T w e n t y S i d e d
So here’s the deal. Everyone wants to be perceived as cool. We can all pretend we’re above it but at some level we don’t want some people to know some things. If people somehow found out you were into that thing, ya THAT one, what would happen? Your whole facade of normalcy or even badassery might disappear. Maybe they would stop talking to you. Maybe they would hate you.
No. That’s dumb. Stop being dumb. Nobody cares. And if they do care, they can fuck off. Their opinions don’t matter. I know this. You know this. So why does it still feel weird to discuss certain hobbies, shows, and even music?
The majority of people that hear “I play Magic the Gathering,” either already know I’m beyond hope or already don’t like me or my shitty tastes in things. Like Dan, Shamus’s brother, who swears at me when I bring it up. But why is it more taboo to talk with randoms and less familiar folks about nerdier stuff? I’d talk to my Luddite uncle who doesn’t care about anything that isn’t directly involving the woods and a gun about my favorite video games and why I love them. So why is it that bringing up the card game I spend most of my disposable income on feel so weird?
It’s easy to talk sports because it’s a societal expectation to have watched the latest sports. I’m a guy in rural PA after all. It’s a lot harder to slip your taste in metal music or anime. Sure, that depends on audience as well, but I don’t see why I should feel shame talking about my interests when I listen to older men talking to me about cars and hunting all the time. I don’t respond with a sneer or a laugh or a condescending reply because who does that? “Sure bud, I’m sure your rebuilt Trans Am is super cool,” I say with an eye roll. Nope. There’s no need to be a dick like that.
So I guess what I’m saying is that life is a lot better when you accept that you can enjoy things and genuinely tune out miserable losers that try to make you feel shame for enjoying something. I like Rick and Morty. That doesn’t make me a drooling stereotype of a Redditor who can’t properly communicate. I love horror movies and metal music. That doesn’t mean I can’t watch other genres of movies and listen to other genres of music. I like a few Vtubers. That doesn’t mean I’m a gooner. I’ve even known the loving embrace of a woman, believe it or not. I like Magic the Gathering. That doesn’t mean I stink. I do stink, but that’s not why.
Which is why I urge all of you to stop being condescending when your kids, nieces, nephews, or whoever shows you something you perceive as super dumb, give it a try. Hear them out. If you don’t like it or care, appreciate that they care about it. I promise you that it’ll make a big difference to them.
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Every so often I’m reminded that some people think “deep dark secrets” only go as deep as, like, the basement, and don’t consider the ones down in the mine shafts, or bubbling up from R’lyeh.
I don’t even know if I can give an example, because I think it would be eaten by the word filter.
I have become a lot more tolerant of sports nerds once I realised that they’re just nerds like me, but with worse taste in obsessions.
As a football nerd as well as an everything else nerd, I appreciate the recognition. :P
Yes, it’s rather infuriating entering nerd spaces and coming across the same behaviours as those which they feel subjugated by, targeted at a different group of things. Hatred of Friends, love of Monty Python, hatred of sport etc. Generate your own snobberies, don’t take them from your opt-in social/identity group :P I understand where it comes from of course. I remember saying or thinking at school that “Warhammer is probably a fun game, it’s just a shame that the people who play it at lunchtime are a bit weird”. Ultimately because they had a different culture to my own in some ways. I had/have a perception that all the things which I love which are important within that type of culture, nerd stuff if you will, like Star Wars, are somehow made weird by the manner in which said people engage with it / enjoy it – that the nerds ruin it for the rest of us enthusiasts. That is to use the term nerd not to mean someone who is a fan of something, but as a perjorative to mean someone who is odd in his behaviour. Which itself is of course not something to dislike or mock someone for, but one doesn’t often like to be tarred by association, even if one doesn’t have any issue whatsoever with those with whom one doesn’t want to be associated by others. In a very similar way to the nerd opposition to football and sport etc., where it is the hooligan lads with their boorish behaviour that they dislike, and thus dislike the general concept to some degree by association. I must admit it is then a little disappointing to see that the same nerds go to goth concerts and behave in exactly the same boorish way haha, same people, same veneration of hedonism, marginally different colour scheme.
Gosh your last paragraph certainly rings true. It occurred to me in the last couple of years, that when my friend complained about his nephew saying that Warhammer was boring when he showed it to him, and lamenting that the nephew instead only loved things like Skibidi toilet, which my friend called brain-rot… that that was perhaps a mirror of his own disappointment in his father’s lack of interest in Warhammer, and his father’s disappointment that he wasn’t interested in football, each writing off the other’s interest (and considering it stupid) presumably due to distaste with the aforementioned cultural baggage.
I do rather dislike the fact that so much of this comes down to school. We shouldn’t be beholden to our school days for the rest of our lives, it’s such as small portion of them. It all so often comes down to silly bullying and childish behaviour, as you say.
My mother often says this quote, which she came up with herself but is no doubt pre-dated by the equivalent by others: “Do what must be done and say what must be said. Those who matter won’t mind, and those who mind, don’t matter.”