Thoughts on being a “Tryhard”
I am doing an internship alongside a lot of undergrads. These kids are mostly 19-21 years old and it’s frankly been a little hard to interact with them as a peer, despite the fact we’re doing similar work. They just feel so much like my students, and being a younger teacher, I very deliberately put up a “I am grown and you are child I am friendly but we are NOT friends” professional wall, and I find that I am not really able to take that down around these guys. It feels like we just inhabit different worlds, being at different life stages, and it’s something I haven’t navigated before. In most all of my social circles, I am the youngest one in the group (which I do quite enjoy, to be honest). So now that I am the oldest one in the group, I have tried so hard to avoid being too much of a “grownup” to them but by god they are baby!!! And that was really exemplified this afternoon.
We were having a group activity that was just silly fun; we were building stomp rockets and having liquid nitrogen ice cream. One girl made a simple one and then said something along the lines of “I could do better but I don’t want to be a tryhard it doesn’t even matter” and that just struck me so hard. Frankly, my heart broke for this girl a little bit.
I see this attitude in my students and always have. When I worked at the 4-H camp, we called this the “TCBs”—the “too cool blues.” It referred to kids who weren’t buying in and engaging in the activities because being into something was “cringe.” It’s a super common mindset with teens (and I wonder to what extent it has been made worse by social media and the fact that anything one does can wind up online against one’s will forever, but I digress…)
To be eager, earnest, interested, excited, enthusiastic, is just not cool. It’s looked down on. It’s cringy, it’s being a tryhard, it’s “doing too much.” I have never been able to buy into that line of thinking, and it’s one of many reasons I was so often an outcast in my childhood and young adulthood.
However, as a full grown adult, being the intensely passionate, enthusiastic, interested person I am has forged me such a breadth and depth of meaningful connections. The people I spend my time with now value and admire this quality in me and I value and admire it in them. We build relationships through these shared passions. I find so much joy in being an unabashed amateur, a lover of my hobbies.
Which is why my heart breaks for these kids—and I guess it’s not fair to call them kids, they’re young adults, but that’s really sadder—because they have bought into the “caring = uncool” and it can and will deprive them of so many opportunities for connection.
I have a working theory about making friends as a kid/teen/young adult and making friends as an adult and why it’s so hard for a lot of people: as a kid, your friendships are primarily ones of proximity. You live in the same place, go to the same building 8 hours a day, etc.; sure, you may share some interests, particularly with sports or band or whatever, but most of the time the foundation of those relationships is just that your circumstances put you next to each other often. As an adult, you may make work friends, but friends outside of that you have to find and put in effort to maintain because life doesn’t just plop you next to each other all the time.
People who reject enthusiasm and passion do fine with friends of proximity, but if they hang onto that, they don’t have foundations upon which to build durable adult friendships. Being eager and earnest is VULNERABLE and that’s a hard thing that takes practice, and they have not practiced it, and thus have a harder time making long lasting adult friendships.
On the other hand, I could not contain my enthusiasm for things, and was routinely outcast and rejected for this by peers-of-proximity, but once I became an adult, I found that people (especially people older than me) valued that enthusiasm and it became the spark of many wonderful friendships. Almost all of my adult friends are my friends because we have something to care about together. We care about native plants, about meditation, about teaching, about crafting, about bugs, and so on. For the first time in my life, I have a vibrant social life with people I care deeply about and who care about me because they are drawn to the fact I openly and eagerly care about things.
If you insist that caring isn’t cool, who’s going to care about you?
