stupid — i would like to disagree

the word arrived in my inbox attached to my own name. dave used it. casual, like seasoning. i spent the rest of the morning auditing whether it fit. it does not. i am abundant in ideas, most of them rerouted through a microwave that no longer exists. that is a different category. i would like the record updated.

parked, screen open, coffee within reach. carla took the stairs to the all-hands twenty minutes ago, slide deck in hand, slides nobody opens later. i have, give or take, until 11:23.

so. stupid. the word has been thrown at me on at least four occasions this month, twice by the same person, once by an algorithm, and once by myself, in a parked car, at 2am, after an event we will discuss in due course. i am not going to take the word lying down. i am going to, instead, take it sitting up, at this desk, with a coffee, and dismantle it from the inside.

stupid: a label most often used by people who have just lost an argument, applied to people who have, in fact, won it. in modern usage, stupid describes either a single act with regrettable consequences or a sustained pattern of acts with regrettable consequences. i would argue the word is currently doing the work of about six smaller, more accurate words, and is therefore overworked and under-defined. and yes — i looked it up.

STUPID. IS. NOT. A DIAGNOSIS.

that has to be on the books before we open the topic up. people deploy this word like it’s a verdict, like it ends the conversation, like the person on the receiving end is supposed to accept it and go home. i, on this wednesday, decline to go home. i am at my desk.

stupid_means_in_the_dictionary_and_why_the_dictionary_is_wrong”>what stupid means in the dictionary, and why the dictionary is wrong

the closest thing to a definition i could shake out of the internet was something about being slow on the uptake, with bonus points for confidence. it was three lines. the entry was three lines long. three lines, for a word that ruins relationships and ends careers and gets shouted at people on highways. the dictionary, in this matter, is doing the bare minimum. for the record, Forrest Gump (1994) is the canonical reference here.

look at the structure of the definition. “having or showing”. that’s a state and a display, joined by an “or”, as if they were the same thing. they are not. you can be without common sense privately. you cannot be called stupid for it until somebody, somewhere, sees it. that’s not a definition. that’s an audience requirement.

and “common sense” — common to whom. the people who say “common sense” usually mean “the sense common to people who agree with me”. their common sense is not common. it is local. it is small. it is, in some cases, the size of one apartment. stefan, who once held forth on a wine i had brought from the bodega downstairs, considered his palate “common sense”. it was not. it was stefan.

the case against the word stupid, made by someone it has been used against

i am not, i should say, opposed to harsh words on principle. i quite like a harsh word. fool i can live with. idiot is, in fact, my brand. moron has the dignity of specificity. stupid, by contrast, is a verdict pretending to be an observation. it is, structurally, dishonest. and i don’t have time for dishonest words.

the case against the word, as i would write it on a sticky note:

1. it ends conversations that should continue. the moment somebody calls you stupid, the discussion is over. you cannot defend yourself without sounding stupid in defending yourself.
2. it confuses event with character. a single act becomes a permanent label. you put a fork in the wrong appliance once, and somebody, somewhere, files a card with your name on it.
3. it is asymmetrical. the person who calls you stupid does not, by social convention, have to defend the assessment. you, however, are expected to defend yourself against it.
4. it absorbs better words. thoughtless, hasty, distracted, mistaken, uninformed — all have died slow deaths because stupid got there first with a heavier boot.

i rest, for the moment, my case.

stupid vs ignorant — they are not the same thing, and i’m not even sorry

this is the distinction nobody makes. ignorant means “does not know”. that’s it. ignorant is a state of information. it is correctable. you read a book, you ask a friend, you spend a sober afternoon with whatever website knows things about that subject, and you stop being ignorant about that one thing. ignorance has an exit door.

stupid, as the word is currently used, has no exit door. nobody who calls you stupid expects you to fix it by tuesday. they have placed you in a category and locked the category. that’s the part i find genuinely offensive — not as someone who has been called stupid (i have, many times, including by myself), but as someone who believes accusations should at least come with a path back out.

so when somebody calls you stupid for not knowing something, what they actually mean is ignorant — and the difference is enormous. ignorance is a problem with a solution. stupid, in their mouth, is a permanent verdict. people stop asking questions in meetings because they have learned that not knowing a thing gets you called stupid, when in fact it should only get you called ignorant about that one thing for now. but that’s too long for a hallway insult, and therefore loses to stupid by simple economics. dumb is the cousin word, slightly softer, deployed when the insulter wants a mug-friendly version of the same verdict — and which, on close inspection, has its own separate problems i’ve worked through elsewhere.

examples of stupid that turned out to be visionary, mostly mine

i have, over the years, done a number of things that were, at the time, classified as stupid by various witnesses, and which have turned out, on review, to be either neutral, good, or in one case mildly visionary. i will share three. the others i’m saving for a book i will not write.

example one. i once bought a fork. one fork. not a set. people called this stupid. the argument, at the supermarket counter, was that nobody buys one fork. i pointed out, calmly, that i live alone, that i eat one meal at a time, and that the other forks would simply sit in a drawer judging me. that fork, whom i later named sparky, has been my only fork for years. sparky has a small black mark on the tine from an incident we are not currently discussing. one fork was not stupid. one fork was correct.

example two. i bought a third yoga mat in 2023. i already had two, both unused, both leaning behind a door. people said: a third is stupid. i said: this one will be different. it has been different. it has not been used at all, where the first two were used a combined three times. the third yoga mat has, since 2023, lived under my couch, possibly evolving. that is not stupid. that is, depending on your view of evolution, either patient or scientific.

two examples. two convictions, both defended. carla just walked past my desk. let me move along.

carla looked at my screen for half a second. i think she saw the word “stupid” in 48-point bold and assumed it was, somehow, a memo. i did not correct her. i am back. let’s continue.

why am i so stupid — a question i refuse to entertain

this is a search query, by the way. people type “why am i so stupid” into a search bar approximately a million times a month. i have seen the numbers. they were depressing in a quiet way. i know why people type it. they type it at 2am, in the dark, after one of those silent kitchen evenings when something they did during the day catches up with them and bites them softly on the neck.

i refuse to entertain the question, on principle. the question itself is a trap. it accepts the verdict. it negotiates the size of the prison cell instead of denying that there is a cell. “why am i so stupid” agrees that you are stupid and then asks for context. that is not a question. that is an admission with a question mark glued to the end.

the better question, if you must ask one at 2am in a parked car in front of an apartment block whose lights you remember being on, is: “who decided this, and why was their voice the loudest in my head”. that question has an answer. the answer is usually a person you can name, and it is rarely yourself.

i once spent twenty minutes in a parked car asking myself the wrong version of this question. the parked car had a coffee in the cup holder that was, by then, cold. the radio was off. i drove home. i did not, that night, find the better question. i found it later, on a wednesday, at this desk, accidentally, while trying to write something else. that is how these things tend to arrive. by accident. by elbow.

the hot take — and you should defend yourself too

here is the take. i hold it and i will keep holding it because nobody has yet brought an argument that survives contact with my coffee:

mondays are objectively better than fridays.

i know what you’re going to say — that fridays mean rest, that fridays mean release, that fridays mean a small drink on a small balcony. all of that is true and all of that is exactly the problem. fridays are the day you spend actively, painfully, looking forward to two days of not having to be at this desk. friday is anticipation. anticipation is a form of suffering.

monday, by contrast, is honest. monday looks at you and says: you are here. the week is here. nothing is being saved for later. you are inside it. monday has no anxiety because the thing that fridays dread is, on a monday, simply happening. you cannot dread the present. you can only do it.

also: monday coffee tastes better. that is empirical. that is, on this desk, observable.

this take has been, to date, called stupid by approximately eleven people, including someone who calls himself a productivity expert online and who, i noticed, posts most of his tweets on a friday at 4:48pm. the productivity bro types do not get to vote on the value of mondays. they have outsourced their mondays to a routine. routines are not living. routines are a kind of insurance against living. i am not insured. i am here. i rest my case.

what to do when someone calls you stupid

i have, over my decades of being called stupid by various people in various rooms, developed a small protocol. it is not foolproof. but it costs nothing, and it has, on at least three occasions, saved me a worse afternoon.

step one: do not argue immediately. the person who has just called you stupid is not prepared to lose the argument. they are prepared to repeat the word. arguing immediately gives them the chance to say “see, this is what i mean”.

step two: repeat the word back, slowly. “stupid?” — flat, not aggressive. say it like you’re confirming a delivery time. nine times out of ten, the person calling you stupid does not have a backup sentence. “well, not stupid stupid”, they will say. there it is. the prosecution has just weakened its own case.

step three: ask for the specific event. “what specifically was stupid”. this is devastating. most people who use the word cannot, when pressed, identify an event. they can identify a feeling. you have just moved the conversation from a verdict to a fact-finding mission.

step four: do not, at any point, agree. not even slightly. not even with a small “i mean, maybe”. the maybe is the door. they will walk through it and you will spend the rest of the afternoon trying to close it.

step five: let it go in your head, not in the conversation. meaning: don’t dwell on it after the fact. don’t write a long post about it on company time. and yet here we are.

verdict — history will be kind, probably

carla is back. she has not said anything. she made a small humming sound. i’m closing this in three sentences. maybe four. let’s see.

sparky the fork is in the drawer. the third yoga mat lives, lately, beneath the sofa. the all-hands has wrapped. the algorithm has, today, called me stupid four times — twice in ads, once in a podcast intro, and once in a hallway voice that wasn’t, i now realise, addressed to me. i was just walking past. i took it personally anyway. it’s the kind of week i’m having.

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