Reading These Dumb People Confessions Is Better Than a Self-Esteem Workshop

The dumb person story genre operates as a kind of communal pressure valve for everybody who has ever had to work, live, or co-exist with somebody whose confidence radically outpaces their information. The stories are not really about intelligence in any clinical sense. They’re about a very specific human phenomenon, where the people who know the least often hold their opinions the most loudly, and the people around them have to either correct them, ignore them, or, occasionally, post about them anonymously to thousands of strangers. The funny stupid people stories filling galleries like this are essentially the third option.

What makes the genre particularly satisfying is how often the stupidity is delivered with complete sincerity. Nobody in these stories is joking. The pyramid-reverse-engineering guy genuinely believes he could do it in an afternoon. The Belgium-denier is not trolling. The zodiac-litter-box-theorist is operating from her actual diagnostic framework. The Dunning Kruger memes that get reposted from these threads work because the original speakers were never in on the joke, and the gap between their confidence and reality is what produces the entire comedic effect.

There’s also a recurring pattern in these stories that’s worth naming, which is how often the confidently incorrect people are in positions of small authority. The middle manager. The assistant team lead. The shift supervisor. The crazy people stories that emerge from workplaces tend to feature exactly this demographic, because being a little bit in charge of a few people seems to amplify whatever certainty the person was already operating with. The pyramid guy was not, in fact, a professor. The pyramid guy was an assistant manager at a steakhouse, which makes the confidence somehow more impressive.

The other thing the genre captures is how exhausting it is, in practical terms, to deal with somebody operating at this level of certainty. Correcting them rarely works. Ignoring them produces other problems. The viral Reddit stories that come out of this corner of the internet are, in part, stress relief for the people who had to sit through these encounters in real time, and the audience response is mostly sympathy. We have all met this person. We have all sat through this meeting. We have all wondered, briefly, whether Belgium is really there.

What this whole gallery is really capturing, when you sit back from the secondhand frustration, is one of the great enduring features of human social life, which is that confidence does not require accuracy to be effective. The people in these stories are, by most measures, getting along fine. They have jobs. They have apartments. They have romantic partners who, for various reasons, have chosen to stay. The internet finds this exasperating. The internet also has to acknowledge that the system is working, more or less, despite the participants.

There’s also a small structural observation about online platforms that’s worth making. The dumb person story genre has grown, in part, because Reddit and similar platforms allow people to vent about their colleagues, partners, and family members anonymously, at a scale that previous generations did not have access to. Your grandmother also had a coworker who thought the moon landing was filmed in a warehouse. She just had to tolerate it without an audience. The hilarious dumb stories filling galleries like this are essentially the digital version of complaints that used to be reserved for the bar after work, and the audience has grown accordingly.

The other recognition is that the genre is, mostly, harmless. Nobody in these stories is being doxed. The names are usually changed. The whole exchange functions as a small public catharsis, where the storyteller gets to vent, the readers get to laugh, and the original subject of the story remains, in most cases, blissfully unaware that they are now an internet character. The pyramid guy is still confident. The Belgium denier still doesn’t believe in Belgium. The system holds. The stories keep coming.