When you are dead, you don’t know you are dead. The pain is felt by others.
The same thing happens when you’re stupid!
Death has a strange reputation. It walks in, switches off the lights inside you, and you are spared the whole fiasco. You are gone, and everyone else is left sweeping memories from the floor.
Now shift that lens to stupidity. Same pattern. The only difference is that the person is still breathing and often offering life advice with the confidence of a magician who never practised the trick.
I have met a variety of humans. Some kind, some chaotic, some wise, and some who walk around with the intellectual awareness of a window that never opens.
The problem is they never realise it.
The room around them fills up with groans and suppressed yelps, and they beam as if they are distributing joy. Their confidence is astonishing. It is almost spiritual in its delusion. They stand in the middle of a discussion, drop a line that makes the universe reconsider evolution, and then smile as if they solved global hunger. The rest of us stare at the ceiling, searching for strength or a trapdoor.
Stupidity is not always loud. Sometimes it marches in like a tipsy uncle at a wedding, insisting on giving a speech. You start with hope, end with regret, and spend the rest of the night questioning your life choices. The uncle thinks he delivered a masterpiece. Everyone else is plotting escape routes.
You can usually spot a wise person. They listen. They reflect. They make you feel lighter.
A foolish person makes you feel like you are doing manual labour with your mind. Five minutes with them and your soul feels like it has been carrying sandbags up a staircase. You walk out of the conversation holding your head, not because something hurt, but because the universe tried to warn you your IQ is leaking.
The strangest part is how stubborn foolishness can be. Advice bounces off it like rubber balls on marble. Facts slide off it. Logic evaporates. You can stand there explaining something with diagrams, examples, maybe a shadow puppet show for good measure, and they will blink and say something so unrelated you will need a moment to adjust your reality. Talking to them feels like trying to upload a file using a charger cable. It should work, but it never does.
Human relationships suffer the most. A foolish person rarely knows they are exhausting the room. They stroll around tossing their opinions like confetti at strangers. The rest of us collect those opinions with a broom of patience and mutter prayers for our sanity. Arguments with them are even worse. You could present evidence, logic, ancient scrolls, and video footage, and they will still insist you are overthinking. They will grin with a bravery that only ignorance provides.
But here is the comic tragedy.
We all take turns being foolish. Nobody escapes it. Sometimes life becomes too much.
Sometimes the ego gets loud. Sometimes we skip reading, skip thinking, skip self-awareness, and wander around making a mess with our mouths. In those moments, someone else suffers. A friend listens and screams internally. A partner nods and plans a solo vacation. A colleague stops believing in teamwork. And we continue blissfully, unaware that we have caused a mini-epidemic.
What saves us is the ability to recognise it and evolve. Intelligence is never just knowledge. It is curiosity, humility, and the willingness to be wrong without insecurity. People with real depth never parade their minds. They upgrade themselves silently, like a phone that installs updates without bragging. You feel the difference in how they carry themselves. No exhibition. Only steady clarity.
So, how do you protect yourself from the living version of conceptual decay? You do not argue endlessly. You do not try to fix them. You learn the subtle art of stepping away before your inner peace starts writing resignation letters. Not every conversation must be a rescue mission. Some must be a graceful goodbye.
Yet keep a soft corner for them. You never know when life will hand you the same mirror. We are all flawed travellers. Some of us trip more often. Some of us refuse to look at the stone that made us fall. But all of us can learn.
And that is the final joke life plays. Death hurts the living. Foolishness hurts the living too. The only difference is that one cannot be helped; the other can be cured if the ego is willing to retire.
Until then, carry your wit like sunscreen. It will save you from the bright glare of misplaced confidence wandering freely among us.