The Age of Loud and Wrong

Stupidity used to be obvious. The guy who stuck a fork in a light socket. The neighbor who invested his life savings in a "sure thing" because some guy at a bar told him about it. There was a clarity to it. A cause and effect. Now, stupidity is slippery. It wears a suit. It has a verified account. It speaks in the right buzzwords, retweets the right opinions, and knows just enough to be dangerous.

It’s not that people are getting dumber; it’s that the world makes it easier than ever to feel smart while knowing nothing. We have access to infinite information but no time to process it. We consume headlines, not articles. Hot takes, not analysis. We mistake speed for accuracy, volume for truth, confidence for competence. The guy who reads one Wikipedia page and suddenly has strong opinions on international policy isn’t an outlier—he’s the blueprint.

This isn’t entirely our fault. The system is built to keep us in a permanent state of mild ignorance. Every app, every platform, every news cycle is designed to keep us scrolling, clicking, reacting. Outrage is easier than understanding. Certainty is more marketable than doubt. And so we float through the world, forming half-baked opinions on things we barely understand, mistaking engagement for insight, collecting facts like trinkets rather than using them to build anything meaningful.

The worst part? It feels like thinking. It feels like participating. You read, you react, you post. You feel a brief rush of righteousness, of being on the right side of something. But real thinking is slow. It’s uncomfortable. It requires sitting with doubt, resisting the urge to immediately categorize everything as right or wrong, good or bad, my team or their team. It means accepting that most issues are complicated, that most people aren’t villains, and that sometimes, the correct answer is “I don’t know.”

But who has time for that? Modern life moves at the speed of distraction. If you’re not reacting, you’re falling behind. If you’re not constantly reaffirming your identity—political, moral, cultural—who even are you? The internet has turned beliefs into brands, and once you’ve invested in one, changing your mind feels like bad marketing.

So we stay where we are. We mistake familiarity for truth. We listen to the voices that make us feel smart, that confirm what we already believe. We build our little worlds out of opinions that were handed to us, convinced we arrived at them on our own. And maybe that’s the worst kind of stupidity—the kind that doesn’t know it’s stupid. The kind that would rather be wrong forever than admit it was ever fooled.

But there’s another option. You can slow down. You can resist the pull of easy outrage, easy certainty, easy tribalism. You can step outside your bubble and let your brain do what it was meant to do: think, question, wonder. Not for clout, not to win an argument, not to prove anything—just because it’s the only way to stay human in a world that would rather you weren’t.