People Aren’t as Stupid as They Seem

Why smart people keep falling for the long-con that leaves them broke, lonely, and praying for a bailout

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People just seem so stupid lately. Have you noticed this?

An online friend told me she was helping the war in Ukraine by reposting videos to her stories. She always has a Meta story active. Ukraine, Palestine, whatever is feeding Meta’s reel machine that week.

I wanted to ask her, who is watching? Which of your friends doesn’t agree with you? Who are you influencing? What has changed in all the years you’ve been scrolling, commenting and re-posting?

What value does you being constantly anxious and sad add to anyone in the world? What does it take away from your family?

There is a real danger in believing you are taking action when you are in fact putting only more dollars into the pocket of large corporations.

You don’t say that to people in the mom’s group. You let them keep the story. It took me a lot of awkward years to learn that lesson. Most of casual, social friendship is about supporting narratives.

Some of my other neighbors protested recently at the Tesla dealership in my town. The dealership sits in the most left-leaning, nicest area in the state. Taxes as high as Canada and California.

Who drives past that dealership and gets converted? No one. Voting records show the city has less than 1% Republican voting. The protest was only for the protesters. Most modern protest is.

Why don’t they see that? Why doesn’t it feel silly and selfish to echo your complaints into a chamber of people that already agree with you?

Do they want anything to change? If they do, why are they feeding Meta digital dollars? Do they understand the attention economy?

I keep coming back to the same question:

Why is it so easy to trick people?

Why is it so simple to create a wheel for people to get stuck on?

Not just uneducated people without the cognitive resources and privilege to think beyond their basic struggles. People who can read a study and balance a budget and still believe that being angry on a platform only designed to make money by keeping you on it as often as possible, inside a sealed loop of people who already agree with you, counts as resistance.

Weird.

The most popular essay (not the more important one) I ever wrote was about the collapse of dating into two poles. On one side, date everyone, stay emotionally and digitally tethered to every body in your past, question your inner world until you’re awash and eventually a little asexual. That side leaks. It needs constant novelty to survive. New images, new people, new drama, new charges, new language every six months… or often less.

On the other side, a control so archaic it gives men no room for emotions and women no room for a job. In a time when it really serves people to have multiple income streams. In a time when children could deeply benefit from getting daily care from men.

Repression dressed up as order, with something almost crusade-ish running underneath it.

Most of insulting of all is how the far right leadership is awash in constant scandal and surrounded by porn-like, injected bodies. It is pure absurdity to preach family values while you simultaneously settle up with your side chicks in court.

Who can support that with a clear mind? It’s wild.

Neither extreme works. Yet, both have millions of people inside their bubbles, defending the walls.

Maybe that’s our biggest problem of all. Maybe it’s our only problem.

I watched the same machine run in the therapy world. Women told to open their sexuality, take lots of partners, put their bodies on the internet as a statement of freedom. This is feminine boss energy.

To me it mostly looks like offering more free porn for men who are already slaves to it. Becoming your monster is such an old trap.

Then this same industry sells her a new offer to heal her of everything the first offer did. Reset. Create boundaries. Learn to analyze every word that comes from a man’s mouth like it’s your job. Harden yourself into freedom.

Best I can tell, the women and men who buy the whole package the wellness world offers often end up functionally homeless and very lonely, dreaming in online imaginations, vulnerable to anyone who offers a glimpse of what they could have. Orally re-painting the past to soften the blows. Finding an external villain — a new narcissist — to avoid the only path to freedom: self-reckoning.

How are people so stupid?

That’s the question you want to ask.

They’re not stupid.

They just don’t have hope.

They don’t believe there is anything better than what they’re being offered, so they take what they’re offered. Even when what they are being offered is a trap.

Watch how it plays out in dating.

A woman gets burned through being wide open, so she hardens. She grills every man across the table. Guard up, tests running, ready to defend herself. She thinks this makes her harder to fool. It makes her easier to trick. Anyone with real options feels that chasing, defending energy and leaves. The only men willing to perform inside her interrogation are the ones willing to manipulate her, because they’ll play any game that gets them in.

The armor selects for exactly the predator it was built against. It’s a trap.

Or homeownership and housing.

It’s not actually that complicated if you commit to a career field. It’s a bit more complicated if you are committed to a stroll to ten-dollar coffee. If you’re flexible, if what you actually want is a place that feels well kept, there are so many places in America to live well and grow forward. I can’t speak to the whole world but I will tell you that over half of my clients live overseas and they seem to be able to sort it out.

Maybe land ownership isn’t safety to everyone, but having a consistent place to live that you know you can afford long-term is. Housing is basic. Being in a high stakes rental trap your entire life is a trap. It just simply isn’t true that with a few good moves you can’t wrangle debt and get yourself into a city where you can afford safety. Believing it’s impossible is the trap.

And people say, well, I can’t do that.

Can’t. As if it were a fact about the world and not a belief they picked up somewhere and never checked in on. There are so many ways to live well and create safety. Once you do it for yourself, against as many odds as anyone you know, you can’t unsee it. You can’t unsee the loops.

Fear and fantasy, fear and fantasy.

The far right runs on one, the far left on the other, and the therapy-wellness industry runs on both.

What breaks the swing is having something real.

My life is not perfect. Real life is not perfect. My relationship with my body, my cycle, my children, my home, my partner are very, very good though. Not everyone likes me, but a handful of people love me.

And once you start collecting real things, you don’t dump them for fantasy. You don’t choke them in the rage of not having your fantasies either.

Stupid fantasies are easy to give up after you’ve had one experience of something worth defending.

It makes me sad that people believe long-term relationships always go sexless. A relationship where the tension of attraction goes unprotected can go sexless. That’s a failure of protection, not an assignment.

There is a whole way of living and looking that is not represented anywhere on the internet, and it’s not even hard to commit to.

Here is what liberation actually is.

Commitment to your body, your health and your sexuality. Work that gives you specifically some feeling of purpose. A small group of people, five or less, that you are lifelong committed to. Family on your own terms, whatever that means. And seeking your own enlightenment as a daily practice, through your own religion, your own land, your own culture. That’s it.

If words like family make you flinch, notice that without marriage or a long-term partnership that shares assets or other anchors like children, the people on your list tend to come and go. They morph into digital connections, which is worth thinking about before you decide those things are always prisons.

Commitment has always been human liberation.

You just need to commit to reality, not commit to keeping a fantasy going through role playing with other humans. Playing the angry victim of a big machine you have no control over is a very popular role lately.

We might be living through turmoil on our timeline. There might be some kind of AI reckoning coming. But, on humanity’s timeline we are the safest we’ve ever been.

Committing to the middle road is your liberation.

Otherwise the far left and the far right will keep swinging you back and forth your entire life, and you’ll end up angry and bitter and unrelenting, alone even in your closest connections.

I write primarily to support my small business. You can meet with me about 1–1 coaching or purchase my $27 self study courses for men and women.

*Christina Lane is a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator. She writes about the interior life of modern relating. She writes weekly on Medium & Substack.*

Christina also owns a tutoring company Connected Tutors and is a parent to three teens.