Too Stupid to Live

Just when we need to be smarter for survival, we're getting dumber

The scruffy-looking ambulance attendant said he’d soon apply to the Chicago Police Department. We murmured our appreciation as he vowed to serve and protect.

A moment later, he related how much fun he’d had looting Michigan Avenue stores during the pandemic.

“Got some really good stuff,” he added, throwing back his head in laughter.

During my misspent life as a newspaper reporter, hearing anyone admit to such spectacular hypocrisy was rare. I felt oddly privileged to be in the presence of a consummate piece of crap.

But I almost lost the opportunity to hear him, as did his two fellow 20-somethings in the little room. Everybody but me had fished out their smartphones as soon as we got there, and all was silence. Conversation had started only because the stubborn old man insisted.

When we’re paying more attention to faraway folks on the Internet than scary people in our own world, bad stuff can happen to us, right quick. 

And bad stuff is coming quicker and badder all the time.

All this scrolling is not just making us antisocial and unsafe. It’s making us stupid. 

The time we spend on screens used to be spent daydreaming, thinking without boundary. It’s not exciting, but it’s probably important. 

Everybody needs to risk letting themselves get bored once in a while. It affords us a little space in our lives to figure things out.

But we humans, especially the younger examples of our species, are fighting boredom as if it were fatal. As soon as we stop doing something that commands our attention, we’re likely to be on our phones.

We need quiet time to reflect on our problems and envision ways to create new, more entertaining ones. If we spend most of our spare moments looking at screens, we become preoccupied with other people’s thoughts while neglecting our own.

And those other people’s thoughts are not so hot, either, because for a lot of the time they’re awake, they’re probably doing the same thing. 

I can imagine a time when two or three people are doing all the thinking in each of life’s areas of interest, and all the rest of us are just reposting. 

Maybe, by then, we’ll consider ourselves lucky if those two or three people are actual people. 

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that

We used to let our minds wander while on public transportation, in waiting rooms, in cars, on planes, at restaurant tables, in bars, walking and standing in line, on hold, on the toilet.

Remember the old days, like three years ago, when people never brought their phones into the bathroom? Now we’re lucky if they just mute the things when they flush.

Photo by melissa mjoen on Unsplash

One of the best times to leave oneself open to free thought and conversation is when hanging around outside a conference room before a meeting. It’s an opportunity to learn the whispered inside dope on a project or organization from one’s fellows. Maybe to build alliances. But in today’s real life, instead of comparing notes, everybody is likely to have their heads down. 

We express amazement at how others can’t understand what we consider obvious and essential truths. Those others’ habit of rarely taking a moment to ponder can’t help matters. And it might be our own fault because we do it, to. Maybe we’ve failed to notice that our truth isn’t.

Most of us learn something new from every day’s scrolling. Some of it’s valuable, but much of it is trivial. Some of it is just bouncing back from the echo chamber of our own previous beliefs, and lots of it is like the following.                                                                      

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I’m the team mascot. Boy, am I running late. But I got lead in my foot and spirit in my fingers. What a hit! If you don’t have the right auto insurance, the cost to cover that might take your season.

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This is no time to have stuff like that rattling around in our heads. Some experts are saying AGI, artificial general intelligence, will be one billion times smarter than any human by 2047, or maybe as soon as 2027. It’s hard to have confidence we’ll be intellectually equipped by either date to keep the robots from taking over.

After all, we’ve got less than three weeks to decide whether or not to elect Dr. Evil as President of the United States, and the oddsmakers are calling it a toss-up.