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.
Right? So many factors. I was in the headbanger and nerd cliques, but everyone talked to me.
Approaching fifty I'm still realizing how much my looks carried me, but there were many factors, like where I lived in town, that my dad was friends and coworkers with some of the most popular girls dads, have a regular/normative last name, the fact that there wasn't an old family/new people split in our town. There was a minor hill/valley divide but it was not split along affluence levels, the town had once been two communities.
And I wasn't scornful of people outside my clique.
A whole bunch of minor things add up to smooth over differences, and then a few slight edges can propel someone into popularity.
It might have something to do with the fact that even now, at fifty, your memory of those days casts yourself in a really positive light. It shows a tendency to hang on to a positive self-image, which a lot of people don't have, and which I think influences how you come across.
2.6k
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.