Why nerds are unpopular

One of the themes of the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that the monsters and demons of high school are worse than the vampires and demons that Buffy fights. Buffy can dispatch the vampires with a quick stake through the heart, but she can’t do that with the Heathers who constitute the school’s social elite.

If you were like me in high school, with glasses, braces, possessing an apititude for computers, the sciences and writing, and a Dungeon Master of renown — you probably got the crap beaten out of you and then stuffed into a locker by some goombah on the football team. Although each of us handled it differently — I became a master of Schmooze Fu, others withdrew into themselves, and a few either ended their lives, had it ended for them or sought revenge on their tormentors — we’ve all paid the price of being different.

Ubergeek Paul Graham has taken a detour from his usual topics — the ubergeeky programming langauges Lisp and combatting spam — to write the essay Why Nerds Are Unpopular. It’s a lengthy but engaging writeup of that chamber of horrors we call high school and why being smarter than the average bear is more of a liability than an asset during that stage in life. Here’s an excerpt:

Because I didn’t fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn’t realize that the reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn’t know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He’d seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he’d know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it’s good for smart kids to be thrown together with “normal” kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don’t fit in actually is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a “pep rally” at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

(I should scan some photos from my high school yearbook and post them. Brrrrrr.)