Have you ever thought or talked about “normies”? If you’re reading this, odds aren’t bad that you have. We, the technically adept (or at least not completely clueless), often use this term to talk about the kind of person who doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the small web, Linux distros, infosec, blogging, the Fediverse and a gazillion of other obscure subjects.
At this point in my life, I’ve come to realize that all the things I care most deeply about are nothing a “normal” person (whatever that may mean exactly) can easily relate to. I can get enthusiastic about self-hosting, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, RPGs, dungeon crawler board games, data privacy, the issues of browser monoculture, online ads, Doctor Who, the dangers of LLMs (a term to many people probably don’t know). And all of this makes me what people usually call a “nerd”, even in my non-English-speaking country.
Don’t get me wrong, I have more interests than these, I can talk about all kinds of things, ask questions, dig into things I hadn’t known or encountered before. It’s not uncommon for me to have a prolonged conversation with a person who has a job or hobby I’ve never heard about before and ask all kinds of questions about it. However, the reverse isn’t necessarily true. The majority of people doesn’t care about any of the above things, for some of them they wouldn’t even know what they are. No normal person understands what I do for a living or why I spent many hours of my life writing scripts that automate the installation of an obscure German adventure RPG from 2003 (plus a multitude of mods) on Linux (on what now?), why I bothered to learn Quenya at one point in my life, why I know the seven forms of lightsaber combat, why I spent twelve years getting educated and working as a chemist, a subject almost everyone I’ve ever met detests, not that they understood anything about it. No one knows what markdown is, or DNS, a reverse proxy, a server, how Wifi works, that it’s not the same thing as “the internet”, what a “cloud” is and I won’t even start with quantum chemistry. I could go on forever.
Of course I’m being hyperbolic. There are many people who know about this stuff or part of it. It’s just that these people live in tight bubbles, are concentrated at my job on are dispersed all around the world and come together in secluded spots somewhere on the web to argue about which communication protocol is best (it’s not Matrix or, God forbid, XMPP) or which desktop environment (I use GNOME btw) or display server (X11 is dead, deal with it).
Why am I going on about all this? I’ll tell you: I feel isolated from all the people around me. My family, my neighbors, the people I see during my commute on the bus or train. I dissociate, put on headphones and retreat into my own world, pull out my (degoogled) phone and write messages to people halfway across the world to feel less alone.
Meeting people and feeling like an alien because of who I am, what I do and what interests me causes me no small amount of pain and I don’t know how to deal with it, I never knew. Is the solution to just seek the company of people like me? Retreat further into my bubble of comfort? That doesn’t feel like a good solution but maybe it’s the only way to balance out interaction with people who simply can’t relate to me.
I know I’ll never be “normal”. The point has been driven home many times. God knows, I’ve often wished for it but it’ll never happen. That’s probably a good thing but I have yet to figure out how exactly.