The Cool Kid Syndrome

I came up with the idea of the Cool Kid Syndrome when I was an admissions counselor and was required to work with faculty members to make admissions decisions on some students.  Now, anyone who has worked in higher education for any period of time will tell you that faculty members fall into three categories: 

1. The really good ones, that WANT to help
   
2. The apathetic ones who could give a damn and won't show up to meetings
   
3. The uppity, mouthy, loud, god awful ones who know more than you about every possible subject and won't hesitate to tell you such. 
   

The original Cool Kid Syndrome theory was developed to explain the last category of faculty.  I believe that a person's experience in high school is a fairly good indicator for how they will turn out later in life.  For example, most of the jocks/cool kids marry young and never leave their hometown whereas most geeks get out of dodge and go on to be really successful in what they choose to do.  Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule, but more often than not it works out like this.  

In this particular instance, I theorized that the uppity faculty were the geeks in high school and always resented it.  Now that they were the "cool kids" of the institution - basically the most powerful members of it - they were going to use their newfound status for evil instead of good, since that's the way they were probably treated by the cool kids in high school.  In reality, they're just very insecure and being uppity as a method of self-justification.  If they are louder than everyone, and can barrel through their ideas into implementation, then it only encourages that behavior in the future. 

Fast forward a few years: a friend of mine presented at Izeafest this weekend and he turned me on to the live streams they did over Ustream on Friday and Saturday (they also recorded the streams so they are still available to view).  So I'm watching all these widely-read bloggers get up and talk about their blogs...and making money with their blogs...and generally being awesome on their blogs...and having the audience fawn over them with stupid questions like "what is the coolest thing that's happened to you from being a blogger?"...and it occurs to me that the Cool Kid Syndrome is really applicable to bloggers too: Geeks in high school, now ruling their respective roosts but still typically pretty insecure and try to use their blogging success as a means of self-justification.  They're not necessarily uppity like faculty members, but many of them clearly need people to agree with them to feel justified in their opinions.  They surround themselves with like-minded people (or people that look up to them as "celebrities").   It's a constant means of self-justification: if they can only get enough people to agree with them and think they're cool and awesome, it'll all be OK.  

I see these common behaviors in so many people I read and the ones I'm lucky enough to know personally only reinforce my theory by being some of the most insecure people in the world.  I don't say it as a bad thing - I'm probably the most insecure of any of them.  But I'm also very conscious of the fact that running my mouth on a blog isn't going to fix that.  People thinking I'm awesome online doesn't amount to a hill of beans in my real life - it's not going to get me a raise or a promotion at work, its not going to gain me the respect of my off-line peers and it's certainly not going to help my love life.  When I was blogging politics, sometimes readers would send me free stuff like DVDs in the mail, but that was about the most exciting thing that happened.  I had a top 10 blog on MySpace (when MySpace was still worth logging onto), thousands of people reading me every day and in my real life, all that happened was that people thought I was a super big loser for blogging so much.

Ultimately, here's what I'm trying to say:  If you're going to do something like this, you should really sit back and think about why you're doing it.  To listen to some of the presenters talk at Izeafest, you'd think that the best reason to do it is for other people - give readers what they want so that they'll think you're awesome.  I couldn't disagree more strongly with that.  I've said it before, but a blog is a labor of love in a lot of respects and I think the really good ones out there are the ones where the author is doing it because they love doing it.  It's not to make money and its not to be a blogging "rock star" with all sorts of fans - they do it because they like writing or they like teaching people or it helps them to accomplish something in their lives.

And it's not going to fill some crazy void that you've had in your life since high school - your colleagues won't care.  Your families won't care (my parents have never even visited my page!).  Your friends won't care (unless they blog too, then they'll understand).  If there's one thing I've learned in the past nine years of blogging in one form or another, it's that it will never make you the cool kid - it's just going to make you the geek sitting behind a computer screen writing all the time.  And that's OK...but you have to be OK with it :-)