Revenge of the Nerds

This image goes out to all you high school nerds who are wondering if the hurting ever ends: yes, and sometimes quite decidedly so.

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Take my word for it: it gets better. Better yet, take successful nerd Paul Graham’s word for it. Here’s an excerpt from his 2003 essay on nerds and the high school pecking order, Why Nerds are Unpopular:

Nerds aren’t losers. They’re just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It’s hard to find successful adults now who don’t claim to have been nerds in high school.

It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It’s all-encompassing, like life, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you’re still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don’t have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.