Comment by raddan
8 days ago
For what it’s worth I think people have always been this way. I used to read during recess when I was in middle school. I usually could not wait to get back to my books. But the other kids saw this as profoundly antisocial. I wasn’t being antisocial exactly; I was pretty shy and had a very active imagination. Amusingly, the school bullies misinterpreted my bookishness as weakness. That changed when I (accidentally) knocked out a kid’s front teeth during a fight. I felt terrible about it but the bullying stopped immediately.
This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.
It's funny how that works.
I (90s high schooler) was made fun of merely for being on the internet or being able to fix electronics. The early days of Facebook were amusing (when everybody was friending everybody), seeing the same people that bullied me spending hours on end playing FarmVille.
While I never physically fought back, but one of my friends (who had a LOT of success almost immediately after high school) did pass on of our tormentors working construction in the street and made eye contact...in his very expensive SLK Mercedes. Not to degenerate construction work, but there was a lot of satisfaction for him in that moment.
It still surprises me how the peking order in schools so poorly represents real life. A few years ago at a previous job, we had an HR woman who was almost certainly a "popular" kid in school, comment how much fun being around us "nerds" was.