What do you have brain worms about?
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably got them, and that’s a good thing in my book.
Last year, one of my good friends introduced me to the concept of “brain worms”. You’ve got brain worms about whatever hobby or topic gets you animated when you talk to other people about it. It’s the subreddit you spend the most time on, just scrolling along until you hit the post that was at the top last time you refreshed the page. It’s the thing you like to evangelize about without any hint of irony or sarcasm.
My brain has had worms in it as long as I can remember. No one in my family is particularly good at just having one or two interests or hobbies, and we’re always adding more and we don’t often drop them. My Pawpaw golfed, raced stock cars and RC boats, rode motorcycles, played Pickleball, and was in the process of building a plane with his brother when he passed away.
My family tends to pick up hobbies that have a lot of stuff involved. We love stuff. We can even manage to stuff up a hobby that ostensibly needs very little stuff, like running! I have approximately nine pairs of running shoes and a few more in reserve. I have a Garmin and a Whoop and compression boots and a massage gun and a wobble board and you get the picture. Hobbies with stuff are great, and they’re great conversation starters. When you see someone on a motorcycle, that’s something you immediately know about them before you even know their name.
Personally, I find that I get brain worms for things that don’t come naturally to me. I started running because I sucked at running and I didn’t like that, so I set out to get better at it. Mechanical keyboards are perhaps the stupidest hobby I have, but I loved them because it was a completely new field of study for me. I had never held a solder gun before in my life, and now I’ve built a 40% keyboard with surface-mount components and two hotswap sockets for each key. (You don’t need to know what that means, you just need to know that it was a ton of soldering.) I still don’t understand enough about electronics to do much more than assemble the things that other people have designed, but it’s more than I knew two years ago.
My husband has a different breed of brain worms, though, that I had never come across before. He just loves to learn about things. He spends all of his free time jumping headlong into Wikipedia rabbit holes, and I am astounded at the combined breadth and depth of his knowledge about the most random things. Every time he picks up a new video game, he’s got optimization spreadsheets and he’s figured out all of the mechanics that provide him the best return on investment on his…beaver city-building game.
And more than learning and analyzing, he loves explaining all of that to other people. He would be an excellent professor, but class would never end on time and you wouldn’t even get half the class material covered because he’d get so hyped up explaining one thing that he’d never get to the rest of the information. It’s contagious too. You start listening to him and then you get sucked in and suddenly you’re standing in the corner with him at a party trying to come up with a solution to the fact that old-growth trees don’t absorb as much carbon dioxide as younger trees, but cutting them down and using them for things releases a lot of the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Or maybe that’s just me.
This species of brain worms doesn’t actually require anything but an internet connection and a computer. I’d never met someone who didn’t collect hobbies that required stuff. It works well for us, because it means I have more room for my bikes and running shoes and keyboards and trad clothes and camera gear and the Kawasaki Z650 I’m trying to convince him I definitely need.
I mentioned Reddit earlier, because that’s typically been my gateway into new interests. In college, I was a regular on the college football subreddit, and then later on, the motorcycles subreddit. Now I mod a couple of running subreddits and lurk the mechanical keyboards sub. Reddit is absolutely the best and worst place for people like me because there is a subreddit for everything, including things you didn’t even know it was possible to be interested in.
I’ve always tended to use Reddit as a way to learn about other people’s subcultures. Communities organized around niche interests are absolutely fascinating. They almost always structure themselves the same way, and they can be both incredibly inclusive and cliquey and insular at the same time.
On Reddit, you often have a small community where people have very similar knowledge levels about the subject where everyone is friendly and knows each other pretty intimately. The subreddit can grow at a rate that’s sustainable for keeping that kind of small community feeling, but eventually, there’s an inflection point and the growth outpaces the rate at which people can keep up those individual relationships with the whole community, and that’s when you start to get hierarchies based on tenure and knowledge levels within the group.
That’s the same time that the meta threads about repeat posts and reading the sidebar or wiki start to pop up, and it’s at that point that subs have to put posting rules and schedules in place. You get daily simple questions threads and themed threads once a week or so. The growth can be great for embedding brain worms about this particular topic in others, but it fundamentally changes the community and that often upsets the long-standing members of the group.
See, I’ve even got brain worms about brain worms. What do you have brain worms for?