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 success story all along.
Maybe I’m like Inspector Gadget. The titular character, but the real protagonist is my niece and her dog.
With the barriers to entry that Lemmy has it’s not that unlikely. It’s like an incel going onto 8chan and saying, we can’t all be the most edgy people we know.
According to this website there are only around 40-70k daily active users (monthly vs semiannual). If you look at total users we’re sitting on about 1.3 million with 11 million posts per day and 23 million comments per day.
So 0.015% of the world population on an obscure site which is not mainstream accessible.
EDIT: Just because you were one of the smartest people in your class doesn’t mean you are “smart.” I would argue that it says more about the other kids in your class than it does you, most people are fucking stupid.
See!? I warned you I wasn’t the smartest.
That’s entirely plausible. It’s fairly normal even. Thats still well over 10 million people and it’s common for people to be in the 95th percentile then go to college and be completely average.
And I gotta say I really appreciate it!
Really appreciate it 🥰
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.
Lol :)
Winnemucca be like that
Ely actually too…
Let’s be honest, it’s pretty much the entire state. We’re* not 49th in k-12 education for nothing!
*Although I moved to WA a few years ago
Anything north of Clark county is technically Kentucky.
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.
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.
My version of this was still being among the smartest people at my good engineering school but realizing I didn’t have the discipline to thrive without externally imposed structure. I coasted on skipping classes and catching up just fine my first semester, but that didn’t last all that long (a year before I was no longer near the top of any given class, 2 years to where I was struggling to understand because my grasp of the prereqs wasn’t as solid).
So it took a few years to learn how the world doesn’t inherently reward intelligence for the sake of intelligence, but that intelligence is still a good tool towards accomplishing other things the world does value.
I’m still sometimes the smartest person in the room, but I’ve learned to stop assigning any value to that fact.
I’m pretty happy these days, and I directly credit my intelligence and introspection for that. Even though the “smart but lazy” label gave me some trouble early on, and I had a little quarter life crisis when I realized that being smart wasn’t enough, eventually being thoughtful gave me the flexibility to recover from some setbacks early in my career, has helped me with my social life, helps me manage the day to day life outside of work (finances, chores, hobbies, interests, family life, etc.), and otherwise has helped me set up the things that are important to me and find contentment in a chaotic world. It’s certainly a form of intelligence, just productively channeled at some point to make things better for myself.
“A big fish in a little pond”, it’s how I described my po achievement in my first job out of uni.
That’s what we call an average fish suffocating in a puddle
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.
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.
school is kinda bullshit to be honest
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
Did I write this last night in my sleep?
I just told this exact story to my oldest yesterday, almost verbatim. Freaky.
There are dozens of us!
is this going to be me in the future ;-;
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…
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.
weeding out is horrific bullshit. I got weeded out of CS and now I don’t get to have a good job
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.
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.
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!
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.
Oh God.
But they were all dipshits.
You know, this actually explains a lot. Like how I never realized this before.
It took me many years to realize.
I learned to read and write very young, and so the literary part of school was always super easy. This caused me to neglect studying overall, and when I moved to high school in the city, I was just average lol
“You are reading at college level.”
Translation: “You are baseline literate.”
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.
Did no one make the effort to publicize these stories to prevent this from happening?
These are well known stories but like with every tragedy everyone always thinks: “This won’t happen to me, because I’m different.”
I, personally, would never think that because I’m different.
Well, growing up in Oklahoma has definitely caused me a God complex. Being able to read instantly makes me more intelligent than most people I’ve ever met, so it’s very difficult to not assume I’m more intelligent than everyone else. The weird part is that I’ve always felt kinda dumb, but looking at everyone else, they take it beyond dumb. Everyone else is just completely illogical, like they simply do not think at all.
So very relatable, if I met a room full of people on my level I genuinely don’t know how I’d handle that socially
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. And even now my computer skills alone are basically unmatched among clinical professionals. I had to call IT for something they needed to remote into the workstation for and they were shocked that I just gave them the IP address.
But my instructors and preceptors 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. Did get the degree though; it’s been 6 years now.
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.
Yeah I feel like it’s one of those things that sounds completely insane unless you’ve been through something similar. 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. There are also a few really poignant lessons I learned from some very specific patients but those are much longer stories of their own.
I also always said I wanted to be someone worth listening to and I will say I never seem to have a problem with that now. When I took my instructor classes to start teaching violence deescalation and physical management classes they told me it was going to be hard to get people to stay engaged and pay attention but I rarely have trouble with that. Organization and staying on topic are hard but my ratings on how much is learned and enjoyability are consistently high.
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.
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
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.
☝️
Yeah 10 total years and a dozen Daisy noms in and I still feel like my foot is constantly in my mouth. You also 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.
It doesn’t help that in psych a lot of the time there’s no solution for keeping the person safe that’s not going to horribly traumatize them. I’ve had to do things to people to keep them alive and as unharmed as possible that are still probably gonna feature in their nightmares. I try not to but sometimes they’re already so traumatized that they just won’t be able to see what I’m doing as beneficial. We’ve got people with past sexual assault traumas who are so out of it they don’t realize that urine has been sitting on their skin for days and the acid is dissolving their genitals. They can’t put the steps in order to clean themselves but they also can’t safely accept me touching them to help. The other day I did something as simple as trying to help someone dial the phone and when we finally got through they got it into their head that I’d replaced their loved one on the other end with an imposter.
Some days you just Will Not Win but the fact that human bodies and social interactions have so many uncontrolled variables (and infinitely more when combined) will leave you wondering every time you think about it that maybe there was some right answer you just couldn’t find. Maybe I should have waited longer. Maybe I took too long. Maybe I should’ve played music. Maybe the environment was too loud. Maybe I should’ve been kinder. Maybe I wasn’t straightforward enough. The list just keeps going.
Daisy noms?
System for writing thank you notes to a nurse. They give you a little enamel pin to put on your badge that I’m not comfortable possibly accidentally losing on an acute psych unit so they’re just scattered around my house. Then about every quarter each hospital gives an award to one of the nominees (although usually an employee with better optics than one of the night shift psychiatry goblins). So like, objectively, at least a few of my patients feel cared for. It’s just hard to feel that way sometimes. I’m more protective of the actual written messages than the pins. I have one from a patient I received from the outgoing shift in restraints that I keep in the frame with my license (and it’s not like I let them out right away either, most of what they were happy with was me catching their dystonia but I had the advantage of having had it myself before).
Thanks for the info; I’d never heard of that.
i have had a nurse i have wanted to thank for decades (i had major surgery, my mother wanted to stay overnight in my room and this kind nurse let my mother get cleaned up at her place. we were going to get a gym membership but she would not hear of it. she almost got in a fistfight with a radiologist for me. all i ever knew was her first name, she was the best). i had no idea there was a formal system. how widespread is this? (is it just psych?)
is this? (is it just psych?)
Not at all, it originated in medical iirc
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.
You’re unique, just like everyone else.
We are all snowflakes.
It’s sort of one of my favorite things about us.
“We’re all individuals!”
“I’m not.”
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
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.
The bar for “gifted” is so low, people keep tripping over it. thump
Growing up in a town can be rough if you’re considered smart, and I’ve seen plenty posing as a lot dumber than they really are just so they fit in. The people that will not dumb themselves down tend to stand out more because of this.
