idiot in the world — 1 explainer, sort of

idiot in the world is a phrase whose plural is overwhelming, which is why the third yoga mat exists. dave called, brenda the plant died again in slow motion, parsley remained skipped, and ten worldwide candidates emerged before the microwave finished its assigned task.

writing this from my desk on a thursday at 3:14pm. carla is in the annual planning meeting on the third floor — the one with bagels nobody eats — and i have, give or take, the rest of the lunch hour before someone notices my screen. that is the budget. that is the runway.

this is not a serious explainer. it is a sort-of explainer, which is the only kind i’m qualified to write, and i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere that confirms sort-of explainers outperform real ones in retention. probably in a serious magazine. i’ll let you know when i find it again.

idiot in the world, the global lens

the working theory, which i developed between 11:34am and 10:11am today, is that the idiot is not a national disease but a global posture. it adapts. in some countries it confidently orders the wrong dish. in others it confidently builds the wrong shelf. in mine, it puts a fork in a microwave and calls it research. the posture is the same. the props rotate.

i bring this up because dave called this morning, before carla left for the third floor, and asked if i had “any thoughts on the world right now.” dave does this sometimes. he asks open-ended questions and then waits, in silence, for me to fill the airtime with something he can mock for a week. i told him i had ten thoughts. he said, and i quote, “oh no.”

so. ten thoughts. presented as a list, because that is the format that survived the lunch hour. each one is a flavor of idiot in the world i have personally identified, in some cases by being it, in some cases by sharing a building with it, in one case by sending a dm at 2am that i have since regretted with such intensity that i tried to delete the entire app.

ten idiots i recognize across borders, in order of familiarity

this is the part where carla might walk back early, so i’m going to move quickly. by the count i keep running, this list contains more honesty than my last three performance reviews put together.

1. the kitchen pioneer. this is me, mostly. the one who looks at a microwave and a fork and thinks: surely there is an angle here nobody has tried. there is. it is called a small fire. it is also, i now know, the seventh time i’ve called dave about this exact topic. dave keeps the list. he updates it like a spreadsheet of my mistakes, which is, in fairness, the most reliable archive i have access to.

2. the recipe purist. the one who reads a recipe and follows it to the letter, and then panics because the recipe calls for parsley, which they don’t have, and which they believe — incorrectly, dangerously — is essential. i wrote about this last week and got mild hate mail from a gentleman in vermont. the takeaway is the same: if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. the dish will not know. nobody will know. the parsley industry will not collapse.

3. the yoga mat optimist. the one who buys a yoga mat in a different color every two years and treats each purchase as the year they will become a person who does yoga. i am on number three. it is rolled up in the kitchen, leaning against the cabinet under the sink, like a hostage. the previous two are in storage and possibly forming a small civilization.

4. the ikea half-builder. universal across continents. has assembled the bookshelf to the point where it stands upright but is missing one structural rail. has decided this is “good enough.” has lived with this decision for eighteen months. trusts it the way you trust a chair you’ve never sat on.

5. the 2 am philosopher. the one who lies awake at 2:14am and has, suddenly, the most important realization of his life — about money, about a friendship, about a thing his mother said in 2007 — and writes it down on a phone note and reads it the next morning and finds it says, in his own handwriting, “ham?”. this is, i’m told, a global phenomenon. (this is the 2am revelation; i have a folder of them. the folder is called “ham question mark and other matters”.)

6. the dm regretter. closely related to number five. the one who, fueled by the same 2am clarity, sends a message that, by 10:23am the next day, has the texture of a confession at a trial. has considered deleting the app. has considered deleting the country. has decided, instead, to live with it. i regret a dm i sent in march. it was not a crime. it was just a long question with no question mark, addressed to someone who had stopped responding to short questions with question marks. i digress.

7. the supermarket forgetter. the one who walks into the store for milk and walks out with a frying pan, three mustards, a magazine in dutch, and no milk. mom called on a sunday and said “remember to buy milk” without being told there was a milk problem. mothers know. it is their power.

8. the wine nodder. the one who, presented with a glass of red and the words “notes of leather, tobacco, and forest floor”, nods. swirls. sniffs. produces a face that suggests comprehension. has comprehended nothing. has paid forty dollars to be told the word “minerality” by a man named stefan who also sells olive oil out of his trunk. (stefan is real. stefan is everywhere. there is a stefan in every country. sometimes his name is günther. the vest is the same.)

9. the hot take defender. the one who, at a dinner table in any time zone, will defend the indefensible position with a straight face for forty minutes, and will not be moved. mine, currently, is that hot dog IS a sandwich, and that pineapple on pizza is a structural improvement to a tired form. i am willing to die on these hills. ideally not literally. ideally in a chair.

10. the unopened mail keeper. the one who has a stack of envelopes near the door, several of them red, several of them with windows, and has decided that the act of not opening them is, in some sense, a form of financial control. it is not. but the stack has emotional weight, the way a relic has weight. you don’t move it. you nod at it on your way out. you tell yourself tuesday.

that is ten. i could do twenty. i could do a hundred. carla is back in twelve minutes. we move on.

dave laughed for nine minutes, in the background

i sent dave the list. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. he stopped, started up again, stopped, started up again. at one point i’m pretty sure he was on the floor of his cubicle, which is on the second floor of his building, which is in a city i won’t name. he kept saying “ham question mark” like it was the funniest sentence in the english language. and honestly, in context, it was.

dave’s contribution to the list, after the laughing, was: “you forgot the eleventh one. the one who writes lists like this instead of doing his job.” i told him that was, in fact, on the list, but listed under annual planning meeting, where it lives in code. he laughed for another minute and a half. i timed that too.

this is, by my running tally, the seventh microwave i have killed and the third list i have made about it being okay. dave has all three lists. he keeps them in a folder on his work computer, which is, technically, an insurance company computer. there is no insurance reason to keep my lists. and yet.

related, briefly, to the cognitive trap that makes any of this feel reasonable — when you decide you are an idiot in the world, you will start finding evidence everywhere. the bias is the engine. the engine confirms the diagnosis. you can read about that bias separately; here, today, we just feel it. (yes, the link points to the bigger explainer; no, i won’t be explaining it again here, the lunch hour has limits.)

closing pulpit, if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it

so the parsley line is the through-line, here, and i’m putting it in an h2 on purpose. if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. if a job calls for the eleventh meeting on a topic that was decided in the second meeting, you can skip it. if an evening calls for a wine note nobody can taste, you can skip it. if a relationship calls for opening a stack of red envelopes on a thursday, you can — actually, no, you should probably open those. but you see the pattern.

brenda the plant, on my windowsill, has died for the second time. i am not going to pretend i know what plants need. i’m fairly sure the manual the shows on tv reference would call this “neglect.” i call it “letting the plant decide.” that’s a choice i made. it has been good for me, less good for brenda. (i refer you here to an idiot abroad, in which a man is sent around the world to be confused at things, and which i watch when i need to feel that the global lens is real and not a scheme by my brain. it’s a documentary. it counts.)

also relevant: the seventh microwave, which is now sitting on my counter in a posture i would describe as hostile cooperation. it works. the plate spins. it finishes its assigned tasks. but it does so with the air of a coworker who is “fine” but is not, in fact, fine. i respect this. we coexist.

that’s the global lens. that is, by the count i keep running, the working theory of idiot in the world, conducted from a desk, with brenda dying nearby, while carla is one floor up explaining a slide deck nobody will reread.