I think the biggest hardest tradeoff is just relating to a world where not only is there a huge dissonance between your strong stirring passions & beliefs & oth

I think the biggest hardest tradeoff is just relating to a world where not only is there a huge dissonance between your strong stirring passions & beliefs & other's, but where most people flat out don't have strong stirring passions. Most people are not absurdly driven into deep shit. Most people don't love their day feeling torn apart by wanting to know or wanting to make the things, most people aren't living in their future possibles. > Paul Graham talks about an underrated quality one needs for extreme success, namely the willingness to be low status. And Karikó had plenty of that: she lived her convictions, in this case the conviction in the importance of mRNA through rejections, humiliations (her office was vacated without her having received prior notice) and hardship. I would go even further and say: she had intellectual courage Spoken of as courage and low status, being on the pursuit. But societally what I think is most under-stated is the dissonance. Bruce Sterling's Reboot 2011 put forward two modern archetypes. The first isn't super relevant here, but Favella Chic, being low resources but amazingly cool, bending & reusing whatever you can scrape together to be cool as hell & on top of your shit. The other is High Tech Gothic, where you are wired to the 9's, a master of your domain, amazingly capable & competent, but desperately alone & on your own; a It's Lonely At The Top / The Crown Wears Heavily sentiment. This idea of apartness, the stark difference of values and beliefs and actions between the individual and the world they see about them: I am so glad to have had some referents for this notion, it's been so helpful. And personally, mulling it over, I keep thinking, it's not really the Weird Nerd's issue. It's not really their problem per se; another view is that the world is failing to hook people, failing to expose them to the raw awe and majesty of possibility and science, failing to inspire exploration & discovery & maker-ship that such an amazing universe of possibilities and circumstance has created around us. As the Butthole Surfers song Weird Revolution says, The so-called weirdos in this country stand as completely freaked out by the normal man as the normal man is completely freaked out by the weird masses reaction to him. It's worth assessing not just the weirdos as the weird ones! And it's worth telling them, letting them know, this dissonance between your world and the so called normality isn't necessarily your fault, isn't necessarily something wrong with you. I don't think we duly sympathize or grok the alienation the weirdos suffer with.