Habits, thinking patterns, and everyday behaviors that quietly reveal intellectual laziness

Reading time: 6 min

No one is 100% dumb or 100% intelligent. There may be areas of stupidity and dumbness that co-exists with highly intelligent and genius people too.

• Da Vinci suffered from procrastination driving his clients to frustration.

• Nikola Tesla had no business acumen; he was too stubborn, inflexible and rooted in obsessions.

• Albert Einstein was notorious for lacking social skills.

But, truth be told: there does exist a category of people who are, by and large, dumb and they are totally unaware.

Please note: It's not that dumb people don't have career, life, success or happiness. It is just that their knives are too blunt to effectively cut anything they want to, and over-straining only ends up with strained, injured fingers. Interestingly enough, the danger of hurting your fingers due to a sharp knife is nearly the same as when using a blunt, rusted, incapable or wrong knife…!

Here's a brutal, un-sugar-coated list of 35 signs that signifiy lack of intelligence.

1. They don't invest in learning and improving themselves. They see it as boring, exhausting and unnecessary waste of time.
2. For them, working and learning is torture. Punishment. Prison. Uncool. They avoid hard work like disease causing germs.
3. They follow famous celebrities, politicians, and movie stars like gods. Fun, pleasure and entertainment is their most loved, cherished, highest and purest form of religion, their oxygen, their life blood.
4. They don't know what to do with their time (and their life) if they minus eating, sleeping and entertainment from it. Except these three, everything else bores them. Working? They regard it as just 'time lost'.
5. They blindly follow just about anyone who others follows. What 'Everybody likes or does' defines their universe.
6. They exhibit a frustrating lack of curiosity in their world. They are just not interested in knowing anything.
7. They do what others do. They see what others see. They hear what others hear. They believe what others believe. They live like others live. They shudder and die at the faintest idea of doing something others don't do, or won't do.
8. They jump to conclusions without analysing, investigating, and logical reasoning. Which is why they blindly follow advertisements, new products in market, influencers and social media posts as their guiding light from heaven.
9. They cannot debate; discussing something with them usually ends in bitter argument, ego-injury, personal attacks, nasty accusations, mud-slinging, and a waste of time and energy for both parties.
10. They can't figure out outcomes and consequences and don't know that they can't; the ones they do are mostly erroneously calculated and confidently believed in.
11. Because of their flawed calculation, missing insight and illogical predication they fail to recognise opportunities, luck, chance, traps, dangers, danger-signs, pitfalls, loop holes.
12. They are focussed on immediate results, short-term goals and immediate gratification of senses as opposed to long term planning, delayed gratification and outcomes. Patience, planning, far-sightedness are not their strengths. And they don't even know this.
13. They display a severe lack of insight and perspectives. They see the world as others see it.
14. They mostly think they are smart. Because to know they are not, requires a certain intelligence that they do not have.
15. They don't challenge themselves. They slide into comfort zones and will never venture out of it unless forced. They know what they see and feel but cannot fathom how others would see the same situation or feel.
16. They never ask questions. Asking questions, is to them a sign of being dumb and they prefer to be seen as 'I am smart. I know everything. And even if I don't know it, I would never let anyone know that I don't know.'
17. That's not to say they are bad. They are just too simple, ignorant, intellectually dry, impatient and unwilling to learn, change or improve for their own good.
18. They (often) exhibit scary confidence and courage, and take risks where intelligent and wise wouldn't, and exercise cowardice, aversion, caution and inaction where intelligent and wise wouldn't. That's because of their judgement/critical evaluation/reasoning and logic system is flawed or totally absent.
19. Their decisions are usually ego based, serving short term goals, emotionally driven, usually selfish and dumb, and poorly judged, poorly strategised.
20. They appreciate less and complain more. Complaining about everything weather, work, world, boss, life, family, usually forms a major part of all their conversation at all times.
21. They are less grateful and more resentful. They accept less and reject more. They confess less and deny more.
22. Between 'easy now — hard later' and 'hard now — easy later' they usually always choose 'easy now — hard later.'
23. Fun, pleasure and self enjoyment is usually their all time focus.
24. They shun advices. Mostly, they can't tell good advice from bad. And then cannot follow them even if they do accept them.
25. Their mistakes are not their teachers and their experience is not their learning. They don't learn anything from them. If anything, they keep making same mistakes again and again and keep expecting different results and will fiercely defend themselves that it wasn't their mistake.
26. They avoid responsibilities.
27. They quickly and easily pin faults, mistakes, responsibilities, and risks on others.
28. Everything that goes wrong with them, they staunchly believe and even convince you, is due to fault of others. Missing interviews, failing tests, crashing projects, messing up opportunities, all is somehow always due to other's fault and never their's.
29. They rely on luck and chance more than hard work, strategy, self-improvement, personal growth and learning.
30. They are unable to detect recurring mistakes or repeating patterns in their life.
31. They have lots of friends and nearly no enemies. But they don't know if their friends are real friends. And they certainly don't know who their hidden enemies are. Usually their enemy is their close friend!
32. They believe in 'Eyes wide shut' mindset. They see things without seeing them, understand things without understanding them, and at all times strictly stay away from uncomfortable truths.
33. They easily make a mess of situations and as a result of their failures, experience emotions that do them more harm than good such as envy, revenge, jealousy etc.
34. They hate those who try to correct or improve them. Firstly, because they think they don't need any correction or improvement. Second, because they don't want to change themselves or their opinions/ decisions/ views.
35. They drown their life in cheap, shallow, short-term pleasures, squander their time, money and life, and blame it all bitterly on others (usually god, government and luck.)

Please remember: No one is 100% dumb or 100% intelligent. A dumb person possessing most or all of the following traits may still be able to lead a satisfactorily successful and happy life, because having intelligence and not having intelligence both does not guarantee success and happiness.

But that's just my opinion. Thanks for reading!

Ratna Srivastava

R Blogs

Author | Essayist | Thinker | Philosopher
Writing about intelligence, psychology, society and human nature.

Note: This post is written personally by me and reflect my individual observation, thought, and reflection.