The Nerd Manifesto
Why we should all embrace our inner nerd for a happier, more meaningful life
There should be no higher compliment than being called a “nerd”. Instead of denigrating it, culture should incentivize it and glorify it. Nerds should be modelled in media rather than stereotyped. They should be portrayed as aspirational. But growing up “nerd” was an epithet to be avoided, precluding social acceptance when that was all that mattered. During the years when conformity was most rigorously enforced, it was a potent way of punishing interests outside the norm.
The Machiavellian social dynamics of childhood have a long shadow. The patterns of behaviour laid down in those formative years shape how we think throughout our lives. You never grow out of wanting to fit in. Because of this, “nerd” remains a pejorative, despite an adult world more forgiving of idiosyncrasies. This essay is an attempt to remove that vestigial negativity and reframe it.
Nerds Against Education
“Nerd” is a nebulous term but at its core, it’s a synonym for intellectually curious. To a nerd anything can be interesting. No matter how esoteric the subject there is a group of self-confessed nerds obsessing about it. A nerd’s curiosity is unbounded by what society deems an acceptable topic of interest. In a way, it’s a more childlike approach; a true expression of curiosity not stunted by the pressures of conformity. A nerd carries the awe of a child through to adulthood.
“People like you and me never grow old. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”— Albert Einstein
From the intellectual flowering of ancient Greece until its institutionalization in the modern state, education consisted of the aristocracy hiring learned tutors to foster their children’s interest in the arts, culture, and philosophy. Before the puritanical influence of Calvinism the highest virtue amongst the elite was not work, but to live like a dilettante. Work was gauche. A good life was spent at leisure, pursuing your interests in a range of societally acceptable subjects. Teaching did not involve a top-down imposition of knowledge, but rather a cultivation of interest in those subjects.
Limited to the male and privileged and sitting in the context of rigidly hierarchical and conservative societies, we need to view ancient pedagogy clear-eyed and cognizant of its flaws. However, the tutors of antiquity had stumbled on a fact we blindly ignore today: true learning must come from within. Its primary motivation must be intrinsic. A tutor’s job is to foster natural curiosity and to be guided by it, not to constrain it with a syllabus. The learning that follows is almost inevitable.
Nerds stumble upon this, again and again, obsessively learning outside of formal education. They follow their interests because that’s all they can do, finding their tutors in books or online. Whilst most people relegate learning to something that, allegedly, happened in school, nerds have made it part of their identity.
The Power of Self-Efficacy
We all have a confusing set of beliefs about ourselves and our capabilities. Like every other aspect of our personalities, they are complicated, contradictory, and layered. They can be hard to parse, born from the messy interaction of our upbringing, societal conditioning, and our own unique nature. Psychologists call this “Self-Efficacy.” More concisely, it is your belief in your ability to succeed at whatever you take on. High self-efficacy comes with a sense of agency and confidence that life’s challenges are surmountable. It is foundational to becoming a successful, well-adjusted adult, however those somewhat arbitrary concepts are defined.
Self-efficacy is primarily built through learning or acquiring a new skill, defined as a ‘Mastery Experience’ in the literature. This is because success is generalizable; you learn not only that it’s possible, but also the meta-skill of how to succeed. The wandering, serpentine path to maturity, with its missteps and dead ends, is in a great part a flowering of self-efficacy.
Nerdiness, in the coincidental way that any culture stumbles upon a universal quirk of human psychology, taps into this. It is a vehicle for building self-efficacy through learning. Through indulging their curiosity, nerds learn that they can learn.
Over the ages, as cultures and societies change, the traits those societies reward and incentivize change. In today’s information society, characterized by an exponentially increasing deluge of information and rapid, technology-induced change, the ability to learn is key to survival. The world that educates us will have only a passing resemblance to the world we end our life in, and we’ll have to adapt. Nerds, who have made learning the foundation of their identity, sit poised to thrive.
Somewhat Contra Newport
In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport upends the common career advice platitude of “follow your passion” with his Career Capital Theory. Instead of vainly mooning after the mirage of the Dream Job, you should focus on building career capital; as Newport defines it, rare and valuable skills that provide leverage to steer your career and lifestyle in the direction you want it.
Whilst career capital is a useful concept, in dismissing the “follow your passion” advice Newport is arguing against a strawman. The more convincing version of that argument — the steelman to the strawman — is “to follow your nerdy obsession”. We should discard the ambiguous concept of passion and instead pursue the thing that fans the embers of our curiosity, that we’d pursue no matter the monetary incentive. The entrepreneur, investor, and purveyor of pithy advice Naval Ravikant brilliantly expressed it as something that feels like play to you, but work for others.
“I’m always “working.” It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I know no one can compete with me on it.” — Naval Ravikant
However, many people who’ve run the curiosity-destroying gauntlet of the modern education system have lost touch with that sense of play. Their curiosity, atrophied and half-buried in the sands of responsibility and survival, must be rediscovered and nurtured. This brings us full circle back to Newport, whose insight was that sometimes we just need to get started and the interest will come. You can become a nerd for your job after the fact. Everything is interesting after all.
We are remarkably adept at finding genuine interest in the most esoteric of subjects — whether it’s the nuances of competition law or the complexities of the international payments system — especially if monetarily incentivized to spend all day thinking about it. Newport and Ravikant are both right; you should aim to do what’s play to you, but that sense of play can be discovered after the fact.
The Good Life
Of course, not all of us are interested in maximizing the productivity of our contribution to the capitalist economic system. Really that’s just an instrumental goal for something deeper: living the Good Life.
There are as many manifestations of the Good Life as there are cultures. But humans are not tabula rasa. Culture is the facade painted on commonalities writ in biology. We are seeking animals, hardwired to find meaning in a life of growth. Growth, then, defined as broadly as that can be defined, must be part of the Good Life. Self-efficacy is the engine of that growth, providing us with the capability to act on our instincts.
Those instincts were the impulse behind our world-changing migration out of East Africa. They drove us across looming mountains and lifeless deserts, across arid tundras and endless seas, to colonize every liveable corner of the globe. They have a thousand diverse faces, mediated by the ethnosphere, but are a human universal sketched in our dopaminergic circuits.
This is the pathway, curling upwards through our brain like a snake, that biases us to action. It is why we seek. Rather than rewarding us for achieving a goal, it rewards us for pursuing it. The writers Daniel Lieberman and Michael Long described dopamine as “The Molecule of More”. In this context it can just as accurately be described as “The Molecule of Growth”.
We’re more than our biology, but we are constrained and shaped by it. It paints the landscape of our lives. It’s our biology that sets the range of possibilities the Good Life could take, and that makes a life of growth fundamental to all of them.
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” — Albert Camus
The Manifesto
The Nerd Manifesto, then, is a clarion call to embrace your curiosity, however idiosyncratic, and follow it unapologetically. With the force of that curiosity guiding you, you will learn more effectively than it’s possible to be taught. Success begets success, and over time you’ll build a sense of self-efficacy and cultivate the identity of a learner. This is the precursor for a life spent growing, which is vital to the Good Life, because of the way our motivational systems are wired.
To be curious about the world is to be human. Everything is interesting.
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” — Richard Feynmann
