I feel existentially weird.
I recently met a woman during a local social event. This woman is around my age (middle-aged) and posts a lot of memes about sci-fi and nerd shit on Facebook. And the more of this person's posts I was exposed to, the more I was just rolling my eyes and was thinking, "really, you're an adult doing this?"
And then I kind of wonder: is it okay for me to be like this? I'm a "nerd"; I work as an engineer. I like sci-fi and nerd shit. But I feel increasingly alienated from the stuff I used to like. It doesn't help that the sci-fi genre (at least the popular stuff) for the most part has been taken over by the kind of people (like said woman) who seem to need it as an extension of themselves.
Sci-fi is now like sudoku and escape rooms: So as sudoku has numbers and it makes people feel "mathy" because it has numbers, and escape rooms use some amount of deductive reasoning, the fact that "sci-fi" has "science" (even if not real science), it makes people feel "smarter", even if they're not objectively smarter. (Really, sweetheart: you're not in any way better equipped to talk about the physics of time travel just because you've watched Doctor Who. And I already know from the way you talk, you probably couldn't name one Doctor before Christopher Eccleston anyway.)
I don't want to power-level and drop my creds on the table here to show how much "better" I am. In fact, I don't feel that way. I feel increasingly alone. I live in a world of hyper-arrested development, and I wouldn't even say I'm immune to it, but I catch myself and remind myself that I kind of have an adult job that requires me to handle heavy math and science; stuff that a lot of these weirdos would "yay, science!" over, but wouldn't lift a book to learn anything about it because a book is heavier than a Funko Pop.
See...I'm being an asshole, and I get it.
What am I to people like this? Am I someone they disdain for holding up a mirror to them for not really being a "science" person? Am I someone that they wish they could be more like? Either way, I have few peers and few paths of finding peers. And I frequently feel bad for acting as if I should be looking down on people for liking what they like, even if objectively I know their behaviors are kind of unhealthy, which is where I enter the spiral of "oh yeah, well how am I any better?"
So yeah...that's how I'm doing.
