The Smart Identity is Dying: How to Adapt

People unlike you are multiplying.

Photo by Kristina Bekher on Unsplash

Social media became an irreplaceable family member for most people. Soon after, smart people disappeared.

It’s like most people share a consciousness.

Some smart people like to rebel. To announce they’ve never been on the apps. Or they’ve deleted them all for time to create. For reading. For gardening and face-to-face meetups. Comfort themselves believing, “I’m different. I embrace my intelligence.”

Many will scroll past search engines’ AI summaries for a Reddit link. They aim to find someone like themselves. Whose personal experiences tell them (a) they’re not alone and (b) gives non-general advice. This isn’t only done online. But in every room you enter.

“Do I see myself in the people around me?”**

When it gets harder to find others like yourself, you stop searching. Build a community around fellow rebels you’ve found. And fade into your online neighborhood or frequent only your favorite physical spaces.

Unbeknownst to some smart people, they’re consuming an agenda that’s rewiring how they position their smartness. It seems innocent.

Shopping influenced by what others own under the excuse of saving time. If you’re watching a show, you’re studying it for formulaic design. After all, you’re smart. You’re playing Spot the Similarity game, noticing commonalities between it and the last shows you've watched. Soon, you realize you feel differently about your intelligence.

So, even if you avoid the phones, the smart person identity as we know it is dying in the pursuit of sameness and belonging.

Modern smartness isn’t as it was before. It’s adapted, or else, it gets absorbed and erased by algorithms. Smartness doesn’t have the desirability it once had. And if it is any good, it’s quickly copied and made mainstream until it no longer stands out. It’s now the new standard.

Let’s see why.

Why is the smart person’s identity dying?

Shifting critical importance.

Early content provided approaches you could use for any topic.

Then social media went into the advertising circuit. The apps moved from friends and family to business owners and consumers.

Saturation hadn’t yet happened. When we crossed this point, the clout of influence exploded. Today’s media provides specificity. They don’t say pink. Nor bubble gum rose. That’s mundane. The color description more likely says magnetic dragon fruit smoothie pink.

It presents a lived-in specificity that emotional psychology approves of.

Vulnerable, observant specificity is the convenience we’re used to. We’ve come to expect the confidence bias of an incorrect GPS leading us off the road into a field. Clear, concise instructions that our short attention spans find endurable. Versus the nervous vagueness of a stranger. Who pauses to think, scrunching their nose before asking if you know any landmarks here or there. Who lists directions you have to decipher and remember before you can follow them.

Smart people are dying out because they’re the opposite of a convenient GPS. They’re the stranger giving directions. Correct. But they make consumers frontload effort. This goes against how modern capitalist efficiency culture trains the masses’ to cope with feustration and to get their dopamine fix.

Uncommitment to risk

Let’s go beyond the confidence bias into the realm of stakes.

Look at the AI dilemma. Accredited economists remained undecided about the impact of artificial intelligence. For instance, here’s an epistle of uncertainty. Despite their knowledge and research, “It was difficult to estimate consequential employment effects.”

Those not as intellectually acute said with certainty, “AI will take your job.”

The latter was the viral message. The narrative hasn’t aged well. But it did what researchers couldn’t: take a risk. They gave people an answer that could be wrong. Provided a contrarian perspective people could use to make a decision.

The average smart person’s identity is dying because their suggestions are unactionable.

Due to adaptability, a few smart personalities haven’t gone extinct. They adapted into a style social media absorded and made the new standard.

They take on the risk of niching down to attract audiences, like solopreneur Justin Welsh. Or they take on risk by championing a point of view, no matter what topic they write about, like Linda Caroll. Both sides of this standard also display humility rather than doing outright declarations of their brilliance.

Meanwhile, vagueness fatigue contributes to the decline of materials, previous seen as smart person identifier like self-help books and courses.

Rewards

Common belief implies phones are the main contributors to humanity’s increasing dimness. That’s too much blame assigned to an inanimate object programmed by mortals.

Humans adapt well to environmental rewards.

People recognized these days aren’t usually the ones with degrees. Some don’t have much prior experience before they begin posting online, networking, or promoting themselves. Only insights into what’s working for them as of right now. They’re the ones giving strangers the privilege to watch them struggle and progress.

Examples include Shannon McKinstrie and Ben Booker.

Ben Booker is a fitness personality and founder of Second Chance Lifestyle. He used his sobriety and recovery habits to start his gym business and motivational speaking career.

Modern consumption and spending reward speed and execution. And humans are responding accordingly. These behaviors now seen as the qualifications.

The market isn’t buying into someone because they’re certifiably smart. People trust personalities they view as authentic based on their public documentation. Personalities who let them skip mistakes by being their proxy.

It’s life and its many crises.

What were satisfying benefits are now lessons.

Like the employees turned the fired squad. Or the once cute chats with your neighbour dissolving into avoidance. You’re excited to share a random fact you love. The cashier stares down hard at the scanner, hoping you won’t see their irritation.

Entertaining average book smartness isn’t working for the recipients. So, they stopped caring. For example, “Why know about your carbon footprint to feel bad when celebs overuse private jets?”

So, adapting to the efficiencies of social interactions begins to look like competence. It’s the expected demonstration of intelligence. Soon, it becomes the standard by which others get judged as useful or a bother.

If you’re the latter, life quickly moves on, less willing to hear your opinion until things go wrong.

Adapting

Few people base their self-worth on their academic abilities. Academic, book-smart conversations commonly revolve around anxiety and burnout. Talk about intelligence and identity now often ignores grades and GPAs to focus on practiced talent and learned skill. Those unable to separate themselves from their former smart student label struggle with feelings of inadequacy.

As the smart person's identity dies, this individual presents themselves in the palatable formats readily accepted by others.

They learn to say less, stop overexplaining, and limit sharing their type of fun facts with most people.

Eventually, smart personalities leave the apps. Exit group chats and even social events to put their nose between books. Retreat into the company of people like themselves.

And when they can’t ignore the nonsense trending online, they’ll share deep dives into how society strayed, remind us of philosophers like Carl Jung, then disappear again.