I had highschool classmates bragging about driving 80mph down dirt roads and one girl planned to become “richly married” as her career. Maybe we all had dipshits.
A sudden epiphany.
Submitted 15 hours ago by MTZ@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8d02487e-7a5f-440a-80f9-74d450c0000a.jpeg
Comments
Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
WanderWisley@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I’m born and raised in rural northern Nevada population 4000ish. I barely graduated high school and went straight into a manual labor job. I feel like I’m a goddamn Nostradamus or Albert Einstein here sometime.
valtia@lemmy.world 7 minutes ago
Winnemucca be like that
WanderWisley@lemmy.world 4 minutes ago
Ely actually too…
mrmanager@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
Lol :)
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Yea… This was the basis for my first existential crisis in my life… All through small town public school I was basically the smartest kid in the room (sometimes smartest person - we had some really bad teachers). Thought I was god’s gift of intelligence to humanity. Went out of town to a really good engineering school and holy shit I was immediately humbled. I was clawing my way to try to reach “average” and couldn’t quite reach.
d00ery@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
“A big fish in a little pond”, it’s how I described my po achievement in my first job out of uni.
DokPsy@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
For me, it was realizing that while I was smart, the shit level of schooling was more an impediment to me gaining the skills needed to continue excelling and I continue to be surrounded by absolute dipshits wherever I go.
In school, I didn’t have to study to pass and there was no real incentive to learn how to. This bit me when it came to university because the lectures didn’t cover everything that was to be tested on. Turns out, trying is a skill I never needed until then.
Then, in the workforce, I’m constantly exhausted dealing with people who are at best functionally literate and I have to cater to their understanding of literally everything. No desire to either understand the problem or fix the root cause, just make the thing do what they want right then.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
school is kinda bullshit to be honest
DokPsy@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
The infuriating thing is that it doesn’t have to be. It’s been gutted, filleted, and various other words of a similar effect over the decades to the detriment of the entire populous
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Did I write this last night in my sleep?
I just told this exact story to my oldest yesterday, almost verbatim. Freaky.
snooggums@piefed.world 10 hours ago
There are dozens of us!
joan@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
is this going to be me in the future ;-;
baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 14 hours ago
“You are reading at college level.”
Translation: “You are baseline literate.”
musubibreakfast@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Advanced classes means slightly less stupid. This makes me think of Beijing University. A lot of kids who were considered the brightest and the best in their little towns their parents would go into debt and borrow money from others in the town to send them to Beijing University.
When the kids arrived they’d discover they weren’t as smart as they thought they were and they’d flunk out despite studying as hard as they could. And instead of returning home and embarrassing their parents in front of the other townspeople they’d kill themselves.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
Did no one make the effort to publicize these stories to prevent this from happening?
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 5 hours ago
That’s what we call an average fish suffocating in a puddle
chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
One of the asian ones is a frog in a well. Though it carries more the connotation of Dunning-Kreuger, though more due to environment and experience vs a mental condition.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
You know I heard a quote one time that said if you’re the smartest person in the room you’re in the wrong room. But at the same time my parents always told me whatever I did I needed to be the best at it. Like they put me in tutoring because my math skills were only one year ahead. My family is all engineers, computer scientists etc. Everybody’s a bachelor’s or above except my one sister who’s specifically disabled.
When I decided on nursing school I was like OK I’m just going to aim for something achievable for me. The content should be right at my level, at least I’ll be able to excel at that like they’re expecting. And the coursework itself was super easy. I had all the chem physics and bio I needed for the conceptual groundwork. I had all the Greek and Latin roots I needed for the terminology. Even the math was actually right on my level (basic algebra, ratio and proportion, PEMDAS equations), I just needed to up my accuracy when I had previously optimized for speed.
But they absolutely humbled me in people skills and emotional resiliency. I actually flunked out the first time for being too emotionally immature. They made me cry on the regular and I just couldn’t get a grip on what they wanted from me interaction wise. It was actually my first shitty job at a psych hospital + going through therapy simultaneously that fixed me. It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did. I learned so much about respect and what it really meant to uphold a promise through adversity and how to keep my stupid mouth shut.
So. I thought I was aiming low, and I still wound up being the dumbest person in the room.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did.
That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me (not to excuse your parents, if applicable). It’s not the same thing at all, but I learned much better people skills from living with a boyfriend who had abandoned his treatment for and didn’t tell me about his paranoid schizophrenia than from anyone else. He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.
When you are working with people with a very different perspective on the world that you can’t change, and neither party feels entitled to acceptance because of family, you need to learn how to treat others respectfully and with dignity to succeed.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Yeah I feel like it’s one of those things that sounds completely insane unless you’ve been through it. A lot of it was learning how to respond to crazy but I did actually learn a few positive behaviors directly from them. You’d be surprised how much please / thank you and sir / ma’am they use. I also learned to stand a lot taller, swagger a little, and speak from my chest. Like people will comment on how much confidence I display which is wild to me being actually in my own head.
snooggums@piefed.world 10 hours ago
He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.
I have found this helps but also that a lot of people hear what they want to hear no matter how clear and deliberate you are, and recognizing who those people are is another skill.
NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
I also work in healthcare. The science was challenging, but achievable with effort. The hand skills took practice and repetition. But the people skills are truly never mastered.
I’ve been in my field for 17 years and it’s still a daily fire walk trying to avoid setting expectations too high, setting expectations too low, or somehow inadvertently inviting litigation with the wrong choice of words. The same verbiage doesn’t work on everyone, and you have about 20 seconds to decide which variation of unreasonable you have to sidestep on every person.
I feel like I am fortunate to have employment and not worry as much as many people about affording groceries and the mortgage. And yet, I really hope my children don’t choose patient care for their career.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
☝️
Yeah 10 years and a dozen Daisy noms in and I still feel like my foot is constantly in my mouth. You have to walk this horrible tightrope of remembering this is the worst day of someone’s life then emotionally file it under your 400th Tuesday. The cognitive dissonance of that alone is enough to drive you bonkers.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
As an engineer from a family of engineers, yeah i wholeheartedly believe that you learned better people skills from the criminally insane than engineers. I had a real tough time learning people skills and emotional resilience
OttoVonNoob@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
A bad teacher can stunt you. I always wanted to make video games, but my high school programming teacher’s style didn’t mesh. Even though I enjoyed the class, he suggested I drop it because he thought I wasn’t a good fit for the field, I reluctantly agreed. Twenty years later, I’ve completed most of the programming for a game I plan to release one day, though I can still picture him tapping the chalkboard every time I asked a question like that was supposed to help…
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
likewise, i have always been the family tinker/inventor. invented a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell when i was 8 before i learned they already existed better than i had invented. i went to school, took engineering classes. the intro to CAD teacher was an ableist douche (long story) and publicly stated that it was his intention to weed out anyone he felt was not “worthy” of being in our “noble” (ranked four hundred something nationally) engineering program via his computer drafting program and since grading was almost entirely subjective (75% of each project was for “style” whatever that meant) he got to do that.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
weeding out is horrific bullshit. I got weeded out of CS and now I don’t get to have a good job
rumba@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Most programming classes are bullshit. You come out with basic knowledge of practices that aren’t used in real production. They teach you how to write code, but they don’t teach you how code is written in most businesses.
Outside of actual gaming programs in colleges, new developers are generally bewildered and end up making stuff that’s hard to maintain.
We had a professor sit in with us for a few months once to get the gist of what was needed so he could form classes around game deveopment.
mimic_dev@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Good luck on your game! I was always too dumb to realize if I combine all the stuff I love doing it equals game dev. Only realized a couple years ago and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been.
OttoVonNoob@lemmy.ca 42 minutes ago
Honeslty, I thought it was way above my head. Im a social worker so very far from game dev. My friend sorta nice bullied me into it stating all the time anyone can do it the hardest part is getting started. He was right once I started rolling it came together. Now I do it as a hobby after the kids go to bed. I treat it like playing video games, its a creative, problem solving, process that i really enjoy. I honestly believe anyone can make a video game with a good idea!
MrFinnbean@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Opposide for me. I realised i enjoy playing games much more than making them.
But im happy for you that you found a thing you can be passionate about and spend time working on it too.
hansolo@lemmy.today 7 hours ago
Oh God.
But they were all dipshits.
You know, this actually explains a lot. Like how I never realized this before.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Big fish in a small pond.
Guessing I’m not the only one in here that had a similar pathway with video games. Maybe games in general, as chess was similar.
Vespair@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Everywhere is filled with absolute dipshits. Frankly the bar for “gifted” should not be looked at a praise-worthy state of those deemed such, but rather as a scathing rebuke of the general idiocy rampant across humanity.
TokenBoomer@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
You’re unique, just like everyone else.
MTZ@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
It’s sort of one of my favorite things about us.
Randelung@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
“We’re all individuals!”
electric_nan@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
“I’m not.”
OriginEnergySux@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
In my defense, Ft worth was a big town
Zannsolo@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
You were gifted with a monkeys paw smarter than most people but not smart enough to do anything great so you got stuck around the people you were smarter than to watch them struggle at the self checkout
AffineConnection@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Isn’t this basically the premise of Idiocracy?
MTZ@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
No the premise of that is that a totally average servicemember in every way is forgotten about in an experiment and is unconscious for 500 years, only to awaken with his prostitute experiment mate, as the two smartest people on earth. A documentary.
selokichtli@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
In my country there is no advanced people and you can’t really fast forward years of education. I know a couple of famous cases, but is not something that happens all the time. My family treated me as a special kid for so many reasons, and being “smart” was one of them. Had to travel to the big capital city to study a bachelor in science, there was no way around it, because the expenses were mostly covered by this public university, thank god.
The first year was hard. I failed some classes even, and seriously questioned myself if I had it in me to get my degree. Education is just better in big cities with museums, cultural activities everyday, bookstores and libraries. Back in the town I grew up we only had the little municipal library, others existed but weren’t open to the public, and one or two libraries with best sellers. In my university we had one library with several levels just for the students, there were books and journals, maps, a digital library too, etc. You need to be curious, yes, but the environment to pique that curiosity is very important too.
Xerxos@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
An IQ of 100 is ment to be directly in the middle, so roughly 50% of the population is below that. An IQ of 100 isn’t that bright, so think about the incredible masses of dumb people.
So, yeah. It’s not impossible that you were the one-eyed among the blind.
someacnt@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
I am realizing I were only good at tests… So sad that I am one of the dumbest and just managed to fool some people with grades. But that does not help with real life.
realitista@lemmus.org 13 hours ago
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
I feel like Lemmy and Reddit are filled to the brim with these “lazy intellectuals”, I’m starting to wonder if any other sort of people even exist online
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Idk if I’d even call it “intellectual” so much as “smug”. You find this all over. People self-sort into cliches. And then they get high on their own supply, insisting everyone outside their group is inferior.
You’ll find it over in the Joe Rogan-verse, among the TradCaths, in every ethnic enclave from Cuban expats to the Taiwanese Diaspora. As common among Marxists as Fascists. As common among Americans as Iranians. As common in the board rooms as the barber shops.
Broadly speaking - and particularly as people get older - we develop this entrenched worldview that results from accumulations of vast amounts of personal and peripheral information.
MTZ@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I call it pseudo-intellectualism. These people 100% think that they know exactly what they are talking about.
rumba@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
The difference between most GT and Standard classes lies in your ability and willingness to put in extra work.
Half the kids in the standard classes just want to skate along as easily as possible. Why stress and work hard when you get the same exact outcome in the end? It’s not like they want to go on to college, so why work hard now?
It’s not that different in the workforce in many places.
stardustpathsofglory@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
WagnasT@piefed.world 11 hours ago
Just watching people do normal tasks is depressing, like watch people at self checkout, it’s painful. Surely not every person is experiencing self checkout for the first time but it hurts to watch. Same with watching other people use a computer (they get a pass on this one, not everyone has spent hours optimizing their workflow…fine. It’s fine.) Seriously, just watch people do stuff, it’s rough out there. These people can vote or run for office and I wouldn’t take those rights away, it’s just scary and it explains a lot.
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 11 hours ago
If a kid gets good grades in E-12 the teachers tend to leave them alone.
If a kid is good at sports they get a coach who helps them with their schoolwork, social life, and other areas.
My program was called ‘college bound’ and the only thing we did was prep for the SATs.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Gifted And Talented was just segregation with extra steps.
You could buy your way in. You could be placed in the group by referral, without any testing. We had a developmentally disabled kid in our GT class, because his parents were rich and GT offered your kid far more resources than the standard school program.
The lowest common denominator of GT programs wasn’t IQ or GPA or number of spelling bee wins, but address and family income.
m4xie@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
Good for him
AlfalFaFail@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
This is a highly limited context of your experience and situated when you went to school and where you went. I can only talk about the TAG program in my district and they use testing and are very strict about it.
Our child was referred by a teacher and we were encouraged to pursue it. There’s more to say about the program and it’s role in society, but these type of comments preclude a discussion on child needs and wealth.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
preclude a discussion on child needs
They indict the system precisely because of how it distributes resources for the children of Haves and Have-Nots.
Our child was referred by a teacher
“I was told that my kid isn’t like other kids” is always the bait at the end of these hooks. You’re not segregating, you’re elevating.
No real need to look back and ask why the broader structural issues of class size, teacher experience, and class room hours aren’t addressed holistically. Maybe the kids you left behind just don’t need those resources like your precious little muffin does.
candyman337@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Jesus, there’s some real intellectual elitism being displayed in this thread. Like I understand that the American education system is shitty and a large portion of the population is just functionally literate, and I understand the frustration of having to deal with those types of people and having to explain things to them. But, that’s one thing, it’s another to call them idiots or see them as lesser. They’re most likely not idiots, it probably just means they didn’t have extra help like you did as a kid to better understand some of the things you did. You should never look down upon someone for being less intelligent or less educated than you. Those things are not the entirety of what make up a person’s worth. Everyone deserves the same base level of respect.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Small town woes, lol.
Gonzako@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Hey! Don’t call me out!
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 29 minutes ago
Here’s the thing: we can’t ALL have been the smartest kids in our classes. It’s just so unlikely. We were the generic background idiots in someone else’s story all along.