Embracing the 'idiot' within all of us

Many people can agree with this, but socializing can be quite exhausting for those not born with the adequate predispositions. Some thrive in the crowd, befriend effortlessly, seduce like it's second nature, then others suck at it.

Just picture it : your outgoing friend dragged you to this party downtown. You don't know anybody there. The music is too loud, and the scent of cigarettes follows you around. Out of the blue, your emotional support friend disappears, leaving you all by yourself. There you are, all alone, with your drink in your hand, checking the weather app for the third time, as if God himself would change the temperature just to entertain you.

You want to socialize, it's deeply ingrained in your DNA, but somehow your body hates it. Hates the pain of being judged, or potentially judged. The fear of rejection.

"What if I say the wrong thing ? What if they judged me ? What if this girl/guy makes fun of me behind my back ? What if ? What if ?..."

What I described is the life of many shy people, or people with anxiety, and most of them don't even stutter. Thus, adding a stutter on top of this only makes this enterprise more tedious than it already was. "What if they judged me for my stutter ? What if they feel annoyed ? Embarrassed ? What if I become the joke of the party ?". And so on, and so on…

Living your life in constant paranoïa can become quite tiresome. You may be tempted to just give up. I won't blame you. But you need to socialize, to talk to other human beings, just for the sake of your mental health. That's why you may feel so miserable and conflicted : you hate socializing, yet you seek it.

I've been struggling with this topic for years now. I had my shares of bad moments. Overthinking is second nature to me. Trust me, it never helped. That's why I've recently been experimenting with a new way of living that I wanted to share. People online call it "retardmaxxing".

A lot of youtube videos talk about the subject, but to sum it up, it pretty much means that you purposefully live your life like an idiot. Why ? Because idiots don't think, they just do. Think of Luffy from One Piece : he acts before he thinks. His mind is just white-noise 24/7.

It only makes sense when you dig deeper. Idiots don't think, and because they don't think they can't project themselves in the future. They don't relive the past either. They just exist. Idiots don't care about the S&P 500 or the next Claude update. They don't bother with existential questions. No, they live, one day at a time. They don't care about anything really, and certainly not what some guy or some chick thinks of them.

Sure, this way of living can cause you a few problems there and there, but in the end you'll be far happier than the person who overthinks and thus is crippled by anxiety, self-doubt and inner conflict. On one hand, the idiot acts, gets results, improves. On the other hand, the overthinker pollutes his mind with negative thoughts, refuses to act because of possible nightmare scenarios and stays still. One has momentum, the other inertia.

Maybe the idiots got it right all along, about the art of living. Maybe they are the smart ones.