I gotta say, getting stuff done feels really good. I changed the kitchen sink faucet today. Tomorrow I’m building and mounting a fan. I do these things without the aid of videos or AI, which is a reminder that I am actually fairly intelligent. It doesn’t come up much these days. There isn’t much of a premium on actually being smart. the preference leans towards being able to do stuff cleverly or, more to the point, being seen as popular and doing things in general. We’re sliding away from caring if anyone actually has brains and falling into this sense of its okay so long as they are popular and or has charisma.
I blame Obama. Not because the dude isn’t smart–he’s a damn intelligent man. It is because he is a black man who also had the charisma and the moment to be seen as the future of America. That pissed off a lot of people who saw that as a sign that the future of America didn’t look like them or speak like them. So, we slid backwards. We’re still sliding.
So, now we have the Orange one in the office as a holdover from a past where his slimyness was representative of American Idealism. Trump is the late 80’s early 90’s of a particular class of people. Unfortunately, we’re very far past that. We need to remind ourselves that being intelligent and actually getting our hands dirty by learning how to do things matter.