicators that I had never heard of before and made sense of several recent financial policy changes. Also, based on her experience of going into labor, I really need to have a checklist of non-negotiables for a life partner that will go through difficult events with me.

I was stepping out of the conversation overwhelmed and challenged. The friend’s perspectives are informed by the environment she works and lives within, which I find miles apart from mine.

In a hipster coffee shop looking over Trúc Bạch Lake, another friend kept lamenting about his recent realization that not every person he had met lately seemed to care about world affairs he had been obsessing with.

“Honey, not everyone has a New York Times subscription in their pocket or reaches the “genius” level on daily Spelling Bee like you do.

Maybe it’s you who has been living in a bubble for so long that not hearing the echo of what you see, think and believe is just frustrating,” I told him, feeling meta.

We are different, so are our current “big issues”.

A random comment on weather was enough for the ride-hailing serviced driver to see my good will and start explaining to me how different platforms share commissions to their partners and how new product features impact them. He felt disrespected by a platform being penny-pinching and opted to another because “they are also bad but better”.

A day before, the Cambodia-Thailand border conflict started escalating. The driver told me he knew about the event and found it “scary as they are near us”. However, his only concern by then was still “how to make the daily benchmark of rides to bag the platform’s performance bonus”.

Fischer, Schulz-Hardt, and Frey (2008) found that individuals who intentionally seek information that contradicts their existing beliefs are better able to revise those beliefs when presented with new evidence. Their research suggests that by actively engaging with diverse perspectives and varied sources of information, decision-makers can reduce the impact of self-serving biases and make more accurate, well-informed judgments.

The decision can be as small as choosing the better commission option for drivers the next time I book a ride and not hating on him for being apathetic about the Cambodia-Thailand conflict. His reaction didn’t make him arrogant. I suppose he doesn’t have any close connections living in those two countries like I do.

In her speech at Vassar 2003 commencement, Susan Sontag said “The most potent, the deepest form of censorship, in a society and in an individual life, is self-censorship”.

A lot of times, I restrained myself from sharing my “not-significant-enough” concerns, afraid of being perceived as a “petite bourgeoisie” and irrelevant. Those concerns are usually not widely covered by big media, nor viral on social media, nor of immediate life-and-death.

That my cousin’s billable days are reduced to 15 per month after she turns 28 years-old might be nothing to a lot of people but it is my current “big issue”. In a wider scope, it is also a big issue to hundreds of thousands of other female exported laborers and their families, remittances to Vietnam’s economy or even its recent revisit to reproductive policies.

“Don’t stay at home browsing the internet too much. Go out. See the world by yourself. Cool kids are already out and about looking for the answers for their problems,” said a wiser, older friend of mine.

In the coffee shop’s air-conditioned section, I looked over the friend’s shoulders, through glass doors and found myself anxious as some young coffee goers, mostly in their early 20s, puffed cigarettes one after another.

“My life partner needs to be a non-smoker,” I jotted down onto my mental notebook for non-negotiables.

It will take 6 years for Vietnam to impose the absolute tax of VND10,000 (US38 cents) on a pack of tobacco in 2031. Meanwhile, there is already a proposal on banning sleeper buses regardless of the duopoly of Vietnam Airlines and VietJet Air which makes long-distance travel unaffordable to a large portion of average Vietnamese people.

Till next time,

(*) https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24145761/reddit-am-i-the-asshole-moral-philosophy