2️⃣088: Being stupid is easy 😃

Have you ever wondered what medieval peasants thought about during their free time?

I know I bring up medieval peasants a lot. The reason I do is that I'm fascinated by contrasting how we waste our time today to how they wasted their time before.

What did they talk about when sitting around at the pub and drinking for hours?

Think of it like this: You know that lady who posted a tweet about the "Discussion Topics" her dad makes when going to the bar on Friday nights with his friends?

This is the tweet I'm referring to that started it all:

Since this first tweet went viral, the lady has been posting her dad's list every Friday night, and the internet loves it. Well, except for these guys:

(this is why we can't have nice things)

What would a list of Friday Night Discussion Topics look like for a medieval peasant? I'm guessing it's something like:

That's honestly way more things than they probably talked about.

Hold up, let’s pump the brakes for a second. You’re probably wondering how I got here (not a Malcolm In The Middle reference fwiw). Before I thought about medieval peasants, I was inspired to write this email because I was watching Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the New York Jets.

There's a scene in the second episode where the team brings in a mentalist to entertain the players for one of their meetings. And by mentalist, I'm not talking about the Patrick Jane television series that aired on CBS and was cut abruptly short.

RIP to a good show, though:

This is the Oxford definition of a mentalist:

Here’s more, just in case:

Now, I don't claim to be smarter than a mentalist, nor do I know the inner workings behind all of their tricks. I just love the show The Mentalist and have also seen a few mentalist shows through work and college.

What I do know is that what they do is based on gaining our attention, making us look one way, switching things on the other side, and priming us to give answers that we think we came to out of our own free will but in reality they guided us there (basically a magic show with fewer rabbits in hats).

That was a long sentence. Let me explain what happened in the show.

The first trick the mentalist played was on Jets running back Michael Carter (draft him in your fantasy league; he will do well this year, trust me). He brings Michael Carter up to the front of the room and asks him if he could pick any number to wear on his jersey; what number would it be? (This is a football thing because traditionally, certain positions only had specific numbers, but now because the American empire is crumbling thanks to the Woke Mob™️, we have quarterbacks like Teddy Bridgewater rocking this shit on the field:

Back to the mentalist. He tells Michael Carter he can pick any number for his jersey number. Then he starts to say random shit to distract him and make him think he's doing super powerful mind games figuring out the number.

While Michael thinks of a number, the mentalist looks at him and says, "10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90. Hut. Hut! Hike! Okay, look here. *snaps fingers* Pick your number, hold it, and picture it in your mind. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Hold! Don't lose that number."

He then tells Michael Carter to face the wall and turn his back to the rest of the team. He puts a blank paper on Michael Carter's back and writes the number he thinks Michael Carter is thinking of. He writes the number 10. Michael then announces his number:

Everyone in the meeting room loses it:

People can't believe what's happening. Even famous anti-vaxxer and ex-boyfriend of Olivia Munn, Aaron Rodgers, is stunned. He can't believe it, either.

Dear Readers, your boy david not david was not tricked. I knew exactly what this dude was up to (mami, for the record, I wanted to say "motherfucker" instead of "dude" right there because it has so much more emotion, but I know you wouldn't like that, so I said it here instead explaining to you why I didn't say it 😘).

My first thought was, "He set him up to say number 10. Isn't it obvious?"

The first thing he says when Michael Carter thinks of a number is "10" as he counts up by 10s. Then the final thing he does as Michael Carter thinks of a number is count from 1 to 9 while conveniently not saying 10. It doesn't take a wizard to realize he started and ended priming Michael Carter with the number he wanted him to say, 10 🙃

At this point, I'm asking myself: Michael Carter and everyone in that room are kinda stupid for falling for this, no?

(No offense Michael Carter, I'm sure you're a good guy who will be drafted into somebody’s championship fantasy football team.)

Before we keep going, I have to say Michael Carter fucked up picking such an easy number. My first thought for a number when the guy told him what to do was, "Pick the square root of -5!!!" The mentalist did tell him he could pick any number. So pick a fucking weird number! Instead, this dude (I wanted to say "motherfucker" there, too, mom) was like, "Hmmm, how about a nice, even, round, completely common number like TEN." SMH, Michael Carter, I will not be drafting you for my fantasy team (everyone else totally should, though).

As the camera panned the room to all the players, jaw-dropped wondering how he guessed the number, I asked myself once again:

Are these guys all idiots?

How many more people would fall for this?

Has anyone else thought to pick a number the same way I did, like Pi, so the mentalist couldn't figure it out?

And that's when I came up with the idea for this email. It was at that moment that I realized even though we have the entire history of the world and everything we could ever learn literally at the tips of our fingers, most people in the world are idiots.

You'd think it wouldn't be like that.

You would think peasants with no access to technology or education who are only focused on the upcoming wheat harvest and die from paper cuts because they didn't have basic antibiotics would be dumber than us.

But it's BECAUSE we have all the technology and information in the world at our fingers tips that we're so fucking stupid.

Let's skip the fact that deadly diseases that had previously been eradicated are coming back because people refuse to get vaccinated (yes, yes, I know some of you aren't crazy conspiracists, yet, you refuse to get vaccinated because "I've never done it before," you're still fucking things up and you're part of the problem you should totally get your vaccines cuz white people be nasty and they don't shower properly or wash their hands or scrub their legs and lack basic hygiene and you don't want to die from malaria or get the shingles or HPV).

I want to ask you:

When was the last time you read an entire article?

I'm not talking about reading 3/6 carousel pictures that one meme account on Instagram posted discussing the death of Lil' Tay, which then turned out to be a hoax.

And I'm not talking about liking The Shade Room posts every day, getting your information from a single headline and nothing else, and then going around to everyone you know like, "Did you hear about RECITES EXACT HEADLINE WITHOUT ANY OTHER INFORMATION BECAUSE THEY DON'T KNOW ANY OTHER INFORMATION."

Please stop following The Shade Room. They're actually dangerous.

Stop following those random news accounts that were previously meme accounts but realized they could post click-baitey headlines to get more engagement.

Please be aware that most of those big, random hip-hop accounts that have 300k followers and share the dumbest news articles ever are run by 17-year-olds in India or Pakistan.

People don't even read full captions anymore. They'll read the headline in the picture and then go in and comment about things missing from the story without realizing the things they're saying are missing are fully explained in the caption or maybe in the link in bio a profile referred them to.

It's because people don't want to read, and in order to learn, you have to read. You have to spend time dedicating your mental energy to something that doesn't provide immediate hits of dopamine. And that's what it takes actually to learn and grow.

But,

People don't want to learn.

People want to know.

People don't want to be informed.

People want to have an opinion.

Being informed and having an opinion are two completely different things.

Being informed takes time. It takes energy. It takes effort. It takes admitting to yourself you might be wrong about something. It takes having the humility to admit that even when you're researching something and have read a lot about it, you still might not have a single fucking clue about what's going on (I can't tell you the number of times someone is explaining something political that I think I want to know about and I'm five tweets in thinking to myself "I have no fucking clue what this person is talking about, I'm confused by these sentences, I'm confused by these words, and I feel like an idiot because everyone responding seems to understand them perfectly.").

Because when you don't know what's going on, you can't comment on it. And if you can't comment on it, if you can't share your opinion, you can't post anything to let people know that you know about what's going on. You can't let people know where you stand. And when you can't let people know where you stand, they might assume where you stand. And that's the scariest thing of all.

Here's the thing, I don't blame anyone. I'm guilty of this, too (not the black square part, don’t be ridiculous). I'm guilty of not spending enough time reading and learning. It's so much easier to read 50 tweets in a matter of seconds that make me laugh, cry, get upset, and help me stay "informed" than it is to sit down and read an article that takes eight minutes to go through. Just yesterday, I sat down to read two new books I bought, and then I felt my phone vibrate right next to me. The next time I looked at the clock, it was 30 minutes after I "sat down to read," and I had only read the first paragraph of the first page of one of the books.

Needless to say, I'm also fucking up with all this information we have. But dammit, at least I'm trying (is what I tell myself).

I think we can all agree that:

This isn't a phenomenon I discovered myself. Decision fatigue is a thing we've known about for a while now.

And if you haven't realized it because you're too busy laughing at stupid videos and haven't read an entire book since middle school, then you're probably a victim of it too.

Why would people spend time reading and learning and being knowledgeable about things in life that won't make them any money when they could sign up for Twitter Verified to make money and post stuff like: 

"Republican candidate for School Board Director says he has no problem with the LGBTQ+ community but will go out of his way to stab to death any drag queen he sees because he fears for his family's safety. Followers, y'all rocking with protecting your family or nah? Let's discuss!"

It's so much easier to do that than, say, reading a fucking book about the dangers of what's really going on and not commenting because you know it's just engagement bait and finding other ways in your daily life to actually help the world that you can't post about on social media.

When you share pictures or posts on your story about that one movie I’ve previously mentioned, but I know you didn’t read this in-depth article about, so please come back to it at some point, this is what you look like to me:

The thing is, if we have so many easy, mindless ways to make money and if we can provoke people to respond to us and laugh at them because "we're just trolling," why would we ever care about doing any meaningful knowledge gathering that requires time and effort?

It's all a joke; nothing matters, we're all going to die, and I'd rather make fun of someone for admitting they googled the answer to something they didn't know than admit I didn't know what it was either. But you don't get "HaHa" replies from the group chat on your text admitting you didn't know something.

You get it for making fun of the person who did.

In today's age, would you rather be the person who got the laughs or the person who admitted they were ignorant and spent time learning?

That’s up to you.

PS

At one point during this email, you were probably like, "Come on, David, you’re exaggerating there, saying The Shade Room is dangerous. I get all my news from The Shade Room, and I’m super smart and informed.”

Ok, whatever. Shoutout to this bright young man who's probably smarter than me: