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The title sounds like the most rude and entitled thing someone could ever say.

I’m prepared for the hell I may have unleashed. The “you privileged a**hole” or the “you think you’re so good, Tim Denning” comments. But as always, the shallow thinkers will trip themselves up and hang their own noose without me doing anything.

There is a deeper idea behind the somewhat controversial framing of the title that will change how you think about the life games you’re playing. It’s so rewarding for you that I’m willing to risk looking like a d*ck to help you understand it.

Here we go.

The statistics that don’t lie

It makes sense to consider IQ first.

IQ is built so that 100 is the exact average, and about 68% of people land between 85 and 115. So by that measurement 99% of people aren’t stupid based on IQ. But IQ isn’t a good measurement for stupidity.

A normal person can have a healthy IQ, but what can make them stupid is a lack of curiosity, excessive conformity, unexamined thinking, or conforming to beliefs as if they’re the only way which they inherited from a 3rd-party they never questioned.

The best example I can think of is a religious person I dated who joined a cult and never thought to question that everything the cult told them was in the cult’s best interest and not theirs. There was no reasoning with her. There was 100% an afterlife that she would get to live, but she couldn’t prove it. A guy just said so. “Trust me, bro.”

This is pure stupidity.

Again, statistically, most people follow the traditional path. They join an education system designed for factory workers, they get into huge debt for a degree, and they work a job they find boring after a year. Then they stay on this path until 65 and retire which is when they’re told to start living.

In case you think I’m special, I’m not.

I managed to skip the degree because my family couldn’t afford it, but I didn’t skip the traditional path. I got stuck there for over a decade in corporate hell.

That’s why I’m qualified to write about this topic because I was as stupid as it gets. And yes, I joined a dumb religious cult too for a while so I was also easy to brainwash.

Making it out of stupid society is the real prize. Stupid society is where most of us start, but we don’t need to stay there.

The modern amplifier of stupidity (that is your greatest opportunity)

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but society has gotten stupider in the last 5 years.

Two changes have happened:

1. People spend most of their day looking at their phone screen and pinging their brain to death with notifications.

2. People have outsourced some or even most of their thinking to AI platforms like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT.

Most people are accidentally living like robots, which is why their lives feel lifeless.

If we take the compassionate approach here, it’s not too far-fetched to say that if people are glued to a phone screen for most of their days and don’t do much of their own thinking anymore, it’s reasonable to assume we’d become stupider.

Algorithms run the platforms we use, we’re more distracted than ever, and we have access to infinite infotainment and entertainment.

The modern term for this state of living is called brainrot. Human brains are literally rotting from all the AI slop, context switching, high screen time, and lack of thinking.

So if we live like mindless robots as the default, then of course society is getting stupider, and obviously most (99%) people now meet the definition of stupid.

Suddenly, nothing in this essay is controversial at all. And it’s not meant to be.

The trend change no one could have ever predicted

(Not even me.)

No one trusts big corporations anymore. They’ve lied to us for too long.

This started in 2020 when 1000s of massive corporations, that told us they loved us and had smiling-assassin HR teams, suddenly began mass laying off people right when they needed their jobs the most during a bat virus that locked us in our homes.

I lived through this moment in history and it was jarring.

For the first time corporations were exposed as the wolf in sheep’s clothing that they’ve been all along. The costume came off. We saw the truth.

Since then there has been a quiet shift in sentiment.

More people are realizing no corporation gives a f*ck about them, and they’re a disposable human working on a temporary project. They’re also underpaid so their employer can make the maximum profit off of their work.

Now the default path starts to look more like the stupid path for a lot of us.

We’ve trusted our livelihoods and the ability to feed our families on a false god. Some people have continued to be lied to because it’s easier, and others, like me, have decided to accept the inconvenient truth.

Human psychology ruins us every time like death by a 1000 paper cuts

If you define stupidity based on what we do, then you realize that not doing stuff is a big part of the problem. Why don’t we do stuff? You’re going to hate my answer: a lack of self-improvement.

Every goal or how-to in any field boils down to the cookie-cutter basics of self-improvement that are so cliche at this point in history that I feel disgusting and like I need to have a shower for sharing them here with you.

For humans to NOT be lazy & stupid and get stuff done, they must: make their goals daily habits, have the right mindset (optimism), record their results, hang around others with similar goals, take action daily, and learn from those who have already achieved a similar goal. There you go… that’s my Jim Rohn speech from 1970.

It’s so simple yet no one does it.

Society is stupid because they don’t practice the basics of self-improvement. Instead, they rely on hope, luck, fantasies, waiting for the right time, or inconsistent levels of action. Without self-improvement our monkey brain runs on survival mode and destroys any chance we have of achieving anything.

The crazy part is every single person knows about the basics of self-improvement.

But knowing isn’t the same as doing. And doing it is hard some days, so it’s easier to not do it at all and either delude yourself into believing you are doing it, or to