Fierce Nerds

It's good to be fierce and intelligent, but it's really important to be compassionate and empathetic too. IQ without EQ is wealth without health. If you truly want to enjoy life, if you don't want to make other people miserable, and you would like other people to raise you up in good company, you need to work on how you treat and think about other people. For nerds I think this is as difficult a problem to solve as any other they could attempt.

It's interesting to think about the difference, though, and he does nail a few things about nerds from my generation. Most importantly, that being socially awkward was a prerequisite, because functioning social instincts would have prevented you from ever saying anything unconventional or investing time in learning things that were outside the norm. Without the internet to expose people to a diversity of views packaged in well-edited, easily digestible chunks, the socially acceptable range of interest was limited entirely to what people heard from tradition, network television, and if you were "edgy," MTV. Any progressive ideas you got, any historical perspective you got, anything you learned about different cultures, any cool ideas you had about the future, you got from books and magazines, and you were a total weirdo if you treated them as part of the shared world you inhabited with other people.

And I'm talking about pretty mainstream stuff. Like, if you remembered something out of a National Geographic article you read and repeated it in conversation, that was already letting your freak flag fly. So we came to identify reading, curiosity, and a progressive attitude with social inappriopriateness, with grossness, and this had an enormous impact on us. It affected the way we presented ourselves, the way we dressed, everything.

A hugely consequential example is our gut response to the feeling that we're about to say something that other people would find off-putting or offensive. We learned the habit of embracing that feeling. That was the feeling we got whenever we admitted to liking a book we read in English class, or talked about anything to do with science or math, or said, hey, did you know the last time that country had a democratic government we overthrew it? If those things were good, then it was good to embrace the feeling of social disapproval they generated, the way an athlete embraces the burning in their muscles in a hard workout. To be honest and intellectually engaged, we had to be weird and distasteful, and we learned not to trust anybody who shied away from that.

The younger generations of nerds, I feel like they trust peer influence more. When they feel like they're about to say something inappropriate, their instinct is to pause and recheck their thinking, which, I have to say, I'm kind of jealous of that. They take it for granted that the people they feel pressure from are people they choose as their peers, people who reflect their own values and therefore have the potential to improve them.

For my generation, being socially maladjusted felt like a moral imperative. We had to be socially maladjusted to be the people we wanted to be: curious, open-minded, engaged with the information and ideas trickling in from outside our little towns and schools. It was necessary, but it selected for people who already had a difficult time integrating socially and then further warped us in a way that maybe the generations after us aren't warped.