Every so often, an essay comes along that changes your whole point of view on something. This one, by Paul Graham, is long but worth it: Why Nerds Are Unpopular.
I’d usually summarize the points someone’s trying to make, but it would be a disservice to this essay to let it be picked apart based only on my summary of the author’s primary points. All I have to say is my immediate reaction upon reading it was “Wow,” followed by “He’s so right”.
I was terribly unpopular — bottom-of-the-heap unpopular — until 10th grade, when I made a conscious decision to play the popularity game. I managed to bump myself up a few ranks on the popularity scale, until by 11th grade I realized it was stupid and time-consuming. That was about the time I also got less angsty about the whole thing.
I think every thirteen-year-old should read and understand this essay. Unfortunately, I think they’d fall prey to the same problem described in it: it’s an assignment given as part of the zero-sum, worthless game played in the prison of high school.
The trouble with profound things is that they’re too irrelevant, most times, for me to have been interested in “getting” them in junior high and high school when I needed them most. I remember being assigned Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in 7th grade, and pretty much missed the whole thing. My freshman year of college, that piece caused another “Holy Crap!” moment for me.
We’ve built this thing that we were trapped in through junior high and high school. It wasn’t intentional… high school is like the garbage-dump of our industrialized, specialized society. A by-product, something we had to do to build a more productive adult society. What do we do now to fix it? Or does it need fixing?