how stupid am i test — how to take it and discard it, in steps

the third yoga mat has been under the couch for seventeen months. i know this because i counted backward from the day i bought it. the test online wanted ten minutes of my time. the mat wanted nothing. one of these is more honest about my behavior than the other. steps to take and discard the test follow.

writing this from my desk on a wednesday at 8:14am. carla just headed up to the all-hands on the third floor with a slide deck the size of a small novel. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning. the kitchen at home is, as we speak, exactly as i left it.

so. the how stupid am i test. i clicked one. i answered the questions. i scrolled past the ad for a mattress and another ad for a different mattress. the result said, in cheerful color, that i scored “above average for a thursday”. this is the level of insight on offer. the test, i can now report, is the easy part. discarding it correctly is the actual work.

step one, take the test, briefly

find one. this is the easy part. type the words into a search bar and the internet will hand you eleven of them, sorted by how aggressive the ad placement is. pick the second one down. the first one is always sponsored. the third one is always a dating app pretending to be a quiz. the second one is, statistically, the least insulting.

do the questions in one sitting. do not pause to consider. the how stupid am i test is calibrated for fast clicking, not reflection. if you reflect, the test breaks. it cannot tell the difference between “i don’t know” and “i am thinking about whether i know”, and it scores both as the same shrug. quick clicks. one pass. ten minutes maximum, ideally five.

i did mine while standing at the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle. the kettle is, in my house, the only timer i trust. it boiled before the test ended, which i took as a result in itself. the official score, when it arrived, was a number followed by a small graph. the graph had a curve. the curve had me on a slope i’m not going to describe in detail because i already, this is broader stupid territory, dismantled the word in a separate long-form refusal of the word “stupid” on a wednesday last month.

step two, examine the results, more briefly

the result will be a percentage and a sentence. the percentage will be in the seventies because the test is designed to make you feel mildly clever and click “share”. the sentence will compare you to “the average user”, which is a population that does not exist anywhere except inside the test’s own database. the average user is a phantom built out of everyone who ever clicked the wrong answer first and then corrected themselves on the second pass.

do not share the result. this is critical. the moment you share it, you have agreed that the number means something. it does not. it means that on a thursday in june at 9:48am, a stranger’s algorithm decided you were 73% sensible. tomorrow, on a different test, with the same brain, you would be 41% sensible or 89% sensible depending on which mattress they were trying to sell you that morning.

cross-reference the result against your own life if you must. but be warned: the test is not built for cross-referencing. the test is built for confirmation, and the bias built in is that you, the test-taker, want a number that flatters. on the topic of how a quiz can quietly endorse what you already believed about yourself, see my earlier notes on confirmation bias as a kitchen-table phenomenon. the test is a small, friendly version of that bias, dressed up as a measurement.

step three, the third yoga mat is the real test, under the sofa

here is what nobody tells you. the online test is not the test. the online test is the warm-up. the actual test is in your apartment. it has been in your apartment for months, possibly years. it is, in my case, a third yoga mat, purchased in 2023, used exactly once, and now living under the sofa where it has been quietly converting itself into an archaeological layer.

that mat is the result. that mat is, in fact, all the result you need. if you bought a third yoga mat thinking the third one would be the one that finally sticks, you can put down the quiz. you have already failed and passed the only version of the exam that grades you correctly. it is graded on a single question: did you, knowing yourself, still buy a third one? yes. you did. so did i. we are both, by this measure, exactly as stupid as we suspect, and exactly as hopeful as we’d rather not admit.

i pulled the mat out yesterday evening to confirm it was still there. it was. it has a small dust ridge along one edge where the air from the kitchen vent has been routed against it for seventeen months. the rest of the surface looked exactly as it did the afternoon i unwrapped it. no scuffs. no creases. it is, to all appearances, brand new and also extremely old, in the way only deeply ignored objects manage. i then, gently, pushed it back. the mat does not need attention. the mat needs continuity.

step four through six, the discard protocol

step four. close the tab without saving the result. do not bookmark it. do not screenshot it. do not, under any circumstances, email it to yourself “for later”. later does not exist for tabs of this category. later is the place where the unopened mail pile lives, and that pile, by the way, has its own postcode at this point.

step five. do not retake the test on a different day to “see if you’ve improved”. you have not improved. tests of this kind do not measure things that improve. they measure your willingness to click. the more you click, the more honest your answer is to the question “how susceptible am i to a free quiz on a thursday morning”. which, again, is the actual question.

step six. do not, and i cannot stress this enough, ask a friend to take the test so you can compare. dave would do it instantly, and dave would score higher, and dave would mention the score every six weeks for the rest of the year. avoid this. the test is a private failure or it is nothing. shared, it becomes a wedding speech topic, and you will hear about it at every gathering until the heat death of the small social circle in which it was first deployed.

that is the headline. that is the bumper sticker version. carry it with you. paste it, mentally, over the next quiz that promises to grade your inner workings in five minutes for free.

step seven, the close

at this point you have taken the quiz, looked at the score, ignored the score, found the third yoga mat, looked at the third yoga mat, and pushed the third yoga mat back where it was. you have done a complete loop. the loop took, in my case, the better part of a wednesday evening. it cost nothing. it taught me one specific thing, which is that i bought a yoga mat in 2023 and have not, on any subsequent day, become a person who uses it. that is data. that is, in fact, the only data the exercise produced.

you can now go on with your life. or, if you’d prefer, you can sit on the floor next to the sofa with the mat half-pulled out and stare at it for a while. i did this for eleven minutes. the eleven minutes were, structurally, the most honest part of the exercise. i was not being graded. i was not being timed. i was not being shown an ad for a different mat. it was just me and a mat and the dust ridge along one edge.

i would not recommend doing this on a sunday. sundays compound. a sunday spent staring at the third yoga mat under the sofa will produce a kind of low-frequency sadness that the test, even in its worst-rated version, cannot match.

verdict, the how stupid am i test is not the test, the mat is

so here is where i’d like to land this. the how stupid am i test is, in the end, a small piece of internet entertainment dressed up as a diagnostic. i have nothing against entertainment dressed up as diagnostic. i have, in fact, a great deal of sympathy for it. but it is not, in any meaningful sense, the test. the test is the third yoga mat under the sofa. the test is the seventh microwave i bought after the previous six met various ends i’d rather not litigate this morning. the test is the unopened mail pile that has, by the way, achieved a small geological character of its own.

none of those tests issue a percentage at the end. all of them tell you something the online quiz cannot, which is what you have actually done with your years, as opposed to what you would do if a stranger asked you a multiple-choice question with three flattering answers and one obviously wrong one.

the test is also, importantly, free of the small dishonesty the quiz is built on. the quiz wants you to feel a certain way about yourself for thirty seconds. the mat wants nothing. the microwave wanted nothing. the mail pile wants, if anything, less. these are honest objects. the quiz is a flattering one.

i should mention, also, that every meeting could be a 3-line email — same logic, applied to a different category. the meeting promises a deliberation. the email would do the work. the meeting is a quiz that flatters everyone who attends. the email is the mat. one is the test. one is the test.

somebody, somewhere, has filmed the long version of this. the 2006 mike judge film idiocracy grades an entire civilization on a quiz it has stopped noticing it is taking. the film is funnier than my mat is, but the mat is closer to home. the mat is in my apartment. the film is on a screen.

i would also suggest, if you have read this far and still want a number, that you cross-reference the test result against the small overlap between smart and stupid in everyday life. that piece does the work the quiz refuses to do. it does not give you a percentage. it gives you a category, and then it lets you decide whether you live in it.

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