But those reddit threads often do include some research and references, so one has a jumping off point for one's own search with some keywords.

I can only speak for myself, but was trying to avoid being labeled.

I wanted to people to actually get to know me and not just use me as a means to an end. I am not merely my hobbies. I do enjoy helping people out from time to time, but I strongly dislike being someone's "_____ guy". Very easy to be taken advantage of. The world isn't always nice.

> As a child, McCarthy saw no value in school, preferring to pursue his own interests. He described a moment when his teacher asked the class about their hobbies. McCarthy answered eagerly, as he later said, "I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was ... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."[15]

But McCarthy meant that he had 50+ concurrent consistently-actively-pursued hobbies/passions.

Which is something that's possible... if you have a lot of time on your hands, and you never allow anything into your life that drains you mentally so much that doing it kills your motivation to do anything else for the rest of the day. (Which IMHO is really only an option for people who are either retired, "independently wealthy", or being homeschooled.)

Still think he has ADHD?

I myself paint watercolor and oil, am learning violin, joined a sailboat race team, am writing a book, started my own successful business that earns my living, lift weights, read 35 books, hiked 1000 miles of the AT, and became a volunteer firefighter, all this year. I'm currently designing a cabin I want to build. I'm having a blast. I definitely don't do as much with any of these hobbies as someone who only has one hobby, but I don't care, give me variety!

I remember of a kid who was nerdier than me, but he didn't fit into the usual nerdy social anxiety and he also did boxing as a hobby so he was ok.

I concluded that it was not really about interest.

In other words, cool kids are fine with hanging out with un-cool kids, if it can be done in a way that does not involve un-coolness at all, so they don't become un-cool by association.

I have trouble with the discussion of the detail of 'thing' with the people who are into it as, potentially, their only thing. There's a line, somewhere, in every "being really into things", that becomes unhealthy obsession.

I love me some roller skating (inline), and I want to learn and get better at "all the things", but I don't want to discuss it incessantly, as the discussion gets in the way of the feeling and the flow, which is what initiated the enjoyment in the first place.

I used to enjoy Pokemon Go (and still do much less frequently), but some of the people that got really into it were unbearably 'discussional' about details that made no material difference (yes, pedants, one combination in 3,375 can iterally be 'the best' - but, you see, it'll draw you into a life-sucking spiral).

I think, possibly, in both examples, they're people on social fringes, and maybe having a connection, no matter how tenuous, to another human being, is treasured in, sadly, its rarity.

I'm somewhat blessed / cursed to be missing an inherently human need to be 'within', and maybe this is the high-school version of 'cool', even though I've never been cool (roller skating and pokemon go you say? Yeah, nah, club's full man). I've also got kids, which means I value my time enough to require the application of the pareto principle to my "really-into things". But then, I also find almost anything interesting once the surface has been scratched, so maybe my aloof-ness is self-preservation from falling down every single rabbit hole put in my path. I consider it a Denial-of-Service attack when someone introduces me to something I find interesting.

As another reply stated, however, in slightly different words, it's the unhealthily obsessed that create the slipstream for us causal types to cruise in. I am thankful for their existence, and respect their knowledge and commitment if not their life choices.

> the bachelorette

Can't agree. This one's unhealthy in any dosage.

There are entire subreddits dedicated to hating on specific things or people. As if they define themselves not by what they love, but by what they hate, and derive some sick satisfaction from mocking others.

As I've gotten older, I realized these people are probably dead inside. So now I almost pity them. I can't imagine being so spiteful that I must shame another's passions.

LPT: Always pursue your passions without shame, and encourage others to do the same.

I once heard an artist say (can't remember which one), that they loved playing in Europe, since everyone at a festival is there to have fun. While in US, everyone is there to look cool.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096694/

I was about to also mention the "copy homework" part, but I thought that would have sounded too specific, certainly glad that I wasn't the only one to whom that happened :) I've had a former highschool colleague thank me for everything I had helped her with during high-school at our 20 years reunion recently, she was a very smart person back then (still is) but the Physics classes just weren't for her.

My kids go to a scholl where: 1: you can only ever arrange playdates or gatherings with a maximum of 2 other kids - or its the whole class 2: bullying is not allowed in any way shape or form 3: no one is allowed to exclude others from games, plays or events 4: this is rigorously enforced 5: no smartphones or the likes until 4th grade (11-12)

This is then instilled in parents and kids, any crossing of those lines is debated in a democratic way and creates a selfenforcing positive feedback Loop

Works

I disagree. Sure you can stop the most obvious and visible bullying, like physical altercations and obnoxious name calling, and make people generally 'behave' themselves while at school, but that just means the bullies becomes more careful and subtle, not that they stop.

If these rules extends to life outside of school, I would be concerned more than relieved by rules 1 and 3. We should not normalise state-level control of our private gatherings by teaching freedom of association is somehow evil in children. It also would give a group of kids no way to sanction against antisocial behaviour by another kid (cheating in a game comes to mind).

That this has the thin varnish of "democratic debate" (which, let's be honest, will be quickly overruled if the kids decide the rules are stupid) only adds the additional aspect of showing in real-life how democracy is a scam that enforces things the powers to be like to happen while giving the impression it was a majority decision.

Or you just didn't see and experience it. There is more to bullying than everybody standing in a circle and openly making fun of the "nerd". Most successful bullies are very good at hiding their bullying from people they know wouldn't approve. Having had the unfortunate experience of seeing my daughter get bullied, bullies are sneaky, insidious and very good at keeping their behaviour just on the right side of plausible deniability. I fully believe that over half of her class had no idea she was being bullied.

It also seems like they should have gotten an ethics committee approval on what is very obviously a psychological experiment on minors, similar to Muzafer Sherif's "Robber's Cave" [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbers_Cave_Experiment

And my experience from my school is not like that either. You could have been "geek" or "nerd" or onto something and no one cared. Being good at something was cool or neutral.

The difference with the US is about the social dynamics and the organization of school life, not about whether a nerd might be bullied.

The same way school shootings are an order of magnitude or two less common in Europe, in an total area with more population than the US has.

While some 'nerds' certainly did (and do) get bullied, in my experience they where just as likely to get bullied by other 'nerds' as they where to get bullied by 'jocks'. You didn't get bullied because you played D&D or Warhammer or where good at math, you got bullied because you where weird and anti-social and unable to successfully navigate the unwritten social norms expected of you. Lots of people got straight A's in math and science and played Warhammer and had no problem with bullying.

Did kids get bullied? Sure. But it had more to do with social awkwardness than certain interests or school results.

And for the 'popular kids', I could not define who the popular kids in my school could be. Not all girls would try to hang out with certain guys. Each girl had their own interests and that could differ a lot. A concept like a "prom king or queen" for me is totally out of this world. I cannot imagine that concept in my youth, and could also have no clue who the hell would be nominated for such a thing. In my adult life now? Sure, probably the guy with the successful business driving the sports car. In my youth, no idea, nobody stood out like that.

However, I very much enjoy the original's post analysis about 'being into things', I think it's just brilliantly exposed !

A lot of this is a recentish phenomenon with kids mimicking what they see in US made movies and tv series - and also a whole lot more toned down than in the US.

>And reversely, nerds kid would often be made fun of, or socially excluded from breaks / activities

As a nerd, this has always been going on everywhere, and it's basically by definition, as people describe as "nerds" not just people that are good at school and have scientific and brainy interests, but the subset of the above that are socially clumsy, not into sports and the popular social activities, etc part of being a nerd.

Kids with "nerd" interests that are also socially savvy and also like the stuff the majority does, are still popular.

So, nerds being excluded in this sense is almost a tautology, and in many areas, even happens by preference (e.g. not liking parties and drinking). Of course one could argue that we nerds would like them if those were more into our preferences, but, well, those are not the preferences of the wider school population. So this is not exactly active ostracizing, just the 90% not changing what they like to accomondate the 10%).

But again, the forces at play here are not as strong as described in the US in any European country that I know of.

From my POV, the school social structure in USA seems very "schematic". Like there are popular kids and they look like this and have these attitudes, then there are geeks who are socially awkward and physically weak, then there are jocks etc.

My experience from growing up in Czechia was way less "random". There are popular kids, of course, but there aren't really many stereotypes to them. Some of them are dumb, but many of them are also pretty smart and have strong interests. All these people qualities are there, but they are not strongly categorized and appear in various permutations.

What are the odds your POV is coming from television and movies?

But seeing real conversations using those stereotypes ("I was your typical nerd kid at school") here, on reddit and even talking to people IRL convinced me that this "caste system" does actually exist in real life (of course not to the overblown degree shown in movies).

I'd be interested to know what the odds are that students themselves are self-selecting into categories based on what they seen in TV and movies.

Today it would be more IG and Tiktok, but what even are those if not micro-reality TV full of tryhards desperate to get a TV deal?

“From my POV, the school social structure in USA seems very […]”

I agree that it’s harder to generalize over all of Europe.

FYI, the US and Europe are roughly the same population and size (ignoring, as ever, poor Alaska) — ~350 million vs ~500 million, and ~8 million square miles vs ~5 million square miles.

While the US is considerably more culturally homogeneous than Europe, it is also quite hard to generalize across the United States.

In my experience, when non-Europeans say “Europe” they mean something like “the union of the EU and the EEA and the UK”. They probably exclude Russia and a few of the Russian-adjacent states, and if they think of Iceland, they include the part on the North American plate as well as the Eurasian plate.

There was a boy in my class that had difficulties at home and struggled in school (daydreaming instead of focusing etc) and i clearly remember this scene where the teacher mocked him infront of the class saying stuff like "looking out the window again are we, no wonder you're slow and stupid when you dont participate" - queue the other kids laughing.

This happened across classes, multiple times with different people. The teachers where petty, confrontational towards other with differing opinions and did not enjoy being challenged in any ways, shape or form.

(I landed myself at the principals office multiple time by defending the vulnerable ones against draconic teachers) - and i'm not sure if it's still allowed - but i witnessed multiple times where teachers hit students.

(This was a "good" school btw.)

It was clearly an institutional culture, and they didn't know what to do with me because i came from the complete opposite and had the moral highground constantly - the kids where sad when i went back, the teachers (& principal) happy.

Oh, and the actual level of teaching was super bad, all learning by hearth - no "think for yourself", composition or divergent thinking allowed

Also in terms of teaching, I actually appreciated the fact that we had a lot of compositions that emphasised critical thinking (more so than I had when I went to Germany for 6 months as an exchange student). Wonder if that's because things have changed since the 90s or if it's due to the private/public school difference.

On the other hand, I was very heavily bullied in middle school but that was by other kids not by professors. And once I got to High school the bullying completely stopped.

It was a time where playing Magic the gathering was really popular so I guess that reduced the stigmatization of nerdy kids.

I don't think you get that anywhere else.

You just happened to grow up around good people, but not everyone is as lucky unfortunately.

GP's experience feels extremely familiar to mine, even including the later realizations, and this from growing up across the pond.

- she’s such a swot

- I need to swot up on this

- don’t be so swotty

- look at that swot with his books

I recently hired a gardener on taskrabbit, and he was too cool for it so I’m trying to figure out “really? gardening bro?” and turns out he is totally hooking up with women on taskrabbit. like the modern day milkman! he’s also interested in plants and will do the work.

so there is merit to trying to figure out what the edge is, where is the dopamine coming from that gets you to associate the interest with fun?

in my experience, its worthwhile being skeptical, I’m either missing something or this person is completely unrelatable in a dozen other ways.

I would add music you don't like (ex: autotuned rap), "commercial" or "popular" everything (ex: Bud light), and sexual kinks (ex: pet play) to this list.

If you peek a little, you may find even find these topics to be surprisingly deep. Maybe even deeper than the things you like. Or maybe not, but don't dismiss them because they don't fit your preconceived ideas.

Yesterday I learned that there's an entire subreddit, dedicated to making fun of programmers. People take snippets of social media posts by programmers, and post them out of context (without links to the context), and everyone takes turns, making fun of the snippet.

That looks like a lot of fun... </s>

Hey, whatever creams your twinkie...

I’d also suggest that participating in these fora could have … adverse … effects on one’s future career prospects. I can assure you that many HR background checking companies scrape social media, and are getting fairly good at “deanonymizing” posters.

I'm sorry you had to work through this!