It’s what we like that is important, not how we suffered. I think that a lot of people confuse the two.
Shared adversity is unifying.
Sure if you are interested in creating them and us mentality. It’s just one more form of tribalism, and you know where that leads.
And in exchange, my kids don’t have to get their asses kicked at school for being into sci-fi and video games. Just for me personally, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
Fair enough (I’m not advocating that kids should suffer), but i suspect that being into pop culture doesn’t make you a nerd anymore, either that or the term has expanded to meaninglessness. Which was my point.
Yes, it expanded to meaninglessness. Everybody considers themselves a nerd, it’s synonymous with “enthusiast”.
One of the revelations that has helped me as an adult is: Everyone is a nerd about something. Do you know lots of trivia that no one else knows, get together with friends to watch, and dress up as your favorite characters? You could be a Star Trek fan, or you could be a football fan.
One of my favorite articles of all time (man I’m old) from The Onion:
“Nerd is a word that boring people use to describe cool people.” – Toni Lee
Yes, I’ve long maintained this, even before the current cultural zeitgeist that brought the sci fi/ fantasy/ video games type into mainstream acceptance.
Or to put another way, the interests and enthusiasms have not changed, just that people broadly accept the multitude of interests people get passionate about. So the scope of acceptable enthusiasm is no longer narrowly defined and rigid.
Things have totally reversed in the past couple of decades. It is now popular to be a nerd. But since nerds cannot, by definition, be popular, they can no longer call themselves nerds. And because it’s not popular to be popular, once again they have become outcasts, and thus, we have come full circle, and they are again nerds.
See how I did that? It’s like math.
To help people more fully understand my math, I have devised a simple Single-circle Venn diagram of the full circle I just described:
nerd—O