am i an idiot — i audited 115 insults to find out

am i an idiot is a question best answered by auditing every wall on the internet that has insulted you in the last calendar year. i did the audit. the schrodinger’s fridge in the kitchen heard the verdict before i did, and chose to remain ambivalent.

i am writing this from my desk, which the company assigned me for moving rows in a spreadsheet, not for this. it is 11:23am, thursday. carla is across the building running a vendor onboarding nobody briefed me about.

so here we are. i typed the four words into a search bar at 9:47am — am i an idiot — and the algorithm, which has been keeping notes, returned 1.3 billion results and a quiet, almost paternal silence. when the algorithm declines to clarify, it is, in my reading, voting yes.

am i an idiot: am i an idiot is a self-directed question typically asked at 9:47am after a small social failure, a financial nudge, or a stranger calling you one in a comment thread. an honest answer requires auditing your last twelve months of digital insults, regretted DMs, and ambient kitchen appliances.

AM I. AN IDIOT. YES. ALSO NO. ALSO MAYBE.

the maybe is where the real work lives. the yes is easy. the no is comforting. the maybe is what gets you to the longer essay on the word idiot itself, which i wrote a few months ago when i was still pretending to be qualified. it turns out everybody is.

am i an idiot, the question i asked the kitchen

last night the kitchen got the question. the kitchen is where the seventh microwave lives — the one i bought after the previous six suffered creative deaths the manual did not warn me about. next to it is the fridge, which i have started calling the schrodinger’s fridge because it is, depending on the moment, either full of food i intended to eat or full of food i intended to eat last week.

i said it out loud, holding a half-eaten yogurt and a printout of an email i had not opened. the fridge said nothing. fridges, at this latitude, are professional non-respondents. that, i submit, is a vote.

i closed it. i opened the laptop. i started the audit.

the wall of insults, audited at midnight

some months ago i started a private screenshot folder on my phone called the wall. on the wall, i collect every public comment, reply, mention, and DM in which a stranger has, in writing, called me a version of idiot. the spellings vary. the conviction does not.

i kept it because the wall, over twelve months, became a kind of unauthorised performance review. nobody at my actual job has reviewed me in three years. the internet, by contrast, files quarterly reports.

around midnight i scrolled from january to last week. i counted. i tagged. i made a small spreadsheet because i am, structurally, the kind of person who responds to emotional damage with column headers.

• direct insult, mild. 47 entries. one person took issue with my use of the em dash. they were, on reflection, correct.
• direct insult, escalated. 23 entries. these involved my mother and one specific reference to a microwave i have never owned, which suggests the writer reads the blog.
• indirect insult, sub-tweet style. 31 entries. you cannot tell if they are about you. the not knowing is, by design, the insult.
• compliment that is secretly an insult. 14 entries. “this is brave”. seven times. the word brave is, in 2026, almost entirely a euphemism. i looked it up.

total: 115 entries in twelve months. a stranger calling me an idiot every 3.17 days. somebody is composing one right now.

the dm i sent and the dm i regret, again

now the painful one. the audit included the sent folder of every messaging app i still have installed. the sent folder, for any honest person, is a tribunal you opened against yourself.

i found a DM. sent at 1:42am on a sunday in march. recipient: somebody i had not spoken to in four years. contents, paraphrased because the original is too embarrassing to quote, an unprompted explanation of why i had been right about a thing nobody asked me to be right about. 600 words. thesis statement.

the recipient did not reply. they did, however, screenshot it. three weeks later it appeared on a different platform with my username blurred but my prose entirely visible. my prose has, it turns out, a fingerprint.

that DM is the wall’s flagship entry. it is a one-sentence answer to today’s question, and the sentence is yes, with footnotes.

the 4b guy who voted yes, indirectly

the 4B guy lives directly above me. noise of an undescribable category — somewhere between drumming, furniture relocation, and interpretive movement — every weekday between 6:30am and 7:15am for nineteen consecutive months. we have exchanged exactly zero words.

last friday a note appeared under my door. on a torn corner of grid paper, in block capitals: “PLEASE STOP TYPING SO LOUDLY AT 11PM”. no greeting. no signature. no apology for the morning drumming. just an instruction, delivered with the confidence of a man who has been preparing the sentence for nineteen months.

i read it four times. i checked the back. blank, which was, in itself, a statement. then i did the thing that confirms the answer. i sat down. i typed a response. three paragraphs. reasonable. witty. a small philosophical point about the social contract of mixed-use buildings. and then i did not slide it under his door. i folded it. i put it in a drawer.

the wall is what other people have said about me. the drawer is what i have not said back. taken together, a fairly complete portrait. a man who collects criticism but does not return fire is, by some definitions, dignified. by the definitions i am leaning toward — that man is one.

the schrodinger fridge and the answer it would not give

back to the kitchen. i finished the audit at 2:14am. i looked at the fridge. i asked, out loud, the question. the fridge said nothing.

this is the thing. the fridge does not give answers. the fridge gives conditions. open me, and you will know whether the milk has held. but the milk’s holding is also a verdict on the milk-buyer. so the fridge, by refusing to commit, is being merciful. the fridge is letting you live, briefly, in the universe where you are not one. the fridge is a good neighbour.

i did not open it. i went to bed. before sleeping, the brain did the brain thing where it answers honestly because it has nothing left to perform for. it said: yes, sometimes, and that is the price of being awake. which is the most generous a brain has been to me past midnight.

the taxman, the serif font, the verdict

the unopened envelope. it is from the taxman. the taxman sends letters in serif font. always serif. never sans. a deliberate intimidation choice — the fonts of authority are old, vertical, and cold, and the taxman knows. i have seven such envelopes on the counter, alphabetised by the month i decided not to open them.

the envelope is evidence. somebody who is not an idiot opens letters from the taxman. somebody who is not one does not let government mail age on a counter for three months because they assume, with no basis, that the contents will improve in storage. envelopes do not ripen.

closing line, i am, also i’m fine

it is now 12:38pm. carla has not come back. the schrodinger’s fridge has not been opened today. the wall has not been updated since last night, which means somebody, somewhere, owes me an insult.

so the answer. yes. clarified. confirmed. notarised by the kitchen. but also: i’m fine. those two are not in conflict. you can be one and be fine. you can be one and have a good lunch.

(if you want to see the question am i an idiot dramatised across a brutally well-cast jury room, 12 angry men, the 1957 jury room film, is the most thorough audit ever produced. twelve men, one verdict, and one of them in particular will not stop asking until the room agrees.)

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