am i smart or stupid — ten false dichotomies the question hides

the question pretends there are two doors and you have to choose. there are not two doors. there is a hallway, and you keep walking down it, and sometimes you are smart and sometimes you are stupid and most of the time you are simply walking. ten false binaries the question creates, named and dismantled, follow.

writing this from the desk on a monday, 11:47am, with the building still warming up and the printer in the next room having one of its private arguments with itself. carla took the elevator to the third floor for the annual planning meeting at five-past-nine. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning before she comes back with a binder and a face.

the binary framing fails before the second sentence. write that down. or don’t. it is, either way, true.

am i smart or stupid, the binary framing

the question, as worded, demands a choice between two boxes. either box A — smart — or box B — stupid. the implication being that you live in one of the two boxes full-time, with a small key, and a forwarding address. that is not how a person works. a person is, on any given day, in box A for some things, box B for other things, and standing outside both boxes drinking a coffee for the rest. boxes are storage. people are weather.

and yet the question shows up. it shows up at 2am in a parked car. it shows up at the kitchen counter after a small disaster involving a fork that we will not be revisiting today. it shows up in a search bar, typed by someone who is, at that exact moment, neither smart nor stupid but tired. people who type am i smart or stupid at 2am are not asking for a verdict. they are asking for company. the search bar, regrettably, gives them lists. lists like this one. fine. here is one.

i should say, before we get into the list, that i am not in a position to answer the question for you. nobody is. anybody who tells you they can is selling either a course or a personality test, and possibly both, with a discount code in the second email. what i can do is take the question apart and put the pieces on the desk so you can see them. the pieces are dichotomies. there are ten. they are all false. the productivity bro online would call this content. i would call it tuesday work done on monday.

false dichotomy one through five, with annotations

here is the first half of the list. each one is a binary the question hides inside itself. each one falls apart under a desk lamp.

1. smart at school vs stupid in life. the original sin of the question. people who did well on tests at fifteen are not, automatically, the people who can change a tire at thirty-five. the test asked one set of questions. the tire is asking a different set. nobody told the tire about the tests.
2. fast vs thorough. the question assumes smart means fast. it does not. some of the smartest people i know take a long time to answer the door. they want to be sure who is on the other side. fast is a property of trains. thorough is a property of people who have learned the cost of being wrong.
3. book smart vs street smart. the laziest binary in the english language. the people who use it have read neither many books nor many streets. they have read a quote about the difference, on a poster, possibly in a doctor’s office, possibly under a print of a sailboat.
4. confident vs correct. the question assumes that the person who sounds sure is the smart one. the person who sounds sure is, in my experience, the one who has not yet been challenged by anybody with information. confidence is not knowledge. confidence is what knowledge does in good light. those are not the same.
5. asks questions vs has answers. the question assumes smart people have answers. smart people, as a rule, ask better questions. the man who has only answers has stopped, somewhere along the line, being curious. that is its own kind of stupid, and we have not, as a culture, named it yet.

that is five. each one is a knife the question is hiding behind its back. each one cuts the person asking, not the person being asked.

false dichotomy six through ten, with footnotes

the second half. these are the ones the question wears as a coat.

6. good with people vs good with numbers. the question assumes smart is one or the other. it is, sometimes, both. it is, also sometimes, neither, and the person is still a perfectly fine accountant of their own life. people are not spreadsheets. people are not parties. people are people, and the question that pretends to sort them is doing the work of a stapler.
7. creative vs analytical. the dichotomy nobody who does either work has ever endorsed. the people who write the songs also do the math on the royalties. the people who do the math also, in the evening, paint a small picture of a bowl of fruit. the divide exists only in airline magazines, and even there only on the back page.
8. quiet vs loud. the question assumes the loud one is dumb and the quiet one is smart, or the other way around, depending on which decade you grew up in. neither is true. quiet can be wisdom or it can be a phone with no battery. loud can be confidence or it can be a man with no inside voice. you have to listen to the actual sentences.
9. plans ahead vs lives in the moment. the false binary that has sold approximately half of all self-help books written this century. the smartest people i know plan ahead about some things and live in the moment about other things. they do not, in general, plan their breakfast. they do plan their dentist. that is a working life.
10. knows when to quit vs never gives up. the question wants you to pick one. both, depending on the project, are correct. quitting the wrong job is smart. quitting the wrong relationship is smart. quitting on yourself in the middle of a tuesday because the printer made a noise is, by any definition i am willing to use, stupid. the trick is knowing which one is which, and that trick is unteachable, which is why it is not on the test.

that is the list. the ten dichotomies the question hides. on the count i keep running it adds up to ten exactly, which is suspicious, but that is what the desk produced.

why the question wants a side and not a person

i have been thinking about why the question is so popular. the search bar tells me people type it a lot. it gets typed at 2am. it gets typed in the morning, into a phone, in bed, before the first coffee. it gets typed by people who already know they are not stupid and want a sentence on a screen confirming it. it gets typed, sometimes, by the man who has just been called stupid by his boss in a hallway, and who is now hiding in a stairwell with a search bar and a small hope.

the question is popular because it offers a verdict. people want verdicts. verdicts are easier than nuance. nuance is six paragraphs and a careful reading. a verdict is a stamp. the brain, given a choice, takes the stamp. that is not stupidity. that is, by my reading, the brain doing exactly the work it was built to do — which is reduce a complicated situation to a small, portable answer that can be carried around in a back pocket and consulted at a stoplight.

the trouble is the question is not actually answerable. nobody is fully smart or fully stupid. mom called on sunday and said, in the middle of an unrelated sentence about a neighbor, “you have always been clever about the wrong things”. that is, on review, a piece of information so accurate it is almost unfair. mothers know. mothers always know. the unopened mail on my counter was not consulted, but it would, if asked, agree.

here is the second piece of why the question is built this way. the question wants to give you a side because the side is easier to belong to than to be a person. “i am the smart one” is a uniform. “i am the stupid one” is also a uniform. both have shoulder patches. both have membership cards. being neither — being a person who is sometimes one and sometimes the other and most of the time something else entirely — has no patch. nobody hands you a card for being inconsistent. and yet inconsistency is the most accurate thing about you.

verdict, you are neither, you are both, mostly tired

so here is the verdict. you are not smart. you are not stupid. you are a person who is, depending on the hour, both, neither, and sometimes a third thing — distracted. distracted is the secret category nobody talks about because it does not fit on a personality test. distracted is the category most of us live in. distracted is what the question am i smart or stupid actually means when typed at 2am with a phone screen too bright and a kitchen too dark.

and here is the hot take, the one i will defend, the one nobody asked for. sundays should end at 6 PM. that has nothing to do with the question on its face and everything to do with it on second look. sundays after 6pm are the prime hours when the question gets typed, when the binary gets entertained, when people sit in their kitchens and decide they are stupid because the week is ending and they did not become smart during it. cut sunday off at six and the question loses half its volume. i will not be taking notes on this idea. it is correct on arrival.

i am also, on the matter of the question, biased. i have, in my own life, been called both. by the same person. on the same evening. once. the person, in their defense, was at the time on what i would generously call the fourth glass. they meant well. they did not mean either word, in the end. they meant what most people mean when they say either: “i am tired and you are nearby”. that is, on close inspection, the unifying meaning of both halves of the question.

for the pop culture corner — and the desk requires it — there is a film about a man who got smart on purpose, briefly. limitless is the film. the man takes a pill. the man becomes smart. the man, predictably, learns that smart was not the thing he was missing. he was missing, on review, several other things, none of which the pill could provide. the film does not say “smart is not the answer to the question”, but it implies it for one hour and forty-five minutes, which is the polite way to make a point in a movie.

it is now 11:47am. the planning meeting is, to be specific, ten minutes from breaking. carla will return with a binder and ask if i had a productive morning. i will say yes, which is technically true, and then change the subject to the printer, which is now, for some reason, beeping.

sparky the fork is in the drawer where i left it on sunday evening, after a bowl of cereal that was, on consideration, dinner. the binder of the seventh microwave is still in the drawer underneath. the third yoga mat is, as ever, beneath the sofa, possibly evolving, almost certainly not. these are the props of a life lived neither smart nor stupid but, in fact, with a certain amount of stubborn affection for the things i already own. that is, in my view, the only honest answer to the question.

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