A Little Something About Liking Things - Written 082224

I keep encountering people who are asking who or what they should like. They're not beginning with a specific thing and seeking to know more. They're wanting an entire fandom just plugged into who they are, like it's a new personality they can adopt. This is both annoying and disturbing to me.

When I was a kid I stumbled into many things in which I found tremendous joy. Several things were introduced to me by family, and a few were from friends. For the most part I liked what I liked and I didn't stop liking them even as an adult. I could be described as obsessive, but that was because these things inspired me to have passion.

For a lot of this stuff I was mocked, bullied, and shamed. I had kids threaten to beat me up for bringing toys or comics to school. My manhood was questioned and mocked for playing Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons in school in the 90's. I ultimately didn't care.

I once had a friend chastise me for trying to discuss comics on the school bus, because he didn't want to be seen as a nerd. That saddened me, but it didn't shame me out of liking comics.

Back then you could organically find things and determine for yourself what you liked and didn't like. You could like them for as much or as little as you wanted, and there wasn't really peer pressure because those were often things no one else cared for. They were your things and the opinions of others didn't matter, but it was nice to occasionally encounter fellow travelers and swap stories of the joy and depth of your shared interests.

These days and ever since the early 2000's when, "Nerds are cool" became a trend, people seem to want to be directed in what to like and end up investing in those things as shallowly and mindlessly as any consumer group which follows a fad. Instead of adults in sports jersey we began to have adults wearing comic book, science fiction, and fantasy shirts. Nerdiness became hip and big business. Hollywood and marketers pounced on this and made it all even worse.

The world of genre media, comics, toys, games, etc. is different now than when I was young. The quality of person who identifies as a nerd is seemingly lower and more shallow than the people I met in the comic and game stores of my youth. They adopt IP's as substitutes for personality and project their broken sense of self onto media, which leads to then trying to change that media to suit them.

The old guard in the hobbies and interests either pulled back and kept to themselves, or it seems, for the most part, they rushed to be, "Cool" for once in their lives and sold out to appeal to the fadsters. I don't care that they did this, but I do wish that many of them would stop attacking those of us who refused to be as accommodating.

It feels sad to be considered a nerd now. I hate that label, even though there was a time when I just accepted it.

I like the things I like. I found almost all of them organically, and I developed a deep appreciation for them. I can't help what other people do or claim to enjoy, but I don't want to be associated with them because I don't want to be seen as whatever the modern world considers a nerd. I am a person with a life who happens to really like specific things. I am not one of these media robots.

As far as I am concerned, lowering the bar of entry for the hobbies and interests has allowed many of those things to become degraded and ruined. The future doesn't look bright for any of it, but being someone who has been into the things I like for a long time now, well before the fad, I still have everything that mattered to me. Basically, that means that even though media, hobbies, and interests will wither and diminish I will still be where I was before the noise and the storm of fad folk.

As the character Samus, in the web series Glitch, once said, "This geek chic, it will wear off and we will still be here. It's who we are; the bones of us."

The fad seems to be drying up and will most likely continue to do so. When it is gone I will still be here. I will remain.

To put it another way:

"I must not invest in fads. Fads are the mind-killer. Fads are the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face the fads. I will permit them to pass over me and through me. And when they have gone past I will turn the inner eye to see their path. Where the fads have gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."