being stupid — a state, allegedly, that i question

being is a state verb. it implies persistence. you can be tall, be tired, be dutch. being stupid sneaks into the same grammar and pretends it has the same weight. it does not. there is doing stupid, which is bounded and specific. being stupid is identity laundering. i refuse to wear an identity that lazy.

monday, 10:38am, screen open, second coffee a third drunk. carla took the elevator to the q3 review on the third floor about twenty minutes ago. i have until she comes back, which historically is forty-five minutes, sometimes less if the slides skip.

so. being stupid. a phrase that has been said about me, near me, and once into a phone i was holding, by a man who did not realize the line was open. i have spent the morning so far trying to decide whether the phrase is grammatically lazy, philosophically dishonest, or both. i think it’s both. i’m going to show my work.

being stupid, the verb-as-state framing

the trouble starts with the verb to be. it is the verb that english uses to describe what something is, full stop, not what something did, last tuesday, in a kitchen, with a fork. when you say someone is something, you are filing them. the file does not, conventionally, include a date stamp. the file is just the file.

this is fine when the predicate is honest. you can be tall. tall is a measurement. tall does not change between thursday and friday. you can be dutch. dutchness is a passport, more or less, and it survives weather. these are state predicates. they belong in the state grammar.

the larger investigation into the word stupid covers the basic problem with the term. the smaller problem, which is what i’m doing here on a monday from this desk, is the verb. being stupid uses state grammar to describe a thing that is, on inspection, not a state at all. it is a moment. usually a thirty-second moment. occasionally a four-minute moment, in the case of microwaves. but a moment.

and yet the phrase is everywhere. people search it. people type, into a search bar, “how to stop being stupid”, as if stupid were a chronic condition with an exit door at the back of a clinic. it is not. there is no clinic. there is only a tuesday, and a fork, and a microwave that is, by my count, the seventh i have killed.

why being is the wrong tense for the activity

here is the test. take the verb to be, attach it to a predicate, and ask: would i say “he is [predicate]” about someone i had observed for one second? if the answer is yes, the predicate is probably a state. if the answer is no, the predicate is probably an event masquerading as a state.

“he is tall” — yes. one second is enough. tall is not improving when you look away.

“he is tired” — almost. tired has duration but it ends. you can be tired in the morning and not by lunch. tired is, technically, a temporary state, which is its own grammatical class, but the language hasn’t bothered to mark it differently and that is, as i’ve said before in a separate look at what stupid means, a different complaint for a different post.

“he is stupid” — no. one second is not enough. you cannot, on the basis of a single observation, file a person under stupid the way you file them under tall. but the grammar lets you do it anyway. the grammar treats the two predicates as equivalent. the grammar is, in this matter, lying to you.

the productivity expert online — the one whose tweets i read for reasons i don’t fully understand — posted last week that “you are what you repeatedly do”. the implication, which he clearly enjoyed, is that repeated action equals identity. the implication is also wrong. you are what you repeatedly do at the moment of doing it. five minutes later, you are sitting down. you are not, at that moment, doing the thing. you are not, at that moment, the thing. the file is empty until further notice.

examples of mine, with corrections

i have been called, at various times in the last six months, stupid. each time, by my reading, the speaker meant something more specific, and the use of being stupid rather than doing a stupid thing made the situation worse than it had to be. i’ll show three.

example one. i microwaved a fork. the fork was sparky, named retrospectively, after the event. the microwave was the seventh, which is to say the most recent. dave, when called, said “you are being stupid”. he should have said “you have done a stupid thing”. the difference is enormous. the first one says: you, in essence, are a fork-microwaver, this is who you are now, the file is updated. the second one says: a thing happened, on a wednesday, involving a fork, and we will have to discuss it, but it does not, structurally, change anything about the rest of your week. dave is not a grammarian. dave sells insurance. but dave’s grammar, in that moment, did the work of an identity reassignment, and i will not be filing it.

example two. i bought a third yoga mat in 2023. i had two already, both unused, both behind a door. the friend i had with me said “you are being stupid”. again — wrong tense. the correct version: “you are doing a stupid thing in this aisle, on this saturday”. the third yoga mat now lives, lately, beneath the sofa. it has not been used. i have not, since 2023, been using it. i did, however, buy it, once. the buying was the event. the not-using is, in fact, almost the opposite of an event. it is the absence of one. you cannot file someone under stupid for an absence.

example three. stefan, the man at the wine night who once held forth on a bottle for nineteen minutes without a pause, said about a different person, in my hearing: “she is being stupid”. the person had asked a question stefan considered obvious. the person was not being stupid. the person was being uninformed about a specific bottle on a specific evening. the gap is enormous. uninformed has an exit. stupid, in stefan’s mouth, did not. stefan, that night, used the wrong word, applied the wrong tense, and went home before the second course. stefan is, in his own way, an example of the problem.

when the state explanation hides a one-time event

here is the move that the phrase being stupid usually performs, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. somebody does one thing. somebody else, witnessing it, would like the option of holding it against them indefinitely. they reach for the state grammar. he is being stupid. he is just stupid. he is stupid stupid, with the doubling, which is its own crime.

now the witness has, at no extra cost, converted a one-time event into a lifelong condition. they have, in roughly four words, performed an upgrade on their grievance. the grievance is now bigger than the event. it has more terrain to occupy. it has, in a sense, a future.

this is how a word like moron ends up being more honest than stupid, which is a sentence i did not expect to write on a monday. the term moron, in its older sense, was specific — it referred to a particular thing, with a particular history, and it did not, originally, pretend to describe a state of being. it described a category. moron was a noun, applied carefully, by people who at least believed they were being precise. stupid, in the modern hand, has no such restraint. it is a verdict shopping for evidence. the word moron, for all its other failings, at least knew what it was claiming. being stupid claims more than it can carry.

the move can be reversed. you can refuse the state grammar and insist on the event grammar. when somebody says “you are being stupid”, you can say, calmly, “i did one stupid thing, last tuesday, with a fork”. you have just downgraded a state to an event. they will be annoyed. they should be. you have taken the upgrade away from them.

cinema understood this before grammar did. forrest gump spent two and a half hours of runtime distinguishing the two — the man did stupid things and intelligent things in roughly equal proportion, and the film insists, at every turn, that being stupid is not an available verdict on him. it is the polite version of the same point i’m making at this desk, with fewer feathers.

that one is going on the wall, metaphorically. the digital wall, which is where these things go. somewhere between the work-in-progress list from 2022 and a screenshot of a tweet i have not yet replied to.

verdict, i am not being, i am only doing

so here is the cold take, which is also the warm take, which is also the only take i have arrived at, in the time carla has been on the third floor with the slides.

i am not being stupid. i have, on a number of separate occasions, done stupid things. these include, for the record, microwaving a fork named sparky, buying a third yoga mat that lives, lately, beneath the sofa, and once, on a friday, putting milk into what i believed was coffee but which turned out, structurally, to be tea. each of these was a finite event. each had a beginning and an end. none of them, individually or collectively, constitute a state.

the state grammar, applied to me, is wrong. the state grammar applied to most people, on most occasions, is wrong. people are, almost always, doing things, not being things. the things end. the people continue. the file should reflect this.

also: cereal is soup, with rules. i hold this take. i have held it for a long time. i held it during sparky’s incident. i held it during the third yoga mat’s purchase. i held it when stefan was holding forth on the wine. it has nothing, technically, to do with the topic of this post, but i have noticed that the smart-stupid distinction almost always rests on whether you can hold two unrelated convictions at once on a monday morning. i can. i am.

checked the corner of the screen. carla still upstairs. slides must be the long deck today.

so the answer to the search query — how to stop being stupid — is, in my view, to stop being. not in any dramatic sense. just in the grammatical sense. switch tenses. switch verbs. you are not being. you are doing. and what you are doing, right now, on a monday, at whatever desk you happen to have, is reading this post about why the comparative form of stupid breaks down even faster than the base form does, which is the next thing on the list, but not for today.

sparky is in the drawer. the third yoga mat is, lately, beneath the sofa, where i suspect it is conducting some kind of slow audit of the carpet. the seventh microwave is on the counter, blinking the wrong time, as is its practice. i have, on this monday, completed an investigation, however small, into a phrase i have been told too many times. the file is closed. the file was, in fact, never a file. the file was a sentence somebody else wanted to put a full stop on. i have, with this draft, made it a comma.

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