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Upon entering middle school, my once-sensible friend Amy suddenly wanted us to spend our time sifting through teen magazines and deciding which models were pretty. I was utterly perplexed as to why this was interesting, but I tried to offer insightful comments on the Bonne Bell lip gloss model's peaches-and-cream complexion.
As the school year wore on, I dutifully learned our junior high's byzantine rules of fashion, makeup, and cliquery. But my heart wasn't in it, and my friendship with Amy petered out as she ascended the middle school hierarchy. Sometimes I wondered whether I could have joined her up there, if only I weren't so.. so... serious.
But of course I had no choice about being serious. I just was. I loved the company of the quirky kids who stayed up til 2 a.m. writing bad poetry and published it in the school literary magazine. Eventually I became the editor of said magazine; I was the official center of an off-center tribe.
I was doing what felt right, but when I saw Amy in the hallways, I always felt a pang. Her new life seemed so enviable, at least from a distance. She was always laughing and surrounded by smiling, glittery friends.
I thought of all this when I re-read the investor and programmer Paul Graham's brilliant and provocative 2003 essay, "Why Nerds Are Unpopular." His thesis is that nerds are unpopular because they have more important things to think about than seventh-grade personality politics. Here he is:
"...[W]hy are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time [I was in school], I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.
[But] popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.
Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.
Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort...The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable...."
When I searched for photos to go along with this post (I googled "popularity images"), I found that all the pictures of popular girls depict them with shopping bags, just like the above shot of Alicia Silverstone from the movie "Clueless"—thus making Graham's point.
But I don't totally agree with Graham. I think he downplays social skills too much. The ability to navigate tricky social situations with ease is, in the end, what high schoolers prize, and it's a substantive skill that kids like Amy take with them long after they graduate. Others learn this skill later in life, as they mature, and they benefit from it too. Those who never acquire it are at a real disadvantage.
Also, some kids are popular not because they're shallow or Machiavellian but because they have a winning combination of warmth, freedom from anxiety, and social grace.
But Graham is right that in high school these are the only skills that seem to matter. In the real world, other characteristics count too. Know-how. Passion. Curiosity. Empathy. Drive. Serenity. Conscience. Follow-through. Independence of mind. Creativity. Love.
The list goes on and on.
Here is Graham again:
"In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents."
If your child is not the most popular kid in school, if s/he is more self-conscious than smooth, then please! Let him or her know that there's a life beyond high school, a vastly different landscape from one s/he's ever seen, a place with multiple forms of social currency and an endless variety of ways to make oneself useful.
Do you agree with Paul Graham's ideas on popularity? And do you think it's even possible to convince kids that there's a life beyond high school? After all, they've never experienced it for themselves.
