The New Yorker:

Stupidity is eternal—and more complex than we think.

By Joshua Rothman

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the gym, exercising and musing about an upcoming column, when one of the kids from the front desk ran up to me. “Did you put a lock on a locker?” he asked. I said that I had—and instantly realized that, in a moment of inattention, I’d accidentally padlocked the locker next to the one where I’d stored my stuff. We dashed to the locker room, where a man around my age was bouncing impatiently from foot to foot. His belongings were trapped behind my lock. “Dude, I’m really late,” he said. In a fugue state of embarrassment and remorse, I squinted at my padlock; I had my contacts in, and couldn’t make out the combination. “Can you read this?” I asked him, inanely, before simply clawing my contacts out. I opened the lock, then stepped aside so that he could grab his things and bolt for the door.

I felt stupid, obviously—so stupid that, afterward, I could barely concentrate on the heavy weights I was lifting. That could have led to another stupid mistake. Thankfully, a few minutes later, my mood shifted when it occurred to me that I could use the incident to start my column. That’s how stupidity often is—causing problems, but also presenting opportunities. My stupid act had been a useful one, at least to me. To put it differently, I had discovered that I was smart enough to make something out of having been dumb.

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