Do u ever feel like everyone is dumb and that’s why u don’t like socializing?

There are one of two possibilities here.

  1. You are smarter than everyone else and that feeling is justified, albeit cynical.

  2. You're of below to average intelligence and you just think you are smarter than everyone. Also a cynical perspective.

If you fall into category 1. It's your problem to solve. Work hard and get a job for a smart person. Get hired at a company who only employs smart people. You'll suddenly find yourself surrounded by people who aren't dumbasses and are probably much smarter than you.

If you fall into category 2. Then you are experiencing a delusion of sorts. Think hard about what qualifies a dumbass in your mind. Is it because they don't make the same choices you do? Is it because they expect things from you? Is it because you feel like they don't deserve what they have? Is it because they have different interests than you? Is it because others can't perform or aren't reliable? Are they actually stupid or do you just think they are? It's important to understand why you feel this way so you can work to have a less cynical world view. Going through life with this attitude will not benefit you in any way. It will only serve to frustrate you.

I had a similar feeling in my teenage years and opted to live life my own way. "Everyone else is a dumbass so I can get away without really trying and ignore most of them." I hardly went to high school but put in enough minimal effort to still get A's and B's. I learned how to bullshit through college too and for the most part it was easy.

Later on I got incredibly frustrated with my eventually certain "mediocrity" because although I never really tried, "I'm so much smarter than everyone I deserve better, but no one will recognize me for it.". I quit my shitty sales job and dedicated 12 hours a day to learning how to write software. A little over a year and a half later I landed myself a job at a large tech company as a software engineer. It was the first time in my life that I got to witness what genius really looks like. I am not a that person. I realized almost immediately after getting hired that this perspective I had actually stemmed from a place of frustration and cynicism which I not so cleverly used to justify my isolation.

The truth is, yes there are a lot of stupid people in the world, some of them I even wonder how they manage to pay their own bills. But there are a lot of people that are much smarter than you are. This is a fact. Writing the entirety of people off as being stupid and therefore not worthy to socialize with is to make a broad generalization that will hinder your ability to actually meet people that satisfy your arbitrary "intelligence threshold for friendship" requirement. They are out there, but now you've just made them all disappear in your mind. This will fuel the cynicism.

My advice is to chill the fuck out and find people who share common interests. I can't fucking stand listening to people talk about sports. People pushing a ball around from one side to the other just seemed so incredibly infantile to me that I found myself assuming all these people who like "watching the ball on the tv." Were morons who are easily entertained by watching the pretty pictures move fast on the screen. The truth is there are plenty of smart people who like watching one group of folks try to out sports the other. It's just not my thing. Likewise you are probably in a situation where most of the stuff you hear people talk about just isn't your thing. And that's ok. It's good to be different. It just means you have to work extra hard to find people who actually like what you like.

Don't isolate yourself my dude and don't live life as a cynic. It's not healthy.

/r/AskReddit Thread