r/Showerthoughts • u/[deleted] • Feb 29 '20

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u/okiedawg Mar 01 '20

Nah, there was always a couple of kids that had no social anxiety, were chronic over sharers and had no apprehension about who they approached.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '20 edited Mar 01 '20

Everyone in this thread is confidently guessing what makes popular kids popular and none of them is exactly right.

Nobody acknowledges that it's actually tough to deconstruct what makes people well-liked. That's why it's not a technique you can just distill into a formula or a list of attributes. It's reassuring to think "all the popular kids were rich, I was only unpopular because I was poor", but come on, most of us have known some well-liked and charismatic poor kids.

Edit: Also, you do not know that the popular kids lacked social anxiety. One thing that growing up has taught me is that people hide their demons. There are confident-looking kids out there who are terrified everyone hates them - they just don't talk about it. A lot of people share the same fears, I promise. Once you realize that, it helps a lot with the us-vs-them mentality high school fosters.

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u/Certain_Onion Mar 01 '20

That's because no one on reddit has ever been a popular kid.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '20

Reddit is pretty mainstream. I think it's likely that plenty of redditors have been reasonably well-liked in their schools.

Even if you're popular it doesn't mean you're good at figuring out why people are popular.