how to become smarter, 4 steps i refuse to begin

becoming smarter, as a goal, sat below ‘do laundry’ on my list for three weeks before i noticed. i moved it up. the laundry is now also unsolved. i looked into the smarter part during a long voicemail from mom.

writing this between 11:03am and whenever the vendor walkthrough wraps. carla is in the walkthrough on the second floor with the procurement people. the AC is making a sound i have decided is friendly.

so the question of the morning, before someone asks me about the spreadsheet i have not opened, is how to become smarter — not the cold-shower, audiobook-on-walks version, but the apartment-with-the-radiator-knocking, what-do-i-do-with-this-brain version. how to become smarter when the brain in question has, on file, a habit of buying a yoga mat and treating the purchase itself as growth. the search has been ongoing. the apartment has been mostly quiet. the findings, such as they are, are below.

how to become smarter: pick four small things you already do — sleeping, ignoring mail, killing appliances, sitting in a quiet room — and notice them harder. the noticing is the work. the appearance of becoming smarter follows the noticing by about a month, and only on weeks you do not announce it to anyone. that is the entire method.

SMARTER. IS. NOT. A. WORKSHOP.

that goes on the wall before we open the steps. people sell you on becoming smarter the way they sell the 2011 movie “limitless” — a glossy two-hour fantasy in which a tablet rewires the protagonist’s entire frontal lobe between scenes — except the tablet, in real life, is a $390 course and the rewiring is a pdf you will never finish. the rest of us are working with the brain we already brought, in an apartment we already pay too much rent on.

how to become smarter, the brief version

the brief version of how to become smarter is that you cannot, really, become smarter on purpose, but you can become noticeably less stupid by paying attention to the four things you do every day without thinking. that’s the trick. you stop being a tourist in your own life.

becoming, in this telling, is a process — small, often invisible to you and entirely visible to other people. nobody who has actually become smarter announces it. they have stopped using a phrase that used to be in their email. they have a shorter answer to “how was your weekend”. that’s the data.

i wrote a post on whether you can tell if you are smart in the first place, which scored me a generous 3 with caffeine. the becoming question is downstream. you cannot become smarter without first noticing what part of you is, presently, the dumb part. mine is, if we’re being literal, the part that decides on weekday mornings before coffee.

and yes — to flag it now — there is the matter of confirmation bias, the operating system underneath all of this. you cannot become smarter while running a brain that grades its own homework. but the operating system is a different post.

step one, the 2 am notebook entry

it is approximately 2 am, in the apartment, and i am awake. this is not a brag. this is most weeks. the apartment, at 2 am, is the only time of day it is fully mine — no neighbor on the other side of the wall, no algorithm pinging — and the brain, in the absence of other audiences, occasionally produces something resembling a thought.

step one is keep a notebook on the kitchen counter. not by the bed. on the counter. you have to walk to it. the walking is, i now believe, more important than the writing. by the time you’ve crossed the apartment to the counter, you’ve already passed the test of whether the thought was real.

my notebook is a $3 spiral-bound thing from a drugstore. inside it, in handwriting that suggests a person mid-stroke, are entries like “the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you” and, on march 14th, just the word “oh.” followed by nothing. they are field notes from a small mammal who lives in this apartment with me. the mammal is, occasionally, the smarter one.

step two, the unopened mail pile, ignored on purpose

step two is about the unopened mail pile, which lives on the small table by the apartment door, and contains two from the bank, one from the gym i no longer attend, three from a charity i donated to once in 2021, and one in a window envelope with a serif font on it that i am, for the moment, treating as a houseplant.

the conventional wisdom on how to become smarter says: face your problems. open the mail. allow yourself to be informed. that wisdom is optimised for people who do not yet have a pile. once you have a pile, the rules change. the pile is doing structural work for the apartment — it has decided, on my behalf, what i can afford to think about this week.

step two, plainly: leave one pile somewhere in your apartment you have decided to ignore on purpose. every two weeks, check whether anything in it escalated itself into your actual life. the things that escalated are real. the rest is noise.

step three, the seventh microwave, observed without judgement

i have killed seven microwaves. this is the seventh. the count is real. it is, in fact, possibly the most stable data point in my apartment — the rent moves, the utilities move, the lady in 1B moves her dog hank around at variable hours, but the microwave count is monotonically increasing and i am the cause.

step three of how to become smarter is to find the one mistake you make repeatedly and, instead of trying to stop, observe it. take notes. become a naturalist on yourself. the seventh microwave taught me three things the first six did not, because the first six i was busy being embarrassed about and the seventh i finally just watched. it taught me: i microwave at the wrong times of day. i microwave things i have already microwaved. i open the door before the timer ends, every time, because the waiting feels like a small humiliation.

this is also where the hot take of the day applies — cereal is soup with rules. i did not invent it. i overheard it. but i have, in this apartment, made a microwave bowl of oatmeal and a microwave bowl of soup with the exact same gesture and the exact same timer and have begun to suspect the categories were lying to me. cereal, soup, oatmeal — same family, different paperwork. the microwave does not pretend the categories matter.

how to become smarter, in this step, is not about microwaves. it is about whatever your seven-microwave equivalent is. the recurring small stupidity. observe it. the fix arrives later, on its own, when you are not looking.

step four, the apartment quiet enough to think

step four requires the apartment quiet for a stretch of time long enough to be uncomfortable. fifteen minutes is the minimum. forty is better. the goal is to make the apartment so quiet that you can hear the radiator and the fridge and, possibly, the small voice that lives behind your sternum and says things you have been ignoring.

most of the apartment is not quiet. a podcast is running. a tab is playing a video i forgot about. the lady from 1B’s dog hank, periodically. the algorithm, which is technically silent but produces a psychic noise the brain treats as audio. step four is turning all of it off, sitting on the couch — the one with the third yoga mat under it, which i have not unrolled since 2023, which is, possibly, evolving — and listening to the apartment do nothing.

the first ten minutes are predictably terrible. the brain produces a list of every embarrassing thing you have done since 2014. you let it. you do not write any of it down. by minute fifteen, the brain runs out of low-quality material, and starts producing something else — and the something else, on a good day, is the actual thought you have been needing to have. that’s the apartment doing its work. that’s the becoming.

verdict, becoming is a process i refuse to begin

the vendor walkthrough is still going. someone in the corridor laughed in a way that sounded performative. the seventh microwave is still alive, technically. i’ll be home by 6.

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