pseudo-intellectualism
how can one have true intellect without exploring the emotion capacity of anything? in truth, logic and emotion are on two sides of the same coin, at least that's what i think. do you seriously think we are capable of a singular rational thought? that doesn't seem very intelligent to me. maybe this is a product of my rampant imposter syndrome, but i always feel like i'm just wearing the skin of a so-called 'intellectual' or 'literati' or something like that. what do you expect to gain from words alone? what do any of US know about intelligence? i invite you to think with me for a moment.
hey, what do you mean you've never read crime and punishment? or don quixote? or the stranger? or hamlet? what is wrong with you? don't i seem like such a genius? i read the classics! as painful as it is to admit, it's really not enough to just read literature, you have to think critically and understand it. maybe it's the dunning-kruger effect, or maybe it's imposter syndrome, but i feel as though i'm just 'reading' to seem smart and not 'understanding' even though, if i think about it really hard, i'm able to understand most anything. we are all intelligent beings, it came with collective humanity's capabilities for thought, stupid. you dont know what that means? well i do! and i really have trouble convincing myself that is all that matters.
what are we trying to prove? how many of us are genuinely interested in complex ideas and themes? how many of us find ourselves prisoner to deep meaning? i can understand why self-proclaimed 'intellectuals' want to dull down and rationalize their emotions so much, it's a down right chore trying to make sense of your mind. i'm already exhausted writing this, so yeah, sure! why just feel the already established concept of happiness, sadness, and anger that we learn when we're little kids? why not write your emotions in a way never written before? well, the funny thing is that you can't! look up 'mimesis' on your preferred search engine.
i'm not smart. who is smart? what makes someone smart? people often say i'm smart, and i can't help but think, "what does that even mean?" i enjoy things that people would deem as 'sophisticated' as it were; opera, literature, classical music, writing, antiques, etc. thank god nobody called me an "old soul" when i was younger, since i would've totally internalized that! verbalizing that makes me feel like i'm made up of falsehoods. is this all a joke or not? what a gloomy, sad child i am! is intellectualism just the absence of joy? is that what we're brought up to believe? that really is boring.
the line between taking interest in something because, well, i'm interested in it, versus taking feigned or supposed interest in something for the intellectual image is COMPLETELY blurred for me. do i like this thing, or do i just want to like this thing to seem smart? and we're back at square one. what even IS being smart? am i smart because i use big, fancy words you don't know the definition of without looking it up? does this communication gap between both of us make me smart? is it your lack of understanding of me? oooooh, look at me and my advanced lexicon. this is just the worst.
so, intellectualism. how the hell can people claim to know everything without introspection? sure, you know what makes you tick, but why do you tick? why do you keep on living? why do you keep on learning? because it's simply human nature, that's why. you're simply going through the common motions of a presumed 'genius' just without the genius part. that gets boring after a while, doesn't it? unlike most things, intelligence is hard to fake. emotions are also hard to fake. you might find it easy to feign interest or pretend to be sad or happy for someone, but at one point you had to learn those skills, right? so it's easy to see emotion as a burden. we all laugh at unfunny jokes to be polite. "but what if i don't, random deranged girl on the internet?" well, maybe this just isn't about you!
dostoyevsky was right, thinking too much IS a disease! all great men in the world hold a deep suffering that comes with the burden of thought! do you act like a genius because you were blessed with stupidity? is thinking too tiring for you? get in line! every single one of us wants to be something we are quite literally incapable of achieving. you want to be smart? read romeo and julliet and pretend you understand everything. "love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs" huh? what does that even mean, am i right? i am fundamentally brain-dead! we're all just white collar corpses that wear the same clothes and listen to the same music, right? thinking is boring! how could anyone love someone boring? i don't think even god does that!
i don't think i'm normal. i think far too much. is there a disability like overabundant thought disorder or something. there has to be. what is even happening here? pick an author, pick a philosophy, and pick a life you wish you had and just go with it. so kafkaesque! nietzschean, even! we all aren't real anyway. so you want to be an original, well-read academic, huh? unfortunate! intelligence isn't even about intelligence anymore, haven't you heard? for someone way more smart than me, this is all just word vomit pseudo-intellectual slop. but it means something to me, i guess. i'm really thankful the only person that understands me is me. that was a joke. i really do despise it with my whole body. maybe one day, i could become pure like all the others and stop thinking so much.
could you imagine if great works of literature are only comprehensible to their authors? what would we do? we'd all be solipsists! but if we were all solipsists, then we wouldn't be, right? you know, if everyone is unique then it would make a collective logical fallacy, right? don't you see that none of this makes an ounce of sense? what wisdom is all of this based off of, if not collective insanity? wisdom for wisdom’s sake? for all i know, i could literally be crazy. we could all be in folie à deux, the world made up of some kind of shared fabrication. we're all deplorably coated in irony. this could all be fake! existentialism is trendy nowadays! do you ever think for yourself?!
in our school of thought, we are always alone. even when verbalizing it, too. what if i was right in front of you and just said all of this to you, without even stopping for a breath? how could you handle something like that? that's where the segregating line of 'me' versus 'others' begins. i beg on my knees to be understood, but i want to keep all the bells and whistles of the tortured artist's image. "nobody could possibly understand the pain i go through! im a pretentious prick!" or something like that. aren't those types of people absolutely annoying? i would know, i am that type of person, after all.
nothing bad has ever happened to me ever, so to cope, i follow this very simple trick! i'm just convincing myself the suffering i go through every day is created by me in my subconscious somewhere someplace, and that it's for the greater good somehow someway. kinda like jesus, right? technically that's what he did. if i was jesus, i wouldn't die for me. what a fool. i'd might die for him as i would everybody else in the world, that's just the amount of love i hold for the human race. it's seriously disgusting.