signs that you are smart — 1 fairly sure investigation

the signs that you are smart, when laid out as a numbered list, look suspiciously identical to the signs that you are simply tired. i’m fairly sure the productivity bro is quietly selling both products, in the very same email, with two different subject lines and slightly different fonts on the buttons. the open rate, presumably, varies.

friday, 11:47am, desk. carla is on the third floor for the vendor walkthrough and a tray of muffins that, going by the calendar invite, is the actual agenda. i have, generously, until the deck loops back around to slide one.

the deeper bug under any list of signs that you are smart is the same bug under most lists about ourselves: we read them looking for the verdict we already keep in a drawer. for the long-form note on that drawer specifically, see the pillar piece on confirmation bias, drafted at this same desk. the bias is the engine. these signs are the dashboard stickers.

signs that you are smart: a recurring listicle that catalogues habits — misquoting books in arguments, rereading sent emails, keeping a notebook for skipped meetings, looking up common words you already know — and presents them as cognitive proof. they are mostly proof of mild anxiety performed quietly at a desk, which is, perhaps generously, the same thing on a friday.

SMART. IS. NOT. A. DIAGNOSIS. IT. IS. A. MOOD.

1. signs that you are smart, brief

the listicle version of signs that you are smart, as collected by every wellness blog with a sidebar, runs to about a dozen items. half are flattering. half are inventory. all are designed to be read quickly on a phone, in line at the post office, by a person who would rather be anywhere else. i know because i have been that person, on a saturday, in line, holding a package i had been avoiding for nine working days.

that is the lugar of this whole investigation: the post office i avoid. the building exists. the building is two blocks away. the building is, by my own running estimate, the single largest geographical fact of my anxiety. mom mailed me a sweater in march. the slip is on the fridge. the slip is curling at the corners. the slip is, by the count i keep running, the most consistent calendar item in my apartment.

the patron saint of the genre is the 1988 film “rain man” with dustin hoffman, in which a man counts toothpicks on a diner floor and the rest of the scene assumes genius. the takeaway nobody takes is that genius, on screen, is mostly a man unable to function at a normal counter. the takeaway everyone takes is that they, personally, count toothpicks. i count slips on the fridge. it is not the same.

2. sign one, you misquote books to defend a point

the first item on every list is “you read for pleasure”. the truer item, in my experience, is “you misquote books to defend a point you already had”. i do this constantly. dave called on tuesday and i quoted dostoevsky at him about insurance. dostoevsky did not write about insurance. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it.

misquoting is, at the kitchen counter level, a form of confidence. for a sharper version of why misquoting feels true even when the receipts disagree, see the definitional note on confirmation bias from a psychology angle, drafted at this same desk. that note is gentler than this one. it explains the mechanism. this one is, at best, the symptom log.

the practical test, if you want one: ask yourself when you last looked up a quote you had already used in three arguments. if the answer is never, congratulations. you are smart, in the listicle sense. you are also, by mike’s reading at the corner of the bar, “fully cooked”. mike has not filed a tax return since 2019. mike says fully cooked is a compliment. mike is, on this, alone.

3. sign two, dave called and you let it ring

the second item on the canonical list is “you process before you respond”. the kitchen-counter version is: dave called, twice, and you watched the screen until it stopped. dave is the only acquaintance i owe money to with a name attached. three hundred dollars, since 2022, from an emergency that was not technically an emergency. dave knows. dave does not bring it up. dave calls anyway. dave called this morning at 9:14am while i was, by my own claim, in a meeting i was not, in fact, in.

letting a friend’s call ring out is not, in any honest reading, intelligence. it is admin. it is the admin of a person who has decided the cost of answering is higher than the cost of the silence. mom would say “you’re going to call him back, right”. mom always says that. mom always already knows. the answer this morning was “soon”. the answer is always soon. soon is a unit of time invented by the person not making the call.

this overlaps with the entire architecture of the wip 2022 list, which exists for the same reason: the cost of picking the investigation up has been calculated, at some level, as higher than the cost of leaving it shut. dave is in the investigation too, in lowercase, under “owe — three hundred — soon”.

4. sign three, mom approves quietly

the third item is the one nobody prints in the listicles, but it is, in my honest opinion, the single most reliable sign of intelligence in any adult i know: your mother approves of the things you do without telling you, in front of you, while you are doing them.

mom calls every sunday. mom does not call on the other six days, as a rule. on the rare wednesday or friday she does call, it is because something on the news made her think of me, and what she wants to confirm is that i’m not on the news for the same reason. mom does not say “you are smart”. mom says “you sound okay”. those are, near as i can tell, the same sentence in two different fonts.

the productivity bro, the one i never name, posted a thread last week titled “twelve signs your mother is proud of you”. one of the items was “she sends you links”. mom does not send me links. mom sent me a sweater in march. the sweater is at the post office i avoid. the sweater is, by definition, the most patient sign of approval in my life. the sweater is wool, allegedly. i won’t know for sure until january.

5. sign four, the wip 2022 list keeps you company

the fourth item, on every reputable list of signs that you are smart, is “you have a lot of ideas”. the corollary nobody prints is “you have finished none of them”. the wip 2022 list, on this very machine, is a text file with forty-six items. none have moved in fourteen months. one is a working title for a podcast about kettles. one is a business plan involving a kettle. one says, in lowercase, “the kettle thing — finally”. the kettle thing is, definitionally, what i open the investigation to not do.

a list of unstarted ideas is not a sign of intelligence. it is a sign that the act of naming a thing felt similar enough to doing the thing that the brain accepted the trade. (the brain is, on this point, my closest collaborator and my most consistent enemy.) i open the investigation most fridays around lunch. i scroll. i nod at item eleven. i close the investigation. the investigation is, by the count i keep running, the longest-running relationship in my apartment.

this is also the workshop where the post-it about ironing lives. “ironing is a class war i refuse to fight.” i wrote that down, on a tuesday in 2023, and pinned it to the investigation in lowercase. i still believe it. i have not ironed anything since. the shirts are folded. the folds are doing the work the iron used to. the wip list watches.

6. sign five, the seventh microwave keeps you humble

the fifth item, the one that almost never appears in print but ought to, is the inventory of objects you have already broken in your own apartment. mine is led by the seventh microwave, which is the seventh because i have, by my own honest tally, killed six. one with a fork, allegedly an experiment. one with a metallic-trim plate. one with a slightly damp dishtowel left on top during a long defrost. one with what the manual called “a sustained empty cycle”. one with — and this still costs me sleep — a hard-boiled egg.

the seventh is, on a good day, observed but not used. it sits on the counter, plugged in, glowing the wrong color from a small panel that won’t reset. it heats things, sometimes, when it feels like it. that is the household summary of an intelligent adult: a useful object, slightly broken, kept for what it could do if asked carefully.

the broader principle is not that smart people break appliances. the broader principle is that smart people, by their own honest accounting, can name every appliance they have killed and the verb they killed it with. i can. dave can name his. mom, who has never killed an appliance in her life, calls this “the part of you that worries me”. mom is not wrong. mom is rarely wrong. mom is, in the long run, the appliance audit i can never quite turn off.

7. verdict, the signs are evasions

looked at honestly, the so-called signs that you are smart are mostly signs that you have learned to perform competence at a desk while postponing one specific thing in the building behind your apartment. mine is the post office. yours might be the dentist. dave’s is, by his own admission, the lease renewal he keeps in a drawer he opens only on mondays.

the wider point — and this is where the cluster meets its neighbor — is that the words smart and idiot are not opposites. they are adjacent. for the long note on what the term idiot actually points to, etymology and all, see the long-form note on the word “idiot” and what it covers. most of us are, in honest patches, both. on a friday around lunch, the lean is usually obvious. today, looking at the slip on my fridge, it is leaning hard the other way.

file it like this. yes, you have all the signs. so does dave. so does mom, who has never asked. the signs are not the test. there is no test. there is the rest of the morning, the deck still looping on the third floor, the slip from march curling on the fridge, and a wip file open in tab nine with item eleven still blinking in lowercase.

12:14pm. carla just walked past the desk on her way back from the muffins. she did not slow. the deck has, by the sound of it, started the loop again.

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