Being an ambassador of chess - do you experience these same frustrations?

Chess is my life and has given me so much, thus I try to be an ambassador for chess and increase its popularity. Everytime I meet someone I ask them if they play chess and let them know I'm always there to play a game with them or, if they don't know how to play, to teach them.

I have to say I'm shocked by how many people here in the U.S. reach adulthood without having even learned the rules of chess, and again by how many of these people seem to have no interest, or no realization of what a tragedy this is.

I have about one hundred and fifty coworkers at the place I work and of those I've only found three who say they play chess and those were very casual players, with two of the three not even knowing the full rules.

This brings me to another thing I want to talk about, whenever I play a casual player I always give them a pep talk after the games and try to encourage them. I explain to them that being good at chess isn't about intelligence but more about pattern recognition, and that me beating them doesn't mean I'm smarter, and if they practice doing tactical puzzles a lot then they can beat me. I show a great deal of caring for the feelings of my casual opponents because I see them as embers of chess players, with the potential to ignite into fires. So I say all these encouraging things, but it seems like most of these people continue to have just a very casual interest anyway. If they're just going to keep viewing chess as some casual novelty on the same level as Uno or Pokemon Go or something, why should I be giving them the pep talk in the first place? Wouldn't it better to just let people walk around feeling bad about themselves and thinking that I'm their intellectual superior because at least then they'd respect me more? Maybe I should even do they opposite of a pep-talk from now on.

Let me put the last part of the above paragraph into perspective. I left one of my chess sets in the break room for a few days thinking people would just start to play on their own. No one touched it except to shove it out of the way against the wall, and one guy even asked me "Why did you put a chess set in the break room?" I was slightly angered by this question as I felt it was an attack on chess and on me, but again, I gave an encouraging pep-talk type answer of "So people can play me and each other. I'm trying to be an ambassador of chess and I want everyone to know that they can be chess players." But looking back perhaps I should have said something different. These people don't respect the game, so maybe they should feel dumb, maybe I should have said something like "Because I like to play chess, and if you ever played me you'd be like a bum off the street fighting a trained boxer. I would destroy you." Maybe we need to bring some edgyness into it like this in order to make it popular and get peoples attention.

What's really annoying is that I sense that some people want to play but it's like they're embarassed. It's like some people think they're a nerd for playing chess, and not the good kind of nerd like how all the popular, pretty people go to comic-con now and call themselves nerds, but I mean the real kind of nerd in the old sense. 

Just keep calm & say, So long and thanks for all the fish.

 This site really draws the crazy ones. 

No.

Dude why do you write posts that long, I fell asleep over the gold chess board and my wife had to wake me up with a bucket of money!