Dumb Dummy

Some quick, frustrated thoughts on not even knowing how to think.

Regular readers to this blog know that I’ve been writing a lot about UFOs. (Don’t worry, this post will not be about that particular topic.) The phrase du jour in the UFO community is “ontological shock,” the devastating feeling produced when a worldview is turned inside out. One doesn’t need the presence of alien life forms to provoke such an emotion. In my own case, that ontological shock occurred at the beginning of this year for reasons that are actually quite banal - but which I do not wish to discuss - but whose effect was profound. I fell into a deep depression, which lasted a couple long and debilitating months.

When I came out of it, I felt like I had to rebuild and reorder my sense of self. Doing that required deep self-examination, a process still ongoing. The problem is I’m having a terrible time accomplishing that goal because most of the time I feel like the lump of goo in my head isn’t up to the job. Unfortunately, one of the first conclusions I’ve reached in this process is that I am a dumb dummy.

A lot of people believe they grow dumber as they age. Maybe it’s true. Or maybe it’s that our accumulated wisdom gives us some insight into just how stupid we are, just how stupid we’ve been up to now, and how stupid we’re likely to be moving forward. That’s certainly been the case for me.

It’s a real problem.

Have you ever gone house hunting? If you have then you’re no doubt familiar with the experience of figuring out your budget, looking at houses, and realizing that you could afford the house you really want if you had just a little bit more money. Your actual budget doesn’t matter – the house of your dreams is always just a little bit beyond your means. That’s how I feel about my own IQ.

Pictured: me (Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash)

If I was just a wee bit smarter, all of my intellectual problems could be solved. And that is exactly the kind of backwards and dumb-ass thinking I’m talking about when discussing my own idiocy.

But recognizing one’s idiocy and having the wherewithal to do anything about it are two entirely different things. Because this particular dumb dummy is too stupid to know what to do about it, I choose instead to blame others for my own shortcomings.

So: who is to blame?

Obviously, when identifying any problem, the first thing to do is assign fault. I’d like to blame my parents but they were both smart people with good, working brains. Both of them had their own challenges, of course, but I didn’t see them wrestling with the actual inadequacies of their own intellects to work through them. My brother, too, is a smart guy. I don’t see him struggling with ontological shock or any sort of brain deficiency. Genetics are unlikely the culprit here.

My teachers? Surely they are, at least, partly to blame. Isn’t the entire point of an education to teach us how to think? To get past the first defenses of an incalcitrant and lazy brain to the loamier stuff below? Instead, I feel like I was mostly taught the art of regurgitation, useful in games of Trivial Pursuit, but less so during extended middle-aged crises when familiar patterns no longer cohere. Did my education fail me or did I fail my education? Hard to say, but I suspect the latter more than the former. I was a lackadaisical student at best. At the time, I told myself that it was because I “too smart” to deal in the prosaic craft of “learning.” Now I suspect that I was kidding myself all along. The reason I didn’t perform better in school was that I was afraid that if I applied myself and failed, I would have to reevaluate my grandiose opinion of my own intellect. Better to wait until my fifties to do that.

I have no religious instruction to fall back on. My faith background is Judaism, which encourages the kind of questioning to which I’m subjecting myself to, but what do we know about Judaism above all else? It’s the greatest algorithm ever invented for creating neurotics. Psychology is a close second. And I don’t want to be any more neurotic than I already am.

Ultimately, though, it does seem like reordering one’s sense of self is more of a philosophical task than anything else. I did take one philosophy class in college but got turned off by my professor who seemed to take delight in throwing students’ earnest questions back in their faces. It was like the Socratic Method if Socrates had been kind of a sarcastic dick. Even if I wanted to get back into philosophy, what am I going to do, start reading Heidegger? Not with this used-up brain. I can’t even get through the Stephen King novel I’m currently reading without nodding off after a few pages. (Not his fault, I swear.)

The dumbest people I have ever met are blessed with the gift of self-conviction. They are convinced of their own intelligence because they’re too dumb to perceive otherwise. Any worldview which contradicts their own is easily dismissed, any uncomfortable opinion tossed aside like used tissue. What I would give to be that dumb. I mean that sincerely – wouldn’t it be great to go through life so dumb and myopic that you’re incapable of interrogating your own stupidity? I wish I was that dumb. With any luck, my brain will continue to unravel until I am left with nothing but a pile of wet spaghetti in my skull. As it is, the constant awareness of being a dumb dummy is driving me nuts.

Maybe I just need to start doing a lot of drugs. Either they’ll get me closer to enlightenment or fry me so bad that I’ll get to that mythical land of Dumb much more quickly than if I just let nature continue to run its course. Or maybe I just need a nap. Or maybe I can just stop overthinking everything and enjoy the day. That’s what a smart person would do.