Now, it would be downright silly for me to write a blog post about how you shouldn't care if you're popular or you shouldn't care if you're cool. Everyone has been told this and everyone at least claims to believe it. But I'm not going to go that route. So for the sake of this, let's assume that popularity is a desirable virtue.
We as a species do a really, really shitty job of evaluating it.
Popularity, as defined by whatever website Google links to for word definitions, is the state or condition of being liked, admired, or supported by many people. Again, popularity is purely a metric to determine how many people like you or think highly of you. It's really no more complex than that. Yet the way we measure it is based on artificial factors which don't even come close to matching its definition.
For an example, I'm going to use Mean Girls. Why? Because you've seen it and you liked it and if you're a guy saying you thought it was stupid, it proves you're a closeted homosexual, because it's a damn funny movie. But anyway, the point is that Mean Girls is the contemporary movie which most evokes the insane, over-the-top stereotypes which, in my experience, don't really exist a whole lot in high school. Here, I'll give you a sentence which describes a large amount of the movie: A group of unusually attractive girls, who without coincidence do not have brains, spend their time tormenting the smart, unpopular kids while maintaining records of insults towards the unworthy dorks.
The following things are mostly or entirely myth:
1. The correlation between intelligence and attractiveness is largely untrue. Attractive girls sometimes don't put much emphasis on their intelligence because they don't have to, but it doesn't mean it's not there.
2. The kids that are the least popular are the smart kids. When I was in high school, the popular kids were relatively smart--maybe not total nerds but took advanced classes and certainly weren't threatening to fail out. In reality, the kids who barely graduated were generally socially inept and often stoned out of their fucking minds.
3. The "popular kids" never, never, never, never tormented the "unpopular kids." They might torment each other withing their little subgroup, but it's not like there's any reason for the populars to become bullies.
4. Most importantly, were the popular kids in your high school the vain kids who would ridicule others? Did the popular kids exclude others? If your motive is to be liked, excluding people is not the path to this. Think about who your prom king or queen was. Was this person necessarily a jock, or good-looking, or particularly good at anything? Or was this person the person that everyone liked, the one who always was in a good mood and was friends with everybody?
The point of this is that we act is though there is a popular crowd in life. Maybe in elementary school, but once you hit high school and through college and through, well, life, popularity is largely a myth. There is no popular crowd. In life, nobody cares if you're good at sports or if you're attractive or you go to all the coolest parties. Yet people convince themselves, largely out of personal insecurity, to believe this. Spoiler alert: If you're over 15 and you feel like you're part of the cool crowd, you aren't. Not because you aren't "cool", but because 1. It doesn't exist; 2. You're a retarded douchebag.
If a "popular girl" were truly popular, people wouldn't murmur if she wins Homecoming Queen. They'd cheer and be happy because somebody they liked was being elevated. Hell, I'll even call her popular. But when you're in college or you're in the workplace or you're with a large group of friends, and somebody is perceived, either by you or by someone else, as "popular", ask yourself this--who exactly is it that's being asked?
