how to dumb down — a method i did not need to study

how to dumb down is a method i did not need to study because i was born fluent. the supermarket trip on a sunday confirmed it. dave called from the parking lot. mom called from her sofa. the two calls overlapped on a single afternoon and braided into one long instruction i could not follow. somewhere in the middle of all this the chatgpt window judged me, quietly, in lowercase.

writing this from the desk on a thursday at 7:14am. carla is upstairs in some sort of vendor walkthrough, the kind that has a slide deck nobody asked for. i have, generously, the rest of the morning.

so. dumb down. people search for it. i checked. they want, in the search bar, an explanation of something complicated, made simpler, by a person they can tolerate. the verb is gentle in shape and savage in implication. when somebody says “can you dumb that down for me”, what they mean is — without saying it — please descend to my level, and please do it without making me feel descended-to. that is a lot of work. that is a request with a tip jar attached to it that nobody fills.

here is the central admission, since this central pillar on what dumb actually means is the parent of this post and i don’t want to walk in unannounced — i can’t dumb down. i live down. dumb down is, for me, an elevator that opens at my floor. there is no descent available. there is only the room i am already in, with the lights on, and the kettle, and a knife i don’t use.

1. dumb down, the request and the surrender

the request usually comes by phone. sometimes it comes by text. once, memorably, it came by way of dave standing in my kitchen at a quarter past two, holding a brochure for an insurance product he had not yet purchased and asking me to “translate this into english.” the brochure was already in english. that was the first lesson. the request to dumb down is rarely about words. it is about feelings. people don’t want simpler vocabulary. they want permission to stop reading.

i surrendered. i told dave the brochure said, in essence, you give them money, then later they may give you some back, but probably not, and either way somebody in a beige building will keep a percentage. dave nodded. dave understood. dave then bought the wrong product anyway. that is the pattern.

i’d like to log, here, the most useful sentence i have ever delivered while attempting to dumb down anything. the sentence is “i don’t fully understand it either, and that is, in itself, the answer.” this works on insurance, on tax forms, on the feature roadmap nobody at work has signed off on, and on the small print of the bulk place membership i renewed last month while not paying attention. the bulk membership renewed itself, technically. i was simply nearby.

2. step one — dave called, mom was on the line, both gave instructions

this was a sunday. one item. milk. i had walked into the supermarket the way a person walks into a chapel they do not believe in — respectfully, briefly, with low expectations. the milk was at the back. the entire store knew this. the store is configured to make you walk past the cereal that hates you and the oranges that judge you and a discount tower of unfamiliar yogurt before you can find the only thing you came for.

dave called when i was in aisle four. dave’s question was, and i quote, “what do i tell my landlord about the door.” i did not know what door. i did not know which landlord. dave was, as he often is, in the middle of his own sentence and assuming i had been there for the beginning of it. i had not been there for the beginning. i had been here, in aisle four, looking at salt.

then mom called on the other line. mom’s question was simpler — “are you eating.” mom asks this every sunday in a tone that suggests she already has the receipt for what i am eating. i told mom, yes, technically. mom said “that’s what dumb people say, hon.” mom did not mean it as an insult. mom uses dumb the way other mothers use sweetheart. that is its own kind of vocabulary. dave and mom, on overlapping lines, gave me, between them, fourteen instructions, six of which contradicted each other and four of which were not, in fact, addressed to me.

i bought the milk. i also bought, somehow, a jar of capers and a small bag of frozen prawns and a magazine about military history that i do not, noted of this paragraph, have any business owning. the trolley remembered things i had forgotten i wanted. that is the supermarket’s job. that is its actual job.

3. step two — the supermarket trip that completed the dumbing

i got to the till. the till was where the dumbing-down completed itself. the cashier asked, gently, “do you have the bulk membership card.” i did not have it on me. i had, somewhere at home, an envelope with my name spelled slightly wrong and a card inside it for a place called bulk co. or possibly bulkmart, the precise branding of which i have, i admit, never quite committed to memory. i told the cashier i did. i did not. i looked through my wallet for ninety seconds while a queue formed behind me. the queue was patient in the way queues are patient when they are quietly furious.

the cashier said, “it’s fine, we can look you up.” the cashier looked me up by phone number. the cashier read my full name back to me. the cashier said, “is this your address.” it was, to my surprise, my address from two apartments ago. i said yes. i did not have the energy to update the investigation. that is, to be specific, a small dumb act with a long tail. the bulk place will, for the rest of my natural life, send loyalty offers to a flat i no longer rent. somebody else lives there now. somebody else, by accident, knows what i buy in volume. that person now knows i buy paper towels in eight-roll cases and frozen prawns at unpredictable intervals. there is a stranger who has, accidentally, a profile of me. dumb begets data. data begets a stranger. that is the chain.

i walked out with the bag, the prawns, the capers, the magazine, and a receipt three feet long. i walked past “mr. holland’s opus” on a tv mounted above the deli counter, which was playing, with the sound off, in the middle of the afternoon, for reasons no employee could later explain. mr. holland was, on screen, dumbing down music for a kid who didn’t, at that exact frame, want it dumbed down. i felt seen. i felt seen by a 1995 film soundtracked by silence. the supermarket has these moments. nobody warns you.

4. step three — the chatgpt-filtered contact form

back at home, after the milk had been put in the fridge and the prawns into the freezer and the magazine onto the small tower of magazines i call “research,” i sat down to do the third step. the third step was the inbox.

i have, for reasons that are partly philosophical and partly cowardly, a contact form on the website that runs through chatgpt before any message reaches my eye. the form asks the visitor to write whatever they want. the chatgpt window then summarizes, ranks, and, critically, dumbs down each message into a three-line digest. the digest tells me whether the email is worth opening. most are not. the chatgpt does this with a flat tone and no opinion, which is exactly what i want, because chatgpt does not get tired and does not know my mother.

this is not a confession. this is a system. the system does the dumbing-down for me. the system takes a 600-word email about somebody’s grandmother’s kitchen and returns “person asks how to make a list. emotional. polite. not urgent.” the system saves me from having to perform the dumb-down myself, which would, on most days, take energy i do not have. that is the entire point of the system. that is why people automate things. it is not, despite what stefan would tell you at a brunch, about productivity. it is about not crying at 4:08pm.

the dumbing-down done by the chatgpt-filtered form is, also, the cleanest dumbing i have ever seen. it has no pity. it has no condescension. it just says, in lowercase, what the email actually wanted. i wish more humans could do this.

5. step four through six — the good knife, still untouched

i’d like to address the good knife, since the brief on this kitchen demands it. i own a good knife. i have owned it since 2021. it lives in a wooden block on the counter, in the second slot from the left. i have never used it. i use the smaller, blunter, more emotionally available knife from a set i bought at the bulk place. the good knife is for occasions. there have been no occasions.

step four is to use the good knife. i don’t do this. step five is to call the bulk place and update my address so a stranger stops receiving my paper-towel offers. i don’t do this either. step six is to delete the contact form and answer the emails personally, like a human being from a previous decade. i particularly don’t do this. the steps that complete the method are the ones i decline to take. that is the integrity of the system. an honest how-to has to admit which steps are theoretical.

credit cards are a personality trait, by the way, and the fact that i am even thinking about credit cards while trying to write a how-to about dumbing down is its own kind of failure of focus. i will let it stand. it is, on inspection, related. the people who most often ask me to dumb things down are also the people who pay for things in three points of credit and feel clever about it. dave is one of them. dave has a system. dave’s system is to put everything on the orange card and pretend the orange card is not real until the statement comes. the statement always comes. the statement, somehow, is always a surprise.

at 2am last tuesday i lay awake and thought, with sudden and unwelcome clarity, that the entire economy is a confirmation that what people want, almost always, is the simplest possible version of any difficult thing, and the simplest possible version is usually wrong, and yet they will pay for the wrong version forever rather than read the right one. that thought ruined the rest of the night. i made coffee. it was 2:47am. the kitchen was silent in a way that felt judgmental.

6. verdict — the method is to remain

i recognise, here, that there is a sister concept lurking under all of this — the way every audience hears what they already believed, even when you’ve simplified the words to a point of insult. that’s the territory of the confirmation-bias investigation i drafted from this same desk. dumbing down only ever lands the way the listener was pre-tuned to receive it. the bias does the rest. the simpler the explanation, the more room there is for the listener to fill it with what they brought. that, also, is the method.

carla just walked past with a coffee and a notepad. the vendor walkthrough may have ended early. i have, by the count i keep running, about eleven minutes.

the milk, in any case, made it to the fridge. the prawns are in the freezer. the magazine is on the tower. dave bought the wrong insurance. mom called again on tuesday and said “you sounded tired on sunday, hon,” which is mom’s way of saying she heard everything dave was saying through my phone and disapproved. mothers know. it is their power. it cannot be defeated.

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