people being stupid — including me, allegedly, last tuesday

i am one of the people. i should disclose that early. seven microwaves and a fork episode that i will not narrate again here. people being stupid is a category that includes me, which means the category cannot do the work of separation it was built to do. it folds on contact with honesty.

tuesday, 9:47am, second coffee already cooling. carla rode the elevator up to the all-hands on the third floor about fifteen minutes back. the deck looked thick from where i was sitting, which buys me, optimistically, the rest of the morning.

so. people being stupid. a phrase that gets thrown around like a weather report. i hear it on the bus. i hear it in line at the supermarket. i hear it on the radio, in a voice that has not earned the certainty it carries. the speakers, when you listen, are always positioned slightly above the fray. the fray is below them. they are not in it. the fray is what other people are doing. it is, conveniently, never the speaker.

people being stupid, the framing the speaker hides behind

the phrase has a shape. it puts a noun first — people. broad, unspecified, somebody else. it adds a verb in the continuous — being. ongoing, not bounded, definitely happening right now, somewhere over there. and it lands on the adjective — stupid. the verdict. the whole construction is a sentence that pretends to describe the world while quietly excluding the person uttering it.

the parent topic — the larger problem with the word stupid — is the verdict itself, the fact that it ends conversations and confuses character with weather. the smaller problem, the one i am at this desk to handle, is the framing. people being stupid is not an observation. it is a position. you have to be standing somewhere specific to make the statement, and the place you are standing is, by definition, not in the photograph.

at the supermarket on saturday i watched a man in front of me say, to nobody in particular, “people are so stupid”, because the woman ahead of him had three coupons and the cashier could not, on the first try, scan the third one. the man said it like a weather forecaster. he said it like a man with no coupons of his own and no history of holding up a line. but i had, two weeks earlier, in that same supermarket, held up that same line trying to remember a phone number for a loyalty program i no longer used. i was, at that moment, also people being stupid. nobody pointed at me. the framing protected me until it didn’t.

the framing is a chair. the speaker sits in it. the chair is positioned above the scene. the chair has, written on its back in small letters, not me. that is the entire performance.

exhibit one, my microwave, again

i have, by my own admission and the testimony of one (1) insurance-selling friend, killed seven microwaves. the seventh is the one most people have heard about, because the fork incident produced the loudest of the seven flashes. i will not narrate the fork incident here. it has been narrated elsewhere, by me, with feeling. the relevant fact for this post is: the seventh microwave count is mine. it is on my receipt. it is on my counter, blinking the wrong time, which is its way of remembering.

by the framing of people being stupid, the seventh microwave puts me squarely in the crowd. i am not above the photograph. i am in it. i am, in some compositions, the central figure. dave, when he heard the count, laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. nine minutes, on speaker, while i held the phone away from my ear and considered, for the first time, whether i had earned the laughter. i had. that was the answer. i had earned every minute of it.

but here is the move. dave, in those nine minutes, had himself once put a metal whisk into a different microwave, in 2017, in a kitchen i visited. he did not, at the time, classify himself as people being stupid. he classified the whisk incident as a one-off. an event. a tuesday. by tuesday evening it was filed under weird thing that happened, not under i am, structurally, an idiot. dave’s grammar protected dave. my grammar, when applied to me, did not.

this is the asymmetry. people being stupid is what other people are doing. a thing i did once is what i am doing. the words are picking sides.

why context collapses the framing

the framing collapses on contact with context. every time. there is no exception. give me any instance of people being stupid and a quiet ten minutes, and i can rebuild the situation around the actor until the action looks reasonable, defensible, even somewhat clever. this is not because the actor is reasonable. it is because the framing left the context out on purpose.

the woman with the three coupons, for instance. i did not, in the supermarket, know what was on the receipt. i did not know whether she had been sent by a sick relative with a list and three coupons clipped from a sunday paper. i did not know whether the third coupon was for a thing she could not, on her budget, otherwise afford. the man behind me did not know either. but the framing did not require him to know. the framing required only that he be standing slightly above the scene with his arms crossed.

my own seventh microwave, with context: i had, that evening, returned home from a long day at this desk. i had, in the apartment, only one fork, which is sparky. i had heated, the previous night, leftovers, and the fork had ended up in the container by the kind of casual error that happens in kitchens that contain one tired adult and one fork. the next day, the container went into the microwave. the fork went with it. the microwave did what microwaves do when they meet metal. i was not, in the moment, being stupid. i was being tired in a kitchen with one fork. the framing does not allow for that nuance. the framing wants a single word. stupid. file closed.

this is also the territory of the dunning-kruger effect, which is the academic-flavored version of the same misfire — the framing where confidence is mistaken for competence and the surrounding context gets shaved away to fit the chart. dunning, kruger, the man with the coupons opinion, and the productivity bro all share a posture: the speaker is above, the subject is below, the context is missing on purpose. the joke, as always, is that the speaker is in the photograph too. the kruger of one room is the dunning of another.

examples of mine that look stupid only in retrospect

i have, over the years, done several things that, if filmed and shown out of context, would qualify me, by anyone’s framing, as one of the people being stupid. i’d like to list three. the others i’m reserving for a future investigation that may or may not arrive.

example one — the third yoga mat. i bought a third yoga mat in 2023. i had two already. both unused. both behind a door. on the security footage of the supermarket aisle that day, i look like one of the people being stupid. on the receipt, i look like one of the people being stupid. but in context — alone, end of a long week, having seen a video that morning of a man my age who had, allegedly, fixed his back in six weeks with a yoga mat — i was being a man making a small bet on a possible future. the bet did not pay off. the third yoga mat lives, lately, beneath the sofa, possibly evolving. but the buying was reasonable in the moment. it became stupid only in retrospect, and only when narrated by somebody who was not, that saturday, in the aisle.

example two — stefan and the wine. i once nodded along to stefan for nineteen minutes while he held forth on a bottle of wine i had brought from the bodega downstairs. i nodded. i made small affirmative sounds. i did not, at any point, mention that i had paid less than nine dollars for it. on footage, i was being stupid — agreeing with a man whose authority was, on close inspection, largely vibes. in context, i was being a man who had decided, twelve minutes in, that correcting stefan would cost more than nodding through. that is a calculation. it is a small, undignified calculation, but it is a calculation. people being stupid does not, in its grammar, allow for calculations. it allows only for verdicts.

example three — the unopened mail pile. i have a stack of letters on a side table near the door. some of them are red. one of them is, by texture and weight, certified. by the framing of people being stupid, the existence of the stack is incriminating. who, the framing asks, leaves red letters unopened. the answer, in context, is: somebody who has correctly assessed that the contents of red letters do not improve when opened on a tuesday morning before coffee. the stack is a deliberate strategy. the strategy is wrong. the strategy is also, as strategies go, a strategy. it is not the absence of one. people being stupid does not, again, allow for the distinction.

cinema, as ever, was on this earlier than grammar. forrest gump spends two and a half hours refusing to let the audience file the protagonist under people being stupid. every act, in context, becomes a different act. the film is, structurally, a defense of context against framing. it has nothing to do with my microwave and everything to do with the chair i am sitting in.

verdict, the framing is the laziest tool in the drawer

here is where i land, with carla’s deck still presumably on slide six.

the phrase people being stupid is a tool. tools are judged by what they let you do and what they prevent you from doing. this tool lets you stand above a scene and pronounce on it without being implicated. it prevents you from describing the scene accurately, because accurate description requires you to be in the scene at least some of the time. the tool, in other words, trades accuracy for distance. it is a bad trade. but it is a popular trade, because the distance is comfortable and the accuracy is, frankly, a lot of work.

i hold a hot take that touches this, for what it’s worth: mondays are objectively better than fridays. the productivity bro types call this stupid. the framing they use is, predictably, people being stupid like the man who likes mondays. they are sitting in the chair. they are above the photograph. but the photograph contains them too — they are the people who post their tweets on a friday at 4:48pm, the people who have outsourced their mondays to a routine, the people who have a system for not being in their own week. the chair does not save them. the chair is also in the photograph. it just doesn’t know it yet.

checked the screen. carla not back yet. all-hands deck must be the long version. one more paragraph.

by my count i have, this morning, opened twenty-three tabs, three of which are about microwaves, one of which is about yoga mats, and one of which is a search for “how to remove a fork mark from a microwave plate”, which is, on paper, the kind of thing the man in the supermarket on saturday would call people being stupid. but it is, in context, a tuesday, and a tuesday at this desk has its own laws. sparky is in the drawer. the third yoga mat is, as ever, beneath the sofa. the seventh microwave is blinking. the unopened mail pile has, since this morning, gained one new envelope of an unfamiliar texture. the file is, as always, open.

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