I think we all knew someone in high school like this: hated mainstream culture, shat on pop music and popular TV shows in favor for more independently developed music, video games, Youtube channels, etc. If you were that person, or even if you continue to be that person, this article is for you.

To the pretentious people with superiority complexes about their individualism:

First of all, congratulations! You stray from societal norm as much as possible, and you know what? That’s cool for you. I personally like the sense of individualism that comes from not conforming to gender roles and age-based lifestyles.

But where do you get the right to piss on people for not doing the same?

People have different tastes and enjoy different lifestyles. Me? I drink McDonalds coffee and would shell out almost ten bucks for lunch and a drink at Starbucks if I had the money to blow. I listen to Top 40s radio stations and I have listened to almost every single Ryan’s Roses call for three years. When a girl in my high school biology class asked me what my favorite genre of music was, I said “Taylor Swift!” because, damn, true.

But I’ve been on the flip side, you know? I loved to rave about how different I was from my friends and how they never understood me because of my passionate love for Fall Out Boy, and I never listened to any radio stations except KROQ. I cut my hair short and never wore anything remotely feminine, and I pretended so hard that I loved to read because for some reason I thought no one my age enjoyed reading and I wanted to be special. I legitimately thought that I was more superior than my classmates because I enjoyed doing really menial things and I liked really small things thinking I was quite possibly the only person to ever exist outside of Tumblr who enjoyed it.

Hell, at some point I even bought into that “Tumblr is a secret society” bullshit. Uh, no thanks. It’s a popular website.

I guess my point is: stop being so pretentious. Nothing in this world is more superior than the other just because you have a personal taste for it and others don’t. Twilight isn’t a shit series because it’s “cliché” or because Meyer used the word “said” a little bit too much at dialogue points; it’s a terrible series (to you) because you don’t like it. Count down on my fingers how many times I have been told I’m not intelligent enough to understand John Green novels and I have just enough digits to stick my middle fingers at you. I’ve heard enough people tell me my taste in a mix of alternative or rock music and pop music is so contradictory, as if I’m not allowed to bop to Taylor Swift and My Chemical Romance in the same playlist.

Puh-lease.

Do me a favor, maybe, and get over yourself perhaps. Enjoy what you want to enjoy without making such a big deal about it, and let other people do the same. Let’s grow as a society.