A Stupid Argument For Stupidity

This post was originally submitted to Adam Mastroianni’s blog post contest. Adam is the clever mind behind Experimental History with funny bones to pick with peer review and productivity culture. I found him through his legit psychology study written up as a blog post, “Things could be better”. My favorite might be about forgetting things we learned in school. If it seems like I’m linking an awful lot, it’s because I think so highly of him, and it’s hard to pick just one to recommend. If that doesn’t interest you, he just announced the contest winners. I haven’t gotten a chance to read them yet, but he said he was looking for weird, surprising posts, and it looks like that’s what he got.

My post, as it was when I submitted it, is below. If you know me and like to hear me admit to doing stupid things, I hope you’ll enjoy it.

A friend recently made me feel insane without even trying. All she did was ask reasonable follow up questions about why I went to see Dune: Part Two which I did despite not liking the first one which I saw despite not liking the book which I read despite not liking sci-fi in general.

I don’t know for sure what possessed me to take a bus alone to pay full price to watch a 3 hour film I didn’t think I’d like on a weeknight. Maybe it was just for the sense of accomplishment and completion or because some friends who liked the first one liked the second one even more or subliminal advertising or some other hobgoblin of my little mind.

It’s not even a good hatewatch. It was just me sitting in a theater bored for hours and a smattering of cool shots. As my friend so easily spelled out, I did not make the best choice with the information I had at the time. And still I don’t regret going. At least I got to laugh at myself all the way home. Stupidity is its own reward.

When I became self aware, around 6th or 7th grade, I declared to my (older and wiser) sister that I was going to try to live more intentionally to which she replied, “Ugh, that sounds exhausting,” or something equally dismissive. To me, the pinnacle of free will was the process of thinking about a desire, planning how to get it, and executing on the plan. But to this day, much as I admire and sometimes envy the people who think through large and small decisions methodically, it’s never suited me to try to emulate them.

The negative restrictions on free will are obvious. Addiction in the extreme, but also other ways of giving in to base desires: banal instant gratification and just floating along making the easy, default choices in life (in my case buying myself a slice of pie on the way home from work; it happens automatically).

But there’s also a lack of free will in the opposite direction. When I feel at my most responsible and highest energy, a shockingly large part of my attention is dedicated to adding things to my todo list and ticking them off which also doesn’t feel very “free will-y” of me. I’m just running code I wrote for myself in the past.

Stupidity is a way out of the dilemma. It’s not base or noble because to do something stupid is to act against your interests themselves. It was stupid of me to go see Dune: Part Two. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it, and nothing good came of it, but at least it was an exercise of free will.

It’s the same reason I never want to know the health benefits of cold plunges. The thing you have to understand is that it’s a really extreme and unpleasant sensation to squat in Puget Sound under 50 degrees at low tide in the misting rain. (Bragging about it here doesn’t nearly make up for the experience itself). Even if you’ve done it before, it’s probably worse than you remember, or at least it’s impossible to recall the pain viscerally. And the craziest part is that you don’t feel any better after you’ve gotten out and warmed up aside from the vague moral superiority¹. Doing cold plunges goes against my long standing self interest of staying warm and dry, but I’m still afraid that if someone told me why they’re supposed to be healthy, it would take all the fun out of them².

Dostoevsky’s Underground Man has a bleaker view of humanity’s situation. Man would rather “contrive destruction and chaos… suffering of all sorts” than be said to have as much free will as a piano key. In my own experience, trying to walk home from Logan Airport in the middle of the night after the Silver Line has stopped running does the trick (I took the bridge which was less stupid than Maps’s suggestion to walk across Boston Harbor). No destruction needed, and only minor chaos.

That said, stupidity is not “one weird trick” for The Good Life. The thing about acting against your interests is that you often do end up worse off, like the camping trip where someone told me it was ok to eat a prickly pear cactus, and, after watching him scrape spines off, I gave it a once-over lay inspection myself, licked it, and had tiny little cactus spines in my tongue for the rest of the trip.

That’s why I also wouldn’t recommend maximizing stupidity, not that I need to clarify that I hope. A little stupidity goes a long way. It’s a rare virtue that’s immune to perversion by productivity gurus. It lends itself to temperance. It’s harder to worship than intelligence, beauty, or power, though some people do.

You might be wondering here whether it’s possible to achieve the same psychological benefits from stupidity done intentionally with all this in mind. I assure you that it is as I tested one day by running a few blocks in a thunderstorm to buy ice cream sandwiches. It was a little “Stargirl” of me, but it worked.

This isn’t a stupid argument just because I’m using up all of the Truths I usually save for 2 Truths and a Lie. It’s stupid because stupidity is not the thing I’m arguing for, even the way I’ve defined it as “acting against your own interests”. Not exactly. In all the examples I’ve given, there was a “good” I was pursuing. I genuinely hoped that I’d enjoy the movie. I did the cold plunge to prepare for a Triathlon. I was too cheap for a late-night Uber. They’re all simply inefficient ways of getting at the good which looks from the outside and feels on the inside like stupidity.

And because stupid ideas often sound so good in the moment, it’s hard for me to give any useful advice on how to be stupider although I suspect everyone is a little stupider than they’re usually willing to let on. If you are stupid, I hope you can stop and appreciate it, knowing what those with good judgment are deprived of. And if you’re really really stupid, let me know. I know a Nigerian prince who needs some money.