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It took me too long to realise that a lot of the popular kids where also smart. They just had social skills as well. It's much easier to tell yourself that other people don't like you because you are smarter than them than it is to work on yourself.
If you've ever spent 5 minutes talking to a programming (most likely a nerd), you don't need an article to tell you why they're unpopular. From my experience, most nerds are completely condescending and complete assholes. Maybe it's time us nerds to look at ourselves and take a little blame instead of shifting it off to everyone else.
There's definitely a subset of nerds that are like this. Don't waste your time with that subset.
I don't remember nerds or unpopular kids being any smarter than the popular kids and for the most part it was the other way around.
Fast forward fourteen years from when this was posted, and now everyone is a self proclaimed "nerd" of something. Half naked women on Instagram, holding video game controllers, while attending a sold out ComicCon.
Meanwhile, the actual nerds are still as unpopular as ever. It's just that the niche comic book culture spun off blockbuster action movies -- and everybody plays videogames. But the actual over-studying, learning minutiae, having isolating hobbies, being introverted, etc, part is not shared.
Fast forward fourteen years from when this was posted, and now everyone is a self proclaimed "nerd" of something. Half naked women on Instagram, holding video game controllers, while attending a sold out ComicCon.
This article is in the same vein as that execrable Lisp article that showed up today: "Alas, poor brilliant misunderstood me, cursed by my genius and unwillingness to ~play the silly games of the lesser people who surround me~"
"I was too busy studying to be popular!" > Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Just like all those quarterbacks who were too busy with football practice to waste any time honing their social skills. Oh wait...
There were a lot of self-anointed "computer nerds" and others who were bookish and not popular, but not necessarily smart. (Most never left that town, while the football-playing honors kids are almost all at least bachelor's graduates and never go back.)
Fast forward fourteen years from when this was posted, and now everyone is a self proclaimed "nerd" of something. Half naked women on Instagram, holding video game controllers, while attending a sold out ComicCon.
It depends on whether "nerd" is defined by personality or hobbies. If it's the latter, you're right, but so are they. If it's the former, what are the new nerds doing?
It took me too long to realise that a lot of the popular kids where also smart. They just had social skills as well. It's much easier to tell yourself that other people don't like you because you are smarter than them than it is to work on yourself.
I thought 21 Jump Street hit the nail on the head w.r.t. (modern?) high schools, a lot of the most popular kids in that movie were also the smart, "nerdy" types. Could be a regional thing though, who knows.
Looking back, the thing I wish someone in middle/high school pointed out to me is how temporary it is. Day in and day out it's your entire life and you think it goes on like that forever, and then one day you graduate and poof it all disappears. I remember the day after I graduated it sunk in that I'd never be in that world again and this huge feeling of relief and excitement washed over me...and then I remember feel…
"If this doesn't matter, why am I in so much pain?"
The trick is that it both does matter, but also isn't permanent. So little of what happens in high school is irreversible, and certainly almost none of the things that feel permanent are, but it's hard to explain that without minimizing legitimate feelings.