Over the week-end, I read a fantastic essay called “Why Nerds Are Unpopular” in a book by Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters. If you want to read the whole thing, you can go to http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html. Here’s the part that I want to talk about tonight:
“As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.
When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.
Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.
At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn’t even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were…. Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)
And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.”
When I was a teenager, I discovered running as a way “to escape this empty life” and it was for me the real work Paul Graham speaks of. Each time I headed out to do a run on my own (not during a track season or as part of conditioning for tennis or basketball, but just for ME, my own thing), I felt that I was doing something real.
I still feel this way almost 30 years later. Teenagers flock to junior and high school cross-country teams throughout our nation because they need to know that their labor is meaningful, that their lives are meaningful.
There’s nothing pointless about running.
H&P is an excellent book; Graham’s writing is so careful and easy to follow that I found it hard to dispute any arguments he made. That essay was the first one I ever read to put a real finger on why I hated high school so much. Unfortunately, when I read it, I was on a table getting iontophoresis treatments for chronic PF… so I didn’t make the running connection.
Yes, could not agree more. Two trains of thought come to mind: (1) There was an article recently that went on to elaborate how the greatness of individuals in sports is usually debatable, except for track & field. Was Joe Nameth a better quarterback than Tom Brady? Wilt Chamberlan a better center than Shaq? But in T&F, that is a different story, the race was run in a time recorded for all to compare with or a distance, or a height? No dispute, sure there can be discussions around the conditions and training methods but the performance is recognized and comparable to today. (2) Running allows for more participation than other sports. You are one of nine in baseball or you spend time sitting, one of five in basketball or spend time sitting. But when you run, even if you don’t compete for the varsity, you still run. You still sweat. You still get from here to there…
Teenagers are just one segment of the population that needs this but they are not the only one that benefits from running!