Popularity (Revised)

*This is a revised copy of an old post. To see the original post click here *

I am currently right in the middle of a book called Looking for Alaska by John Green. The book is about a boy who decides to leave his boring school in Florida behind and go to a boarding school. Lots of interesting things happen to him, and many of them are as a result of the rivalry between the “in” crowd and the “out” crowd. The “in” crowd is the segment of the school that is rich kids. The kids in the “out” crowd all hang out with each other (this boarding school is small) and, for the most part, avoid the “in” crowd kids. Still, they consider themselves less popular because… well there isn’t really a reason. This got me thinking. The kids in the “out” crowd don’t want to hang out with the “in” crowd and vice versa. Why should one group be considered more popular? The popularity of the “in” crowd does not seem to be based on anything. The “in” crowd kids don’t have more friends or better grades, or nicer faces. The only reason appears to be that they have more money.

When I was in 6^th grade, I first started to discover that there were popular people in our school. I am not quite sure how I knew who was popular. I think my friends pointed the people who were popular out to me. Then I knew they were popular, and I started to realize that everyone else did to. That was my first real life encounter with the idea of popular people. It just always made sense to me. Of course there are popular people. I never thought to question it.

            After a lot of thinking on the topic of popularity I believe I have a theory as to why people are popular. Popularity is all about perception. If we all expect someone to be popular, then they are popular, and this only reaffirms our belief in their popularity. This applies to Looking for Alaska as well. In the book, when people started looking for who was going to be popular, they saw the rich kids. There is a stereotype that the rich kids are the popular ones, so when there was a group of much wealthier kids, it was assumed that they would be popular, so they were.

           

            In truth, popularity is not that important. It won’t give you a better life. You wont become immortal. You can be the least popular kid in the school, and still have friends who care about you. The kids in Looking for Alaska prove that. They said that it was fine they weren’t popular because they were going to hang out with other kids, and they are perfectly happy. All in all, the concept of popularity is just a circular mind trick that we play on ourselves. If you think about it like that, it seems kind of sill how much we care about popularity.