Popularity article, sent to me by honeylady

This article on high school popularity makes a few good points, but two things about it bothered me. (I'm going to refer to teens as if I'm not one, because I think I can view high school politics from an objective point. If that makes me sound arrogant, I apologize.)

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven year olds to their own devices, what you get is The Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

It's obvious that it's been a long time since the author of the article, Paul Graham, was a high school student. If an adult told a teenager that he was a savage and lived in a stupid world, the teenager would think the adult had gone insane. Teens can't see how petty their hierarchies and rituals are. Their world is real to them, just as the world of adults is real to them and the world of children is real to them. Perhaps the point of whoever forced Graham to read Lord of he Flies in high school was to make him see how idiotic his teenage world was, but I think that the point William Golding wanted to make when writing the book was to make all people see how idiotic their world is. The world of corporate ladders, the world of politics, the world of social interaction- it's all a game, and the players don't always recognize that. Golding's book is a brilliant metaphor for the grownup world as well as the adolescent world, but I don't think Graham sees that, in his determination to put down the high school way of life. In my opinion, high school politics aren't any more pathetic than the supposed "real world," which is only "real" because the majority of people occupy it. I assure you that my world is neither the world he describes nor the one he undoubtedly lives in, and that doesn't make my world any less real to me than theirs are to them.

The other thing that bothered me about the article was the way it portrayed popularity as something that all teenagers strive to gain, and that the ones who aren't popular have chosen to focus on intelligence, and thus don't have the time and energy to work on being popular as well. I know that's true for a lot of, if not most, high school students, and I recognize that an article like this one has to look at the majority. Still, I know a lot of teens who attend public high school and don't give a shit about how many people like them, as long as they have a few friends they care about and that care about them.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

Real friends don't do that. You hear that all the time, but honestly, it's the truth. People who will ostracize you in "defense" of their popularity are not worth your time. And yes, it is possible to find kids in public high schools that will hang out with kids who hang out with nerds- although the ones I know pretty much all live in California, so the rules might be different. Popularity climbing is still not an excuse to be cruel, though, and not all kids do it. I don't think Graham knows many teens, or if he does, not the kind of teens I prefer to spend time with.