I think I'm getting tired of nerds.
I'm Old now, which is part of it. When I was a kid I always thought of 36 as the cut-off date at which point a man was Old, and now here I am, somehow, despite the sneaking suspicion I would be killed in some kind of hilarious accident before now ("Local Man Fires Cake Frosting Up Nostril, Fills Brain Cavity with Chocolatey Goodness"). I am Old and I have little patience with certain forms of stupidity.
There's a particular kind of reflexive cynicism that characterizes nerds, and I'm often as guilty of it as anyone else. You lash out. You try to hurt something you love before it can hurt you, because you're absolutely sure it will. It, like half the other things nerds do, is a defense mechanism.
It's exhausting, now that I am Old. There's a reinforcement cycle at work on the Internet, spurred on by snark, bloggers, and people like Yahtzee, where you attain status by seeming the most reflexively dismissive. If you accentuate the negative as hard as possible, you win a prize, whether it's by hipster-style appealing to the past ("I liked this better when it was called [x]"), ignoring whatever doesn't suit your prearranged narrative ("These two panels I read out of context on Tumblr prove the entire comic book is the product of a diseased mind"), or making up "rules" out of whole cloth that fiction is supposed to always follow ("Got No Legs Boy is a street-level hero, so any storyline that puts him in space is obviously going to lead to a bad comic").
I sometimes have fantasies of writing a short book, or a few articles, about rediscovering the capacity for critical thought, because it's shocking how many people who would otherwise consider themselves intelligent are incredibly bad at it. I don't know where I'd start or where I'd pull out the authority I need to make it work, which is most of what's stopping me.
Still, it's one more toxic behavior that needs to be confronted, or it's just going to get dystopian. Imagine a fedora stomping on a human face... forever.
I don't know that it's reserved mostly to nerds, but it's definitely accelerated by the internet. I think that it's the same reaction people have always had in bars or barbershops griping about the ignorance and over-abundance of certainty in those people that see being absolute in their opinions as a mark of strength rather than realizing it as a symptom of rampant ignorance. If you can't imagine how you could be wrong, your probably wrong.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious how you arrived at 36 though, when I was in high school I figured "old" was 55+... but then I grew up with really young parents and much older grandparents so perhaps my idea of "old" was wonky from the start.