Felt this really hard as someone from the Philippines (which is currently having an education crisis) and whose intelligence was glazed too often lmao

“You are reading at college level.”

Translation: “You are baseline literate.”

Opposite for me. Feels like I went to school with particularly smart people and I thought I was way below average.

Then I learned about (and also observed) a 60% illiteracy rate.

For me, it was realizing that while I was smart, the shit level of schooling was more an impediment to me gaining the skills needed to continue excelling and I continue to be surrounded by absolute dipshits wherever I go.

In school, I didn't have to study to pass and there was no real incentive to learn how to. This bit me when it came to university because the lectures didn't cover everything that was to be tested on. Turns out, trying is a skill I never needed until then.

Then, in the workforce, I'm constantly exhausted dealing with people who are at best functionally literate and I have to cater to their understanding of literally everything. No desire to either understand the problem or fix the root cause, just make the thing do what they want right then.

Yea... This was the basis for my first existential crisis in my life... All through small town public school I was basically the smartest kid in the room (sometimes smartest person - we had some really bad teachers). Thought I was god's gift of intelligence to humanity. Went out of town to a really good engineering school and holy shit I was immediately humbled. I was clawing my way to try to reach "average" and couldn't quite reach.

That’s me. Then I got a job as a software developer but most my colleagues when to university so they always going on about bougie words like polymorphism, dependency injection, etc.

We coined the term that I am a working man’s software developer. I can do all those bougie words but I just can’t articulate what they are. Nor do I care to to be honest.

Here's the thing: we can't ALL have been the smartest kids in our classes. It's just so unlikely.

We were the generic background idiots in someone else's success story all along.

I’m born and raised in rural northern Nevada population 4000ish. I barely graduated high school and went straight into a manual labor job. I feel like I’m a goddamn Nostradamus or Albert Einstein here sometime.

You know I heard a quote one time that said if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room. But at the same time my parents always told me whatever I did I needed to be the best at it. Like they put me in tutoring because my math skills were only one year ahead. My family is all engineers, computer scientists etc. Everybody's a bachelor's or above except my one sister who's specifically disabled.

When I decided on nursing school I was like OK I'm just going to aim for something achievable for me. The content should be right at my level, at least I'll be able to excel at that like they're expecting. And the coursework itself was super easy. I had all the chem physics and bio I needed for the conceptual groundwork. I had all the Greek and Latin roots I needed for the terminology. Even the math was actually right on my level (basic algebra, ratio and proportion, PEMDAS equations), I just needed to up my accuracy when I had previously optimized for speed. And even now my computer skills alone are basically unmatched among clinical professionals. I had to call IT for something they needed to remote into the workstation for and they were shocked that I just gave them the IP address.

But my instructors and preceptors absolutely humbled me in people skills and emotional resiliency. I actually flunked out the first time for being too emotionally immature. They made me cry on the regular and I just couldn't get a grip on what they wanted from me interaction wise. It was actually my first shitty job at a psych hospital + going through therapy simultaneously that fixed me. It's wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did. I learned so much about respect and what it really meant to uphold a promise through adversity and how to keep my stupid mouth shut.

So. I thought I was aiming low, and I still wound up being the dumbest person in the room. Did get the degree though; it's been 6 years now.

I had highschool classmates bragging about driving 80mph down dirt roads and one girl planned to become "richly married" as her career. Maybe we all had dipshits.

A bad teacher can stunt you. I always wanted to make video games, but my high school programming teacher's style didn't mesh. Even though I enjoyed the class, he suggested I drop it because he thought I wasn’t a good fit for the field, I reluctantly agreed. Twenty years later, I’ve completed most of the programming for a game I plan to release one day, though I can still picture him tapping the chalkboard every time I asked a question like that was supposed to help...

That’s what we call an average fish suffocating in a puddle

Oh God.

But they were all dipshits.

You know, this actually explains a lot. Like how I never realized this before.

Everywhere is filled with absolute dipshits. Frankly the bar for "gifted" should not be looked at a praise-worthy state of those deemed such, but rather as a scathing rebuke of the general idiocy rampant across humanity.

That’s a me, retardando

Big fish in a small pond.

Guessing I'm not the only one in here that had a similar pathway with video games. Maybe games in general, as chess was similar.

That's what every Balzac novel is about

Growing up in a town can be rough if you're considered smart, and I've seen plenty posing as a lot dumber than they really are just so they fit in. The people that will not dumb themselves down tend to stand out more because of this.

In my country there are no advanced people and you can't really fast forward years of education. I know a couple of famous cases, but is not something that happens all the time. My family treated me as a special kid for so many reasons, and being "smart" was one of them. Had to travel to the big capital city to study a bachelor in science, there was no way around it, because the expenses were mostly covered by this public university, thank god.

The first year was hard. I failed some classes even, and seriously questioned myself if I had it in me to get my degree. Education is just better in big cities with museums, cultural activities everyday, bookstores and libraries. Back in the town I grew up we only had the little municipal library, others existed but weren't open to the public, and one or two bookstores with best sellers. In my university we had one library with several levels just for the students, there were books and journals, maps, a digital library too, etc. You need to be curious, yes, but the environment to pique that curiosity is very important too.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king