I cannot manage to understand why you would want to seem smarter than you are preparing to be.
If you make an effort, if you read, if you learn…, you simply become, you learn foreign languages, there are a heap of forms through which you can turn yourself from the stance of an ignorant person into the stance of a smart person…, none of us was born smart, we all took the genetic fund and used what we had…, only there is no fast train…, you have to walk the road, to let your brain build new neural connections, that takes time, to get used to the newly assimilated notions, to integrate them into the processes of thinking…, etc…
The intention to “take photos” with muscles, the way there used to be all sorts of cardboard figures “with muscles”, and there was a hole instead of a face, for each person to put his own face in and have a photo taken…, that is roughly how it looks, in my optics, to try to seem smart…
And this is very hard, when everyone who finds himself at that point has the clear and entirely undoubting impression that he is smart…
I met someone who told me, full of importance, that he wants to “invest” in a “kite” — he said it in English; in my language the thing is a zmeu, a paper dragon on a string. I was left perplexed, I asked what kind of investment that is…, I understood that he was masking a personal whim, in the way he put it, inside an “investment”…, as an expression…, that throws him outside the understanding of words, and if there were an area where people know what weight words carry…, he would have been outside, at a great distance from the gate…
I feel myself the prisoner of these times in which, no matter what I say, it is twisted and interpreted “somehow”, and that is because we have got used to no longer naming things, but to using big words, each for his own reasons, but in general to “taking photos” (with muscles)…
This society brings us into the comfort zone, where you have everything at the push of a button, you have remote controls, you have half-prepared food…, you no longer hear conversations of the kind “how are you managing with some problem in mathematics”, or “have you read such and such a book”…, all that is spoken is “have you been there?”, or “have you seen that?”, or “have you heard about such a thing (person)?”…, advice is no longer asked for in order to become…, a competition is held in order to seem “superior”, on criteria that are quite childish… (I have been, I have seen, I have heard)
At some point a phrase was going around on sites (Facebook, for example), “life begins beyond the limit of the comfort zone”…, only there is no one left to understand it, because all around everything is comfort…
If you do not expose yourself to situations that put you in the stance of going past your limits (the ones from that moment), you will never be more than that…, because you do nothing in that direction…
And this is actually measured. In the Nordic countries, where evaluations were made on entire generations, intelligence scores kept climbing until those born around the middle of the ’70s, and from then on they came back down to where they had started. The interesting part is that the researchers compared brothers from the same family, in order to take genetics out of the equation…, and they came to the conclusion that both the climb and the fall come from the environment. They were not born weaker. The environment made them so.
Which is exactly what I was saying at the beginning: no one is born smart, each one takes the genetic fund and does with it what he does…, only now we no longer do anything. We can say that this is how the end begins…, wrapped in warm socks and house slippers with a bit of fur on them…
From this perspective, you do not even have to do very much in order to step out of the row…, and that is precisely what should give you pause: if the bar is that low, going over it is not a performance…, it is only the beginning of the road, the one without a fast train…
I have met people past the age of 30 who thought of enrolling in high school, of taking their baccalaureate and of going through university…, and they set out precisely because they had above them superiors of the “comfortable” model, who did not manage very well in real life…
Some of them enrolled for the baccalaureate four years in a row, until they passed it.
I admire the people who went back to close a chapter of their life, to the measure of their potential…
I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…
Further: I realized that I am Grateful