Later in life, I managed to catch up in dating and other aspects, but kept a good streak of nerd pride and am totally happy about that.
If you were to have observed my childhood and got depressed about it, that interpretation would have been misguided.
Only one of the two of us was there.
One of my friends in high school was like that - always studying, always doing extra classes. Straight As even without it, good grades, six highers one year and another two and four CSYS by the time he left. Then off to Uni where he got a first with distinction in Business Management. He never did anything but study, although he did play football a bit.
In the intervening 30-odd years he's mostly worked as a deputy manager in a supermarket in a small town maybe an hour's drive from the slightly smaller town I live in. He's never done anything else. Moved a couple of hundred miles from where we went to school, got a job, worked his way up to assistant manager.
I see him sometimes in passing when I'm working up that way.
We must imagine Stephen happy.