If you don't try to be smart, you will be stupid

Thursday 8/13/26

When you understand people all too well, it makes sense to say, "I don't understand people."

The above remark requires thinking through. That means practically no one could ever understand it because no one can think.

If you post an intelligent comment on social media, the replies will prove that your comment wasn't understood in the slightest. Your comment could have been very direct. A remark of pith. You're limited anyway in how long it could have been if you're on Threads or Twitter.

But if it's intelligent, if you use words that are your own, and it's not hill to die on, GOAT, rent free in his head, etc., any of the 100 or so cliched insipidities that constitute the full extent of our expressive range at this point in a world that might as well be blown up because there's no good in it being here, people won't be able to come close to comprehending what you wrote.

Further, people see anything that someone else writes not as something to read, take in, process, but rather as an open invite of sorts to come through the door and start saying whatever they wish to say. Those words they've read might as well simply say, "Your turn," because that's all anyone gets out of them.

If you don't try to be smart, you will be stupid. It's really that simple.

How does one try to be smart? By reading good things. Notice how I didn't say books, because it isn't just books. Thinking. Thinking harder. Making a point to do so. Thinking more. Not staring at devices and screens. Using your own language. Looking up words. Trying to understand someone else's point of view or what they're seeing from their side of things that makes them say what they're saying or what is motivating them on the inside to be saying it and seeing things as they do. Not "consuming" crap. All of the bad shows and movies on streaming services.

Let's say you don't try to be physically fit. Actually, let's go one better--let's say it's as if you're working to be the least bit physically fit possible. Because that's what we're doing mentally when we don't read good things, we don't think, we stare at our phones every chance we get, we watch garbage like streaming product and TikTok videos and YouTube idiocy, etc., we always look to speak in the moronic cliches and word modules (fixed it for you, you spelled moron wrong, hot take, couldn't waterboard it out of me, thanks for coming to my TED Talk, banger, slaps, at the end of the day, etc.), and we're dependent on whatever is trending for whatever it is that will "interest" us in our empty, pathetic, meaningless, vapid lives.

What's the physical version of this? Eating shit all day long. Candy, chips, take out food. Stuffing your face. Never exercising. Never getting up more than you have to. Pissing in a Coke bottle by your side on the couch to spare have to walk to the bathroom. Doing heroin. Doing meth. Drinking constantly. Never going outside. Smoking.

What do you think you'd look like? What would your level of physical fitness be?

I know we're so stupid now, but can no one really see that this is how almost all of us are living mentally? So what could your mental fitness level possibly be?

If you decided it was time for a change on the physical fitness front, you'd put down the latest cheeseburger, cut out the meth, start going to AA meetings, go for a walk around the block, work your way up to doing some jogs, get a gym membership, have some salads, stop eating and drinking half your body weight in sugar every day.

But what are you going to do mentally? You're probably just going to keep doing the mental version of that meth, of pounding another bag of Doritos, settling in for another twelve-hour binge watching without moving a single damn muscle more than you have to.

We see people on the outside, though. People think we don't see them on the inside. And that's mostly true, because almost everyone else is too stupid to see what's right in front of them, even if it is on the inside, and too narcissistic to pay attention to or care about anything or anyone else save their completely uninteresting selves, and can't discern what anything is, the single biggest problem in the world being that people can't tell what things are. And when they can't tell what anything is, nothing has any meaning. It's just chaos.

There's no incentive to actually be good at anything. To create anything of intrinsic quality. To put in all the time and energy it requires to become good at something and maximize one's inherent abilities.

Take writing. Are you going to work your ass off to develop your talent, putting in the endless hours, over many years, to create truly outstanding work, for it to be seen by hardly anyone, if anyone at all, for no remuneration, or are you going to do as little as possible on the writing side, use AI, rip off bad, generic crap, and spend whatever time and energy you devote to "writing" to swimming in buckets of your own cum on social media, creating "reels," being a certain kind of person lapping the taints of similar type of people and getting lapped back, and you get more sales, more readers, for your trash, when you might as well be selling shoeboxes of air? Which doesn't matter anyway. Because quality doesn't matter. It's all other stuff. Anything but quality.

That second person will have more numbers, more followers, more "interest." And anyone--any fucking soulless idiot out there can be that second person. No qualifications are required, save that you suck and are willing to suck. Open to all. Takes nothing.

That's the world. That's who is "rewarded" in this world. Who gets stuff. And in the writing example, if you think some so-called "literary fiction" writer like Laura Van Den Berg is any different from some self-professed cat mom on Instagram who has AI write her a book series ripping off the stupidity that is Heated Rivalry, then you couldn't be more wrong, because it's the same mindset, the same motivation, the same practice, the same trading in what is nothingness with this other bullshit around it, and that other bullshit is what it's all about, what gets whatever done, the stand-in for that person's "work," and why they have whatever they have, whether that's X amount of followers or a gushy review in The New York Times bought and paid for with publishing system grist or a Guggenheim or a MacArthur genius grant or people commenting "OMG I LOVE ur books lol."

There's nothing else in this world right now. That's how it works.