Feeling Like an Idiot Can Be Good for You
‘Humiliation stings, so I’ve always done my best to avoid it — until now’
Jia Tolentino spent last summer promoting Trick Mirror, her debut book of essays. While she was hailed as a latter-day Joan Didion, she insistently styled herself as an athleisure-wearing Steve-O. At every stop on her press tour, the 31-year-old New Yorker staff writer told audiences and interviewers she was “always confused.” She was, she swore, “an idiot.” At first, these blatant counterfactuals rankled me. Tolentino is obviously brilliant. But as the summer wore on, I became convinced she was a renegade prophet espousing the untold pleasures of idiocy.
For as long as I can remember, I have been desperate to look smart. This is part of being human: Humiliation stings, so we do our best to avoid it. But contemporary capitalism has exacerbated our innate desire to save face. Perfection is now a qualification for even entry-level gigs that ask for years of experience and a diverse skill set in return for meager pay. And a cannibalistic social web asks users to choose between sanding down their personalities to inoffensive nubs or making public mistakes that are guaranteed to live forever.
At the same time, the world writ large is more moronic than ever. We’re careening toward climate collapse. Wage…
