On Being Made to Feel Smart

One of my least favorite things to feel is dumb. In hindsight, naming this publication “Will’s Dumb Brain” might not have been the most intelligent thing I’ve ever done. Feeling dumb really is the pits, though. When there’s a conversation going on and you can’t help but feel you stepped into a calculus class when you’re barely qualified for algebra, it’s the worst. And when people purposefully make you feel dumb to make themselves look or feel smart? Ohhh boy, few things grind my gears like that. On the flip side, being made to feel smart is one of the most joyous feelings I get in my everyday life.

This idea for a post came after I spent a couple of afternoons during the holidays playing a game called Cocoon. It’s a small indie-developed puzzle game in which you play as a little beetle-like creature who goes on, “an adventure across worlds within worlds.” Not only is the art direction fantastic, the ambient storytelling gorgeous, and the sound design haunting, the puzzles are perfect. The thing about puzzles is that making them hard is easy. The other thing about puzzles is that making them easy is…well, easy. The hardest thing to make a puzzle is hard at first until you have that wonderful “ah-ha!” moment.

This game is full of opaque mechanics that seem impossible to wrap your head around…until you take a moment, think about the world around you, and trust the developer. Playing this game really made me think about how much trust is a part of a great puzzle. The feeling that you’re in good hands and that the solution to a puzzle is both logical and well sign-posted is worth its weight in gold.

This game got me thinking about other mediums and people who have the ability to make one feel smart. I’ve stated before that I love a dense fantasy or sci-fi novel but what makes one of those truly great is the ability to drip-feed the reader information and lore so that a world that seems so foreign and daunting slowly starts to feel like a place you know as well as your home town. I’m not stating anything new here but JRR Tolkien’s ability to distill an entire world’s history, through multiple ages, was one of his greatest strengths (and is the reason I know orcs from Uruk-hai and that Minas Tirith was originally called Minas Anor which was built by Dúnedain of Gondor…duh).

Similarly, there are a number of YouTube channels and creators that truly excel at taking incredibly complex topics and making them digestible to normies like me. Kurzgesagt is a channel with over 20 million subscribers that has made things, from how the immune system works, to what the Fermi Paradox is, understandable (at least at a surface level) in the amount of time it takes to fold your laundry.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve grown to enjoy learning, and with that comes the appreciation of those geniuses who, through their own massive brain power, are able to impart a feeling of intelligence upon others.

Do you have any people, games, books, movies, or organizations that make you feel smart?