Is It Just Me, Or Is Everyone Getting Dumber?
Last Saturday I went to the apartment building potluck, the one we do every spring. I brought my slightly too salty deviled eggs, no one ate more than two, same as always. There was a store-bought lemon meringue pie someone picked up on the way, and we were all hovering over the table complaining about how much sugar must be packed into that filling. The back label said it had 1.5 pounds of sugar total. Someone offhand goes, “Wait, how many cups is that?”
And crickets. No one said anything. I stared at the ceiling trying to pull the conversion out of my brain, I knew it was around two cups to a pound for sugar, but I couldn’t be sure. Someone pulled out their phone before I could even finish guessing. Turned out I was right, but no one cared. They just nodded and went back to arguing about the new Netflix mystery show. That question just hung there for a second, though, and it got me thinking about this quiet thing I’ve been noticing for a while, the whole question of whether we’re all losing that general, everyday smarts people used to have.
I go to the same coffee shop every morning before work, the lead barista is my 22-year-old cousin Lila. Last month their POS system crashed right during the 8 a.m. rush. All the screens went blue, and Lila just stood there behind the counter staring like someone had cut the power to her brain. The manager, who’s 24, started yelling at the internet company instead of just pulling out the old manual price list. A guy ordered a medium drip and a blueberry muffin, total came to $7.15, he handed over a $20 bill. Lila just stared at the open cash drawer. She couldn’t do 20 minus 7.15 in her head. I was next in line, so I just said “12.85” and she looked at me like I just solved a rocket science problem. I ended up counting change for 20 minutes while they waited for IT to fix it. No one else under 30 in the shop could do it faster than fumbling with a pen and napkin and still getting it wrong half the time.
Before anyone says I’m some old guy yelling at clouds, let me get this straight: I do this too. I can’t remember any phone numbers except my childhood home landline that got disconnected 15 years ago. I can’t navigate to the grocery store 10 minutes away without Google Maps, even though I’ve been going there three years. Last month I had to write a check for my security deposit for a new couch, and I forgot how to spell “forty” for a full 10 seconds. I had to check my phone. So I’m not standing on any soapbox here. I’m just as guilty of outsourcing every little bit of thinking to my phone as anyone else.
Last January, my heat went out at 2 a.m. It was 18 degrees outside, and I could feel the pipes under my sink starting to freeze. I texted the building group chat asking for any quick fixes, because the landlord said he couldn’t get a plumber out till 9 a.m. Half the replies were just “call a plumber” like none of them bothered to read the whole message. Another bunch said “go get a hotel” which, I don’t have money for that on two hours notice, and everything’s closed at 2 a.m. anyway. Then Mr. Henderson from 3B, who’s 78, replied with step-by-step instructions: turn off the main water, wrap the exposed pipe in old bath towels, heat the towels up in the dryer every 10 minutes, pour slow hot water over the pipe if it’s still frozen. I did that, it worked. I didn’t even know you could do that. I would’ve just sat there wrapped in three blankets freezing till morning, because I never had to figure that out on my own. Even if I’d thought to Google it, I was too flustered to type straight anyway.
It’s not that we’re actually stupid, right? My niece is 19, she just planned a whole 10-day trip to Japan by herself, found a cheap flight, negotiated a homestay, figured out all the train lines, edited a whole vlog of it that got 10k views on TikTok. I couldn’t do that when I was 19, I still can barely pull that off now. That’s a whole other kind of intelligence, the kind that’s good for navigating the messy digital world we live in now. But why does it feel like the general stuff, the stuff that’s just… common knowledge, basic problem solving when there’s no screen to ask, is just slipping away?
Last week I went to trivia at the bar down the street. The question was “What is the closest planet to the sun?” Half my team answered Venus. One answered Mars. I said Mercury, and everyone argued with me for five minutes, till we pulled the answer up on the host’s phone. I felt weird being right, like I was being a condescending know-it-all. How do you not remember that from third grade science? I don’t even study that stuff, it just stuck. Why doesn’t it stick for other people?
I talked about this with my dad last Sunday on the phone. He said when he was a kid, if you wanted to know something, you had to walk half a mile to the library, dig through the encyclopedia to find it. You worked for that information, so it stuck in your head. Now, we just Google it in two seconds, so it never sticks. It just goes in one side and out the other, because we know we can just look it up again any time.
I don’t know if that’s an actual loss of intelligence, or just a shift that I’m noticing because I’m getting older. Old people have been complaining that kids are getting dumber since forever, right? I remember reading once that Socrates complained writing made people forgetful, because they wouldn’t need to memorize everything anymore. But I still can’t shake those little moments: the potluck where no one could guess how many cups are in a pound, the coffee shop where no one could count change, the heat going out where no one but the 78 year old knew what to do. It’s not a crisis, not some big end of the world thing. It’s just a quiet little change I notice, every few weeks, that makes me go “huh.” I don’t have an answer for it. I still keep forgetting how to spell forty anyway, so who am I to talk?
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