Why Nerds are Unpopular

[Why Nerds are Unpopular]

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| February 2003When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map
of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy
to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same
popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of
football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the
kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of
the time we called "retards."We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking
physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade
ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise.
Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was,
including us.My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived;
I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground
newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell
the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart
and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between
being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you
unpopular.Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to
ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to
imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart
doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm
you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem
so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary
school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?
The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why
don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why
don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system,
just as they do for standardized tests?One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart
kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart,
and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the
other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job
of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an
enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that
guys envy, girls like.In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids
didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they
would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the
dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical
appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why 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 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.At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them
against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart
was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be
average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many
nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable.
But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be
a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming,
as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who
wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired
by everyone?And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two
masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even
more to be smart. And 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.I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly
are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers
are always on duty as conformists.For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes.
They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good.
But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their
definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything
they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they
make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort
to be more popular.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. For example, most people seem to consider
the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall.
In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent
many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular
isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make
yourself.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.Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being
popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to
be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned
to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the
nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids
were being trained to please.
So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd,
using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the
context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially
adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical
American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least,
so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look
awkward by comparison.Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires.
Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or
siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's
why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven
and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity
than before or after.Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by
other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school,
but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their
family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and
standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family.

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