The importance of being a geek

I'm sure some of you will remember reading the part of my first post, where I said that I tended to not hang out with my flat mates because they don't want to talk about academic subjects. Really all my friends are geeks because I have so many academic issues on my mind, that I need studious friends in order to feel satisfied, although there are of course more personal reasons as to why they are my friends.

I don't just see this fear of being a geek among people my age, I also see it amongst my lecturers. My lecturers will often say that they read a report, are looking forward to an important event in their field of study because they're "sad" or sarcastically say that they did/do this because they're "cool".

But for years I've been trying to work out why it's often seen as a bad thing to be a geek.

I can't see the satisfaction of living a life, where you aren't a geek because anyone, who I've known to not be a geek or indeed not have something that they are really interested in, seems to just be bored. I've often found that these sorts of people resort to bitching/gossiping or other wasteful activities such as watching Big Brother/I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here to fill their time and just generally activities which only bring temporary satisfaction with life. By being a geek life is so much more interesting and rewarding. Having geeky friends is also useful because it means that you can discuss ideas for projects you need to complete, learn how to study more efficiently and reinforce the things you've learnt.


The other reason why I get annoyed by people frowning upon the act of being a geek is that it is so clear that we need geeks in order to live in a world that functions well. Take for example Alan Turing, it was his work on the enigma machines that led to us working out Germany's encrypted messages in order to solve World War Two. Furthermore, professors, people who go into scientific research, etc. are often geeks and those people are responsible for developments in society. Indeed it's societies such as China in its days of a communist economy, the Congo that aren't so developed for the precise reason that they killed off members of the intelligentsia like professors. So unless people don't want their country to continue to develop, are they thinking when they frown upon someone for being a geek?


Currently the only possible explanation I can currently think of as to why society isn't more accommodating of geeks is that it makes those, who aren't more studious, feel embarrassed because they feel out of their depth and feel that geeks outsmart them and make them feel stupid. I'm willing to think that I might be wrong in this issue but that is currently the only logical explanation I can think of for this problem. It was certainly the case that Hitler, Stalin and Mao killed off the intelligentsia because they were more intelligent than them aswell as often being critical of them.