How do you deal with stupid people in your life?

In My Humble Opinion
21

That largely my view as well.

First, consider the significant percentage* of the human population that encompass the gleefully malignant, the enthusiasts of recreational violence and all the energetic spite merchants of the world. Plain old ignorance is a refreshing trait IMHO. The ignorant can be helpful and often entertaining. Just don’t let them drag you down by playing their game. They’re better at it than you.

  • I want to say majority of the population here but lets not quibble over numbers. They’re out there.
22

I avoid them as much as is possible. “Dumber than dogshit and proud of it” is becoming the new normal and the law of the land. Nothing I can do to change it.

23

Big differences between stupid, ignorant, and willfully ignorant.

Everyone is stupid about something. I have dyscalculia and can’t understand anything that has a number in it. Some folks cannot for the life of them figure out how to spell, their minds just don’t work with language well. Mostly you figure out how to work around your areas of blankness.

Everyone is ignorant about something – most things, if you look closely. There are things you are trying to learn, things you aren’t bothering to learn, and things you know enough of to get along with. Everyone is like that.

Then there are the willfully ignorant. They insist that their answer is the right one against mountains of evidence, because it fits with a feeling they have about the world. I have a brother-in-law with a PhD in chemistry and no shortage of opportunities to learn. But he is so welded to his belief that he is much smarter than anyone else that there is not a hairline crack where new knowledge could get in. He’s not stupid exactly but he sure is one irritating sumbitch. The kind of person who even if you are an expert in something, will smugly insist he is right about your field of expertise and you are wrong.

24

Indeed. There’s stupidity, and there’s stupidity. I only live among highly educated people, and I am sometimes horrified to come across blatant racism or pseudoscience.

Plus, one’s stupidity typically comes in conjunction with other elements that everyone should be wary about when they want to make friends.

I can’t believe how stupid I was when I myself was a child or teenager. To a certain extent, my entire evolution can be regarded as an effort to extract myself from my own stupidity and the harm that other people’s stupidity could inflict on my person.

Now that I think about it, I understand that I have developed a strategy. There is a mental manual consisting of simple instructions that help me sift through population so that I can select only the individuals I really want to deal with. It is a simple method of judging people way before you get to know them well enough to be able to judge them.

I’m sure it’s not my invention. We all must use similar abstract guidebooks that help us tell the wheat from the chaff, only the sets of instructions are different. Every set of instructions includes subsets as well suggesting you, for example, who to hang out with or who to avoid. I don’t want to split hairs right now, so I will only refer briefly to the subset that helps me decide who I should avoid - because that’s what the OP is about: how do I deal with stupid people in my life. I can successfully steer clear of stupidity by not making friends with people who, for example:

  • believe they’re always right;
  • fail to keep their promises;
  • blame others for their failures;
    etc.

These instructions may appear not to be connected with stupidity, but I think they are.