idiot people — 1 thorough investigation

idiot people, as a category, are best understood through a comparative table, which is what the third yoga mat suggested before going silent for three weeks. the man across the hall enters the conversation uninvited, a spoon is structurally a smaller bowl, and these are related claims.

i am writing this from my desk on a wednesday. carla is upstairs in the all-hands on the third floor, where someone is presenting a slide about “alignment”, and the rest of the morning is mine to misuse. that gives me, by a generous estimate, fifty minutes before she returns with that face she makes when the agenda ran long.

so i opened a fresh document and started drawing categories. categories of people who have, at one point or another in my own kitchen, been called an idiot. some of those people are me. most of them are me, actually. that is the fairness of this investigation. nobody gets out clean.

writing this from my desk. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor. i opened the document called “categories” and i’m not closing it until i have a winner.

before any of that, the proper context. this whole exercise sits inside a longer thing i wrote on what we mean by the word “idiot” and who keeps using it, which is the larger pillar this little table belongs under. read that one if you want the long history. read this one if you want the short list.

idiot people, the categories i drew up

i did this on the kitchen counter on tuesday night. i had a notebook and a pen and the third yoga mat was visible from the counter, rolled up, leaning, judging. i wrote “idiot people” at the top of the page and underlined it twice. then i wrote “subcategories” and underlined that once. this is what real research looks like.

the list i ended up with was longer than the page. i had to write sideways. some of the entries were just names of friends, which felt unkind, so i replaced them with descriptions. “the friend who finishes other people’s sentences wrong” became one row. “the man across the hall who plays bass at 11pm” became another. that one is real. that one is the_4b_guy.

the third yoga mat, briefly, is a storyline that runs through this whole investigation. i bought it in 2023. it is the third because the first two are also somewhere, possibly in the same closet, possibly in landfill, the records are unclear. i have used the third one once. it is, structurally, a rolled-up piece of foam that lives under my couch and reminds me of an intention.

the comparison table, types and tells

here it is. i drew this on the back of a delivery menu. i transcribed it here with minor edits for dignity.

this is, you understand, a working draft. i may add rows. i may merge rows. i refuse, on principle, to weight any row higher than another. all forms of being an idiot are valid. that is the whole position.

i looked at the list for a while. i recognized myself in five of six. the one i did not recognize was the_4b_guy, and i suspect that is because i have never had to live next to me. the people who have lived next to me may have a different table altogether. they have not been invited to contribute.

the 4b guy and where he fits

the_4b_guy is the man in apartment 4b. that is not his name. i do not know his name. he has a bass guitar and a small amplifier and what i have come to think of as a complete absence of clock awareness. he plays at 11pm on a friday. he plays at 11pm on a thursday. on weekends he switches to 1am, which is, somehow, more polite, because by then i was awake anyway.

i have never knocked on his door. this is a personal failure i am willing to disclose. the closest i came was a note i drafted in my head while making toast. the note said “hello, i am the man in 5b, the bass is great, please do it earlier in the evening, i go to bed at a time that would embarrass a child”. i never wrote it down. i never slid it under his door. the note exists only in my head, where it has been refined for fourteen months.

he qualifies, in my framework, as the purest example of an idiot people-type. he is doing something he believes is reasonable. he is wrong about it. he is not going to find out unless someone tells him, and nobody is going to tell him, because we are all the_4b_guy in some hallway somewhere.

WE ARE ALL SOMEONE’S 4B GUY.

the dm regret, the muted group chat

two of the rows on the table are mine in a way that hurts to admit. the first is the dm i regret. the second is the group chat i muted in 2022 and have not unmuted since.

the dm i regret was sent on a wednesday at 1:14am to a person i had not spoken to in two years. it was three sentences long. the first sentence was fine. the second sentence was a question. the third sentence was an emoji, which i don’t even use, which suggests i thought i was being charming. i was not being charming. the response came eleven days later. the response was “ha”. just “ha”. no period. that is the worst possible answer to a 1am dm. it leaves you nowhere to stand.

the group chat i muted is a different kind of failure. i muted it because there were eighteen people in it and four of them sent voice notes. voice notes are, in my view, the dishwasher of communication: a cabinet that judges you. i muted the chat. i told myself i would check in weekly. i checked in monthly. i checked in quarterly. now i check in only when somebody in the chat dies, and even then i am the last to know. this is a thing i intend to fix. the third yoga mat is also a thing i intend to fix. neither will be fixed.

if you want a longer treatment of the financial version of this — which is a similar shape, mute the chat, ignore the bill, hope for the best — see why people who think they’re smarter than they are tend to do this kind of thing in the spreadsheet too. the dunning effect, in plain words, is what i do every time i open a tax form.

the spoon as smaller bowl, briefly relevant

i need to make space here for one of my favorite hot takes, because it is structurally the same argument as the table above. the spoon is a smaller bowl. redundant. i stand by this. i have stood by it at dinner parties. i have stood by it alone in my kitchen. i will stand by it now in print.

what i mean is: a spoon and a bowl are, in essential geometry, the same object at different scales. the spoon holds soup. the bowl holds soup. one is just smaller and has a stick on it. nobody ever explains why we need both. we are told we need both. we accept it. the cutlery industry is laughing at us.

this is relevant to idiot people because the spoon-as-bowl person — the one who eats yogurt straight from a measuring cup, the one who drinks cereal from a mug — is doing the rational thing and being judged for it. the rest of us, with our properly stacked dish drainers, are the idiots. we just have it backward, the way the entire culture has it backward about what we even mean when we say someone is dumb. the word “dumb” is doing a lot of work in that sentence and very little of it accurate.

the case for self-categorization

the entire point of this exercise — the table, the list, the_4b_guy, the spoon — is that the only useful kind of categorization is the one you do to yourself. you can’t do it to other people. you don’t have the tape. you don’t know what their tuesday looks like. you don’t know how many microwaves they’ve killed (it is almost certainly fewer than seven, but again, you don’t know).

self-categorization is what the third yoga mat is for, in my house. it sits there and waits. it does not say “you are lazy”. it says “you bought me, and that was a kind of intention, and intentions are also data, and i am here when you are ready, which is fine, we can wait”. it is the most patient object back at my place. the microwave, by contrast, is openly judgmental. the microwave hums when it disapproves. the microwave knows what i did with the fork.

there is a whole genre of british tv on this premise — karl pilkington in “An Idiot Abroad” wandering the wonders of the world refusing to be impressed, which i submit is also a form of self-categorization, the strongest one i have on tape. and there is the longer movie version of the same idea, “Idiocracy”, which is a comparative study of idiot people across two centuries, played for laughs that no longer feel like laughs. both belong on the table somewhere. i didn’t have room.

verdict, the categories are mine, also accurate

so. the table is finished, more or less. it has six rows. five of the six describe me. one of them describes the_4b_guy, who will never read this, which is a relief, because he would only argue that the bass guitar at 11pm is jazz, technically, and jazz can’t have rules.

my conclusion, drawn from the kitchen counter on tuesday and finalized at the desk on wednesday at, let me check, 10:38am: idiot people are not a category we apply to others. they are a category we eventually find ourselves in, alphabetically, by accident, while looking for something else in a drawer.

that is the comparison. that is the table. the third yoga mat lives under my couch in a state of polite refusal. the fork is still a small mark on the inside of microwave seven. dave keeps the list, and the list, the last time i asked, had me in three columns and rising.

carla just walked past my desk on her way back from the third floor. she did not look at the screen. she did not need to. she has, i suspect, her own table, and i am on it.

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