moron reddit — 10 threads i read instead of working

a productivity bro tweeted, in a tab i did not invite, that mornings are won by 5:30am. i’d opened the tab to look up moron reddit at 9:48 on a thursday and somehow we’d ended up on a stranger’s morning routine. ten threads later i was still scrolling, the spreadsheet i was supposed to be touching had stopped pretending, and the third yoga mat had nothing to say about any of it.

at the desk. carla is upstairs at a training thing on the third floor — the ones where they hand out lanyards no adult requested. i have, in honesty, the rest of the morning, give or take.

i should clarify what i mean by moron reddit. i don’t mean a single subreddit, although there is one and i’ll get to it. i mean the broader fact that reddit, as a site, is the natural habitat of the modern moron. it is where we go to recognize ourselves at full volume, in someone else’s username, on a thursday, when our actual job is right there on the second monitor, blinking.

moron reddit refers to the cluster of subreddits and threads where users self-identify as morons, share their moron behaviors, and reward each other for it with upvotes. the most cited is r/MoronicMonday, a weekly thread on programming subs. the genre also lives across r/idiotsincars, r/wallstreetbets, and the comments of anything posted by a sincere person.

TEN. THREADS. I. SHOULD. HAVE. CLOSED.

1. moron reddit, the genre i did not need

i went looking for the word “moron” on reddit because i’d already read the dictionary entry, the etymology, and the long table of words people reach for instead of moron, and i wanted to see what a real human, on a tuesday, with a keyboard and no supervision, was doing with the word. the answer is: a lot. the word is alive on reddit in a way it is not alive in the office, which is appropriate, because most offices have an HR department and reddit, on the whole, does not.

the genre, broadly, is people posting their own behavior under the banner “i am a moron” and waiting for confirmation. confirmation arrives within minutes. it arrives in the form of comments that begin “you are not alone” and end with somebody else’s worse version of the same thing. it is, structurally, the moron equivalent of a support group, except no one stops drinking and the chairs are virtual.

this is, in some sense, what i’m doing on this whole project of writing about morons from the desk. i was going to call it research. i’ll call it research. the difference between research and procrastination is, by my own definition, whether you publish at the end. i intend to publish. that puts me, at least technically, on the right side of the line.

2. r/moronicmonday, the actual subreddit briefly

r/MoronicMonday is, plainly, not what you think. it is a recurring weekly thread, mostly on programming and finance subs, where users are invited to ask “stupid questions” without being mocked. the premise is that monday is the day of the week where the brain is at its softest, and so the questions can be at their dumbest, and nobody will dunk. it is, in the original sense, kind. it is also, i suspect, where many careers have been quietly saved.

i lurked on three of these threads. one was a person asking why their code wouldn’t run, and the answer was that they had not, in fact, saved their work. one was a person asking what a 401k actually is. one was a person asking whether you can call a customer service line for an issue that is not their fault. the answer to that last one, in case you were wondering, is yes. you can. they will be polite. they have, after all, a script for it.

i did not post. i was tempted. i had, on hand, a question about microwave wattage and what the seventh one i killed had done to deserve it. i did not ask. i closed the tab. that’s a moron move in itself, by the way — having a question and then refusing to ask it because you’d rather think about it for another nine months.

3. the top 10 threads i could not stop reading

here, in rough order of how long they kept me, are the threads i opened instead of doing the spreadsheet. i counted them as i went. i may have posted in two of them. i won’t say which.

1. r/idiotsincars — three drivers in a row attempting things that physics, on duty that day, was not going to allow. i watched all three. i had opinions. i kept the opinions to myself, which, on reddit, is itself a moron move.
2. r/youbelongwithme — people sending unhinged messages to people who do not know they exist. i recognized a category from my own DM history. i closed it fast. i did not close it fast enough.
3. r/wallstreetbets, archived — a man, in 2021, betting his rent on a stock named after a furniture chain. comments are still active. people are still arguing. nobody, four years later, has agreed on anything.
4. r/MoronicMonday on the python sub — a question about indentation. the answer was indentation. the gratitude was sincere.
5. r/mademesmile, posted by a moron — a man recreated his cat’s funeral with a cardboard box. the comments were, against my expectation, kind. i was, against my expectation, moved. i’d be lying if i said i closed it dry-eyed.
6. r/AmIDumbOrSmart — a self-quiz subreddit. people post their behavior and ask. i did not take the quiz. i did not need to.
7. r/ChoosingBeggars — strangers asking strangers for things, badly. i found two of them aspirational, which is a confession i will not expand on.
8. r/WhatStupidPersonDidIDateThisTime — does not exist. i typed it. reddit refused to autocomplete it. that’s a healthier site than i’d assumed.
9. r/UnethicalLifeProTips — i read four. i closed the tab. i opened it again. i closed it again. that brings me, somehow, to 47 tabs across two browsers, several of which i am pretending are work.
10. r/CasualConversation — people asking strangers about how a person uses the word moron in a sentence without breaking the sentence. genuinely useful. i learned three things. one of them was about bread.

4. the comment sections, where the real morons live

the threads, as i’ve laid them out, are mostly fine. it’s the comment sections that do the heavy lifting. on reddit, the comment section is where the post gets metabolized. it is also where the algorithm, which i have come to think of as a polite stranger with a clipboard, decides which take of yours gets buried and which gets handed a small trophy nobody asked for.

here’s the thing nobody warns you about. the top comment is rarely the smartest. it is the one that arrived first and was funny. the second comment is the smartest, but the second comment is at the bottom of the page, and you, on a thursday morning at 10:11, are not going to scroll. you will read the top three. you will form an opinion. that opinion will be, statistically, the same opinion held by the moron who got there first. that’s how reddit works. that’s how, i suspect, most of my opinions have been formed since 2017.

i checked. carla is still upstairs. the lanyard part of the training, by my reading of the agenda emailed at 7am, takes longer than the actual content.

5. closing pulpit, reddit is the supermarket of being a moron

so here’s where i land. moron reddit is not a place. it is a behavior. you log in, you say a thing about yourself, you wait. somebody, within minutes, says the same thing about themselves. you both feel less alone. neither of you, in the morning, has done anything about whatever started the spiral. the spreadsheet is still untouched. the spreadsheet, in fact, has gotten worse, because spreadsheets, untouched, decay. i have, on this point, office space, the 1999 movie about a man named peter who stops attending his job, which is, by any honest measure, the cleanest film about offices ever made. peter, in that film, also stops touching his spreadsheet. peter, by the end, is fine.

i am not peter. i am still, as of this paragraph, planning to touch my spreadsheet. i am also, in a separate tab, scrolling r/MoronicMonday for one more thread before i do. the productivity bro, somewhere in another tab, has now tweeted that mornings are won by 4:45am. the gap between his morning and mine is, in human terms, two hours. in reddit time, it’s a season.

the supermarket of being a moron has, like the actual supermarket — which, in honesty, is where i once spent forty minutes trying to decide between two brands of tinned tomatoes — no clock and no last call. you stay until you remember you have somewhere else to be. or until carla comes back from training. whichever lands first.

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