dunning kruger complex, the one i don’t have

sarah jogs past my window at the same pace she does everything, which is the pace of a person who knows exactly how much she does. it is 9:14am on a wednesday. carla took an early train and slacked the team a single sentence — “running point on procurement, back after lunch, do not panic” — which means i have, by the kindest reading of the calendar, until 1pm to investigate my dunning kruger complex from the second-floor desk i have been issued.

writing this from my desk. the AC cycles every six minutes. i counted. that is what a dunning kruger complex looks like, on a wednesday.

i typed the phrase into the search bar at 4:47pm wednesday, in my apartment, on a laptop balanced on a stack of coasters i don’t use because i don’t have guests. the apartment is, by default, quiet — a feature of living alone, until the silence becomes the room and you start typing things into search bars.

dunning kruger complex: the unstable suspicion that you are smarter than everyone in the room while simultaneously being the only person in the room. it is not the dunning-kruger effect — it is the lived-in version, the one with laundry on the chair and a search history. one is a graph. the other is a wednesday at 2am with a labeled water bottle on a windowsill that doesn’t belong to you.

sarah, the labeled water bottle, and the eleven o’clock mark

sarah lives in 3C. she runs marathons (plural — i have stopped counting; she has not). she listens to podcasts at 1.5x because, overheard at the elevator, “the hosts speak too slowly for my brain”. she has a 401k-equivalent that is not a metaphor for anything. sarah is not my boss. sarah has never been my boss. i would like that on the record because the universe keeps sliding her into the boss-shaped hole in my head and i keep correcting it.

this morning at 8:47am, i passed her in the lobby. she was holding a water bottle. the bottle had hour markers printed down the side. 7am. 9am. 11am. 1pm. 3pm. each line had a small encouraging note next to it, in serif font, the kind people use when they want hydration to feel like a book. the 9am line had a smiley face. she was already past it. she was ahead of her own bottle.

i stood holding nothing. i had not had water that day. possibly not on wednesday either. the dunning-kruger effect in its purest form is what happened next, which is that i thought, looking at sarah and her labeled bottle: i could do that. i could do that easily. i just choose not to.

WATER. IS. THE. MOST. OVERRATED. DRINK.

i stand by it. coffee is achievement. tea is wet leaves. and water is the thing they tell you to drink when the doctor has run out of suggestions. i have, in eight years, drunk water exclusively when i ran out of other things to drink. i am not dead. that is, by my reading, evidence.

the 47 tabs and what they were doing at 4:47pm

at 2am wednesday i had 47 browser tabs open. the count was: 11 about pension math, 6 about hydration (a betrayal), 4 about whether complex in psychology means what i thought it meant, 3 about a movie i was never going to watch, 2 about a man named kernberg whose pdf i could not open, and the rest were single-use tabs i opened to settle a sub-argument with myself and forgot to close.

tab 23 had been open for nine days. tab 23 was a dunning kruger graph i kept meaning to understand. i did not, in nine days, scroll down on it. the graph was the same graph i had seen four times before. i was, in some sense, collecting it. like a stamp.

the complex has a private symptom that papers don’t measure: the tab count. you can tell what a person is uncertain about by counting how many tabs they keep open about it. i was, by tab count alone, deeply uncertain about water, money, and whether i was the protagonist or a side character in my own apartment.

the 2am revelation, with the microwave glowing in the next room

around 2:14am i had what i now call a revelation, which is the word i use for a thought i had at 2am that, at 2pm, would be a normal thought. it was this: every person i know who is doing better than me is doing one specific small thing on a schedule. sarah and her bottle. tom and his volvo’s tire pressure. mom and her sunday call. mike, even, with his refusal to file (a schedule of refusal is still a schedule).

i, by contrast, am running on a vibe. the vibe is: the day will figure itself out because i, the operator, am present.

the kitchen at 2am has a particular quality of light. the microwave clock is the brightest thing. the microwave is the seventh i have killed — established record, we move on. the third yoga mat is, technically, under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. at 2am the yoga mat is a colleague.

last wednesday at 11:02am i had passed sarah in the corridor and she had been drinking, with the focus of a small surgeon, from the line marked 11. two minutes late on her own schedule, and correcting it. in real time.

“complex” — the word the dictionary refused to settle

i looked up complex. the dictionary i don’t name said, calmly, that complex meant either (a) a building made of several interconnected parts, like an apartment complex, or (b) a related set of partly repressed ideas which cause psychic conflict.

both, frankly, applied. i live in an apartment complex. i also have, by the second definition, partly repressed ideas about whether i am intelligent, which cause psychic conflict. the dictionary did not specify whether having both at once was a discount or a surcharge.

i am not citing kernberg. i could not open the pdf. if a man’s pdf will not open at 2am, that is the man telling you he has nothing for you tonight.

why this is not the same as the meaning of the effect itself

the effect is a curve. the complex is a wednesday. the effect describes a population. the complex is, specifically, the inhabitant of one apartment, alone with 47 tabs, watching a neighbor drink water on schedule and feeling, briefly and without warrant, capable of more.

the academic definition of the effect is about poor self-assessment. the lived complex is about good self-assessment that is also incorrect. you can know, with precision, that you are below average at hydration, and still walk past sarah’s bottle thinking i could do that. precision and wrongness, together, in the same body. this distinction does not appear in any test, including the one i did not finish on tab 31.

findings, from a man with no bottle

so what did the 2am session resolve. nothing. i closed the laptop at 2:43am. i drank, out of spite, half a glass of water from the tap. it tasted like the building.

the dunning kruger complex, in one sentence, is the small private space between knowing you are bad at something and believing, despite the evidence, that you could be good at it on a wednesday if you simply chose to. nobody is grading. the choice is purely interior. that is what makes it a complex and not a curve. curves require a population. complexes require only an apartment, a clock, and someone jogging past your window on schedule.

for cinema that fits the mood, the 2006 mike judge film about a man who wakes up the smartest person on earth is the closest popular culture comes to the inverse of this. in the film, the world’s average dropped to meet the protagonist. in my apartment, the average stayed exactly where it is, and i am the one who slid.

the printer on the second floor is, allegedly, fixed. carla is still off-site. i have, by the kindest reading, two more hours.

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