I always thought there should be some form of yearly bootcamp for nerds. Drop out of larger society for most of the year, doing your thing, then for a week each year you get indoctrinated in all of the crap everybody else is doing and thinking. That way you can stay mostly culturally-relevant without spending huge hunks of your time becoming the master of the intricate details of things like Game of Thrones. Just know the general themes, be able to tell some jokes and create metaphors and illusions.

I don't know who would run this bootcamp. I assume teenagers. Your teenage years are a time where it is very important to stay with the group, establish social ranking, be the master of conversation about various widespread cultural events. Those feelings never go away, but for many of us they die off as we get older, have families, and absorb ourselves in work we find important.

There are some very weird things about getting older. First off, you only are old on the outside. While people, especially some younger folks, may look at you as if you were an alien that just arrived from Mars, inside you're the same old kid you always was. Just the outside has changed. When presented with a new situation, you may appear to decide more slowly, but you're also thinking about a lot of different things and options you wouldn't have thought of in your youth, and you realize that unless you're driving a racecar, most times it's better to take a minute and decide and get it right than it is deciding in two seconds and getting it wrong.

You see a lot of stuff. Hopefully you learn from it!