Building Your Identity Around Social Relationships

If you assume that it is possible to like things for non-social reasons, hipsters and nerds make much more sense. The reason that nerds like both popular stuff like the MCU and less popular stuff like postage stamps is because they don't care about if something is popular. That fascination makes them invest a lot of time and effort in it, which in turn makes it part of their identity. They weren't trying to find something to form an identity first and picking Star Wars was just a side effect. Similarly, hipsters probably just get bored of things they see frequently and want to seek out new things to be interested in. Making obscure things part of their Identity comes second, if at