Now I'm the One That's Cool

I'm watching a music video right now making the rounds in various blogs (e.g. the Irritable Vowel, Hank Green's video blogs) called "Now I'm the One That's Cool". It's a song about how awesome it is to be a huge fucking geek, once you move past the marginalization that many juvenile geeklings experience growing up.

Not because society necessarily rewards us for intrinsically being obsessed with things (particularly if you use a very limited metric, like money), but rather because we know something that a lot of people don't: that one of the most effective tricks to stop feeling lonely and sorry for yourself is to get the fuck over yourself and think about something that's way bigger or stranger than your limited experience of being human and become all about doing that.

So: being a huge fucking geek is its own reward. And here's the fun part: your personal satisfaction, once you move beyond the personal insecurities bred by living in a world of social superficialities, you will probably attract others to you, because they're looking for the same thing and don't know how to get it. In certain limited contexts, that's called 'game'. You not only have a surprising control over how you turn out over time --- you can even control how other people see you.

And that's fucking cool.