Are you a smart stupid person or stupid smart person?

Knowledge? The thing that evicted Eve from eternal paradise??

I used to be a smart person. In high school, I was the type of student who other students would copy from (which is how you know you’re the smart one). I would do the group projects myself because I didn’t trust the other members to pull through. Then I got a 1200-something on my SATs, which devastated me at the time because I thought it meant I was dumb¹. I wasn’t the pretty one, the cool one, the athletic one, the artistic one, and now that I wasn’t smart enough to be the smart one, it was like being the last one standing in a game of reject musical chairs. But if you’re going to detach from any of those labels, detaching from being the smart one is perhaps the wisest move.

But I would gravitate toward intellectual types — people I thought could teach me how to be smart, if not by osmosis then they could at least obscure perception of my dumbness by proximity. I mean, it wasn’t that hard, our social habits aligned easily enough (museums, libraries and bookstores, arts & crafts, obsessively niche little hobbies, etc). And after enough museums, libraries, bookstores, and obsessively niche little hobbies (including LARPing²), I was like, Wait, you guys actually spend most of your social energy throwing your brain weight around more than doing anything that would engender a sense of intimacy and connection³. Is this what being smart is? It’s exhausting.

There’s a plateau to collecting knowledge — usually the point at which it impedes connection, intimacy, and survival instinct. These are just some:

Benevolent Knowledge:

• recipes

• basic chemistry and math

• the economy

• taxes

• etiquette

• TACT

• passwords

• botany

• languages

Malevolent Knowledge

• what people say about me when I’m not around

• the economy

• true crimes

• how people become billionaires

• those scalp microscopes

• my Goodreads reviews

• screentime

• war

An abundance of intelligence will not prevent us from making some truly delulu decisions for reasons only the deepest cavities of our hearts know. Even when we know it is the wrong/bad/unhelpful decision to make. I know enough to know that I don’t need to know what I don’t need to know, you know? I don't think the human mind has figured out how to accumulate so much knowledge and not have it fester into some paralyzing tumbleweed of paranoid cognitive dissonance and woe⁴.

Me and all the mischievous information in my brain.

Knowledge is available for those who seek it out, but I am also very lazy, so obviously that is out of the question. Just kidding, I love 2 learn. But seeing as we are living in the Age of Misinformation, intellect can easily be corrupted by all sorts of bullshit bigotry, establishing biased (and sometimes deeply racist, misogynist, homophobic, ableist) medical texts and social sciences. And this may sound like an argument for the dare I say emerging “trend” of anti-intellectualism (Knowledge? The thing that evicted Eve from eternal paradise??), but that’s just to say that intelligence and morality are not synonymous (the same way beauty is not goodness and wellness is not health).

(Mis)information aside, I have witnessed the smartest people I know fumble the bag time after time. The most obvious solutions evade their logical sensibilities, offering TMI where STFU would’ve been better applied. I’ve been ghosted (or clumsily handled) by people with doctorates, returned incomprehensible article drafts to writers with Ivy League degrees⁵ to re-draft before I can edit, and guided Forbes 30-under-30 types through simple household tasks. Once, an ex-boyfriend plagiarized a Radiolab podcast episode about breakups in his breakup speech to me (one of the reasons he broke up with me was because I didn’t listen to enough podcasts and therefore wasn’t as committed to educating myself about world events as he was). I caught up to that episode months later and thought sonofabitch. (Also the speech didn’t really make sense, but I guess breakup speeches don’t have to make that much sense because the only thing that matters is the breaking up part, anyway.)

We used to separate street smarts from book smarts as if they were diametrically opposed, but there are so many more ways we can be stupid now thanks to technology and the intricate social nuances it hath wrought. (Though, for all the shine emotional intelligence gets these days, we do not talk enough about emotional stupidity.)

The smartest people I know will sometimes force logical pegs into compassion-shaped holes, alienating those they love with a kind of rationale that favors some vague idea of bureaucratic justice over actual mercy and compassion. You can never undervalue the chaos of human emotional logic, or lack thereof. The heart wants what the heart wants, and too often the heart wants the stupidest, most self-sabotagey, losery things. Look, by all means, indulge those hearts. Do it for the plot. But never waste a misstep.

But sometimes I am a dumb smart person. I run my mouth, too eager to volunteer some information no one asked for that would demonstrate my intelligence, only to realize that I now look like an interrupting know-it-all. Unattractive. I’ve pulled doors that say push, and vice versa. I still pronounce ethereal as ether-real in my head even though I know that’s wrong. I mispronounce a lot of words it turns out (as I learned while narrating my audiobook). I’ve put myself in dangerous situations, braced by some naive notion that bad things don’t happen to me, and if they did, I’d know (??) what to do (a symptom of watching too many horror movies).

I have yet to master the balance of thinking, feeling, and knowing.

My very own Hmmm scale of cognitive balance

I often find myself stuck in the rumination slice, drunk on too much Hmm. It’s then that I have to remind myself of the innate intelligence of nature, which (when not interfered with by us) establishes ecosystems for survival using what resources are around. Knowing how to work within the given ecosystem is intelligence incarnate.

I have this conversation with my friends (very smart people who, like me, also sometimes do dumb things) a lot. I can’t express enough how helpful it is to have loved ones check you when you’ve been wielding so much futile control in a situation that requires flow (it can work just as well when they don’t love you, but the landing is rougher). Everyone succumbs to Human Underestimation Hubris (HUH™) from time to time. After all, emotions always undermine our intellect, making it as sound as a roll of the dice. We overestimate human will as much as we underestimate the choices we have.

The best things my cognitive limitations have done for me are to spare me from the agony of overthinking, doubt, and the ease of cynicism that can exploit any bummer to find an excuse not to bother. The solution isn’t always additive. It’s often found underneath all my inner shit-talking faff and bravado that justifies and enables the ego I pretend I don’t have.

The most valuable things I know came to me through crisis, grief, or loss. Beneath their grimy, fraught, or devastating delivery was a brand new star of realization that illuminated something so simple and true that previously was obscured by my own fear and resistance (and laziness). And at those moments, I felt so stupid for not having seen it so clearly before. But a benevolent kind of stupid. I hope to build a constellation of that stupidity.

1. Now I know that the SATs are a bogus testing scam meant to facilitate college applications more than serve as any true measure of real aptitude (and also that 1200-something isn’t even that bad).

2. Which I never got into but even if I wanted to, they wouldn’t have let me because I arrived “mid-sequence” and it would throw off… the sequence.

3. This is what happens when you go to an arts school where all the outcasts who were ostracized in high school for being uniquely nerdy and artistic matriculated to the same place and suddenly they’re not the unique nerdy artistic ones anymore, they’re just one of many.

4. That The Giver book made some points. Free will is overvalued in a society where invisible strings narrow your choices so exploitation is necessary for some to live well while others suffer. Also holograms.

5. Which they are happy to mention at any opportunity!