how to be smarter in life — 1 fairly sure investigation

being smarter in life, as opposed to being smarter where, exactly, is the question the listicle never quite answers, and i’d like to log that fact early. life is, presumably, the room you are in. the room i am in contains, currently, three yoga mats and a phone showing a battery number i’d rather not say out loud. that already complicates the question.

i am at the desk on a wednesday at 2:14pm, with carla parked in some training session on the third floor that the calendar swore would be ninety minutes and which has, predictably, gone past ninety minutes without sending word. that is the back half of my afternoon, and i’d like to spend it on a phrase that has been bothering me since lunch. the phrase is in the title.

the phrase asks how to be smarter, and then adds two words, “in life,” as if life were a setting on a thermostat instead of the entire room the thermostat is in. that small adjustment changes the size of the project from “a thing a person can finish” to “a thing a person is doing whether they planned to or not.” the post that follows is about that change of size.

1. how to be smarter in life, brief

the brief, written honestly, is that “in life” is the part of the phrase doing the heaviest lifting and getting paid the least. you cannot get smarter “in life” the way you can get smarter “in spreadsheets” or “in chess” or “in not microwaving forks.” those are corners. life is the room. the room contains the corners and also the spaces between them, where most of the actual day happens.

here is the thing my working pillar on confirmation bias as a daily habit has been quietly proving, week by week — most plans for getting smarter “in life” assume life is the same shape as a textbook unit, with chapters and a final exam. it is not. life has no chapters. life is, mostly, mondays. mondays do not test you. mondays simply continue.

so the brief is this. “in life” is a generous setting on the smarter-thermostat. you can turn the dial. the dial does, technically, move. the room does not, however, become smaller because you turned the dial. the room remains the room. tom’s room contains a volvo. mine contains, as established, a phone at 23 percent and a yoga mat that has, by my own count, never been rolled out twice in the same calendar year.

2. step one, life is a lot of territory

the first honest step in any plan called how to be smarter in life is to look at the phrase “in life” for thirty seconds and let the size of it land. life is not a topic. life is everything that is not a topic. life is what is happening on the way to the topic. life is the walk from the desk to the kitchen for water, the part of monday before the phone starts ringing, the small audit you run on the unopened mail pile while pretending to do something else.

i’d like, for the panel, to enter this into the record now, while the training session upstairs still has unknown minutes left in it. the territory called “life” includes — and this is a partial list — what you eat, who you call back, what time you give up on a saturday, which of the forty-seven tabs you keep, and whether the dishwasher gets opened on a tuesday or a thursday. those are small. they are also, jointly, the actual map.

here is what nobody on the smarter-in-life podcast says out loud. you cannot get smarter at a territory. you can only get smarter at small parts of it, one at a time, slowly, and mostly by accident. anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you a course. the course is not the smarter. the course is the announcement that smarter exists somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, and we should believe it on the host’s behalf.

3. step two, tom does smarter in life with a volvo

tom is the natural witness here, because tom is, by any honest account, smarter in life than i am, and the gap is not theoretical. tom owns a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen different positions. tom has a pension that, when explained to him, he understood. tom has a wife and two children whose names he can produce on the first attempt. tom is, in the middle of his own life, somewhere reasonably near the center of it.

i am not. i am off to one side. that is fine. it is a choice i made. it has been good for me, mostly, in ways that are hard to itemize on a wednesday afternoon. the difference between tom’s smarter-in-life and mine is not, despite what tom would politely suggest if he were here, intelligence. it is shape. tom’s life is shaped like a volvo. mine is shaped like a phone at 23 percent that always finds the charger eventually.

tom would defend the volvo. he is not wrong. the volvo is a sensible vehicle. tom would also, more dangerously, defend the pension, and he is, on that count, more right than i can comfortably admit. savings accounts are a hobby for the wealthy. i’d like that take entered into the record before tom can object. the take is mine. the pension is his. we are, as ever, both valid, in our incompatible ways.

the gap between tom and me, mapped onto the question of how to be smarter in life, is the gap between a project and a posture. tom has a project. tom is in the middle of it. tom can, on demand, name the next four moves. i have a posture. the posture is leaning back at a desk on a wednesday afternoon, looking at the phrase “in life” until it looks slightly absurd. both, i’d argue, are forms of being smarter. only one fits in a podcast description.

4. step three, i do smarter in life with a 23% battery

the version of smarter-in-life i can defend, from this chair, runs on a 23 percent phone battery, which is the level my phone is at right now and has, in some sense, been at since 2019. the phone hits 23 percent the way other people’s phones hit 50 — daily, predictably, and as the cue to make decisions about whether the next hour is worth being reachable for. that is a system. it is not the system tom uses. it is, however, mine.

the smarter move, on a 23 percent day, is to stop charging at 23 percent rather than to top it up. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, suggesting that the calls a person dodges between 23 percent and dead are, statistically, the calls the person did not need to take. i can confirm that suggestion from my own loose log. the log is in my head. the log has gaps. the gaps, i’d argue, are also data.

this is, in its way, the same instinct that drove me to a film i have seen four times now, which is to say an idiot abroad, where a man is sent into territory he did not request and demonstrates, mostly by complaining, a kind of intelligence the territory itself did not provide. that is closer to my model of smarter-in-life than any podcast i have closed in the last six months. the man complains. the territory continues. the man returns. nobody, including the man, has changed. and yet, in the small budget i keep, he has gotten somewhere.

5. step four, the seventh microwave is part of life

the seventh microwave is, at the moment, the best evidence i can produce for my own smarter-in-life. i killed six microwaves before i got to this one. i’d argue, and tom would not, that killing six microwaves is a curriculum. it is, admittedly, a curriculum nobody else would design and most universities would refuse to accredit. it is, nevertheless, a curriculum, and i passed all six units. the seventh microwave is the diploma.

let me say this clearly, because the unidentified caller has not called yet today and i have approximately the rest of the afternoon to be honest about it. how to be smarter in life, in the version i can deliver, looks like this. you keep the appliances longer. you stop putting forks in them. you let the phone die when it wants to die. you don’t open the bank app on a wednesday. you call mom back on sunday, which is when she expects it. you accept that tom’s pension is a real thing and yours is a faith-based retirement system. you do not, under any reading, take a course on becoming an “intelligent genius.” you spend the course money on the eighth microwave, in advance.

that is, by the running tally, six small things. six small things is not a system. it is, however, a practice, and a practice is what people who actually live in the room develop when they stop trying to redecorate it on a deadline. a system is a podcast product. a practice is what mike has been running, very quietly, for years, while not filing his taxes since 2019 and continuing, somehow, to remain alive and in the same apartment.

6. verdict, “in life” is a generous setting

so. the verdict, after a wednesday afternoon, four steps, one volvo, one phone at 23 percent, and one microwave that hasn’t gone yet but is making the noises that suggest the count will, eventually, become eight, is that “how to be smarter in life” is a phrase the internet keeps making sound like a project and is, in practice, a posture you adopt while the room continues happening around you.

the phrase is generous. it pretends life is a setting. life is the whole room. the room has a volvo in it, in tom’s case, and a phone at 23 percent, in mine, and a fern that is technically my landlord, and an unopened mail pile that i have promised, again, to look at on saturday and will, again, not. all of those are inside life. none of them respond to a four-week course. all of them respond, slowly, to a practice nobody photographs and nobody sells.

the smarter version of me, on this question, is the one writing this down at 2:14pm on a wednesday with the training session upstairs still running long. the dumber version is the one who, sometime around minute eighty, will close this draft and consider, briefly, opening the bank app to “be smarter about money.” that is the version of me that has, historically, killed microwaves. she is, structurally, the same person. the room is large enough to hold them both. that is what “in life” actually means.

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