The Lost Art of Nerding Out

These days, everybody seems to know everything.

Every piece of information you could ever want is just a click away. Why get an MBA when businessmen are posting their tips and tricks on TikTok? Why study creative writing when AI can write the books for you? Why bother becoming culturally literate when all your friends watch the same three TV shows? Why read history books when you can just ask Grok instead? 

If you’re a certain age, you’ll remember just how much time, money, effort (and privilege) it once took to acquire this kind of cultural capital. No longer. What used to be exclusive information for the uber-fortunate insider crowd is now available to any yutz in a basement.

That is why, according to Gen-Z cultural critic Eugene Healey, the new cool kids aren’t the ones who know all the cool stuff the old cool kids know, but the people who obsessively deep-dive into a niche interest.

He cites Tokyo as the epicenter of this new definition of cool. Apparently, it’s the go-to destination for the ultra-specific: unique retail establishments where everything is the same shade of blue, stores that only sell items shaped like mushrooms, or a small restaurant with ten seats where a chef serves only one dish he spent twenty years perfecting.

Think about the kind of person who travels halfway around the world to see these things in person.

Nobody assigned them a mushroom project. No promotion waits for them at the end of their mushroom journey. They just found something fascinating and decided to follow that fascination as far as it would take them. Along the way, they developed an extraordinary capacity for research, discernment, patience, and persistence. All because they gave a damn about something most people wouldn’t look at twice.

Why don’t businesses hire more people like that?

They’re forever telling employees to be curious. To take initiative. To think independently. To go above and beyond. Then they hire people based on how closely their resumes resemble everybody else’s.

Same schools. Same internships. Same extracurriculars. Same carefully rehearsed answers about being a team player. 

Meanwhile, the person who spent three years becoming the world’s foremost amateur expert on obscure fountain pens gets an awkward, polite smile when the interviewer asks about their hobbies.

What a missed opportunity.

You found someone who knows how to become obsessed with something. And you let them slip through your fingers because you didn’t particularly care about the thing they were obsessed with.

Leaders should be on the hunt for people who know how to go down rabbit holes. How to teach themselves things nobody is teaching. And perhaps most importantly, how to sustain their own enthusiasm without needing a boss to stand over them and manufacture it.

That’s a pretty remarkable collection of qualities to bring into an organization.

Of course, being obsessed with fountain pens doesn’t automatically make someone a brilliant accountant, engineer, or manager. But it tells you something about how their mind works. Something a GPA or LinkedIn profile could never reveal.

So perhaps it’s time to add a new section to the modern resume.

Not just Education or Professional Experience. But what are you unreasonably obsessed with?

Leaders shouldn’t care whether it’s mushrooms, fountain pens, medieval architecture, or the migratory patterns of Arctic terns. They should care that this remarkable person found something worth going to the ends of the earth for.

Because giving-a-shit isn’t a teachable skill.