h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

I found out about this essay today. I read through it, and I have a few comments:

-I am a nerd. We'll get that point out of the way right away.

-My adolescence wasn't as painful as this article makes it out to be. The article says that nerds are tormented and relegated to the bottom of the social heap, and wish that they were popular. I had a real distaste for popular people, and I never really thought that being popular would make happy. The only thing I wish I had that popularity would have brought me was mating opportunities. And I lusted after a girl who didn't like popular people, anyway.

-I didn't spend a great deal of time making myself smart. I was far too lazy for that sort of thing. Instead, I spent a lot of time playing video games. I suppose if I put as much effort into being popular as I had put into rescuing Zelda, killing Kilrathi, and beating the big uglies in The Guardian Legend, I would have been among the upper crust of high school society.

-I didn't think of schoolwork as useless until I started looking back at it after I had gotten into college. Most everything I was forced to do in junior high and high school was under the rationalization of "it'll look good on your college application, and help you get into a good college." Only after I got into college did I stop to wonder how doing community service helped me get into college, when they didn't even ask whether I did any or not during the entry process. Also, I found out that kids who wonder how knowing this fact or that will help them later in life are correct; knowing the three causes of the Franco-Prussian war is completely useless unless you go on to be a European History scholar, in which case they'll go over it again for you.

-A lot of my "friends" at the end of high school were people who this article calls "freaks." People who "deliberately opt out because they are disgusted with the whole process." Despite what this article says, it was my friends who went on to serve me pizza and man the counter at the video store after high school. The "popular" people disappeared off the face of the earth. I, of course, went straight through college to get a well-paying job. If the best revenge is living well, then I've got a lot of revenge-dealing to do when the 10-year reunion rolls around.

-Myself notwithstanding, the really smart people at my school were not ridiculed. They were so smart that everyone else was afraid of them. The average student at my school couldn't make fun of the really smart person, because no one understood what the smart people spent their time doing. Most of them were girls, so guys tended to lust after them; they might not have been the best looking girls around, but a guy could do worse than to end up with the smartest girl in school. And just for the record, the smartest girl in school was named Julie Ishida, and she often asked me for help in physics and calculus. She scored higher than me on the Advanced Placement exams for these subjects, but I was the only one to attempt those tests without a graphing calculator.

Zelda!!!

That's what I did!!!