"Being Smart"

According to all of the standardized tests I took when I was a kid, I am amongst the smartest of all humans extant. I am in the 99th percentile. Which means, actually, nothing, as there are thousands upon thousands of people at least as intelligent as I.

Yet.

Voice of authority.

Dear masses, if you are looking to me for guidance, I am glad to share my wisdom for you. After years of deep thought, after decades of self-examination, after torrents of self-doubt, after applying the most precise scalpel to all the joys and pains of human existence in order to directly contemplate them fully, here is what I have to offer:

Bourbon is delicious all by itself; no need to add a soda of any kind. I will admit that, sometimes, I need to add a bit of water or frozen water, also known as ice, to bourbon, to make it more palatable, and so I am, therefore, sympathetic to those of you who feel the same, but I must state, unequivocally, that adding anything to bourbon that changes the inherent flavor, as opposed to merely diluting said flavor, is inadvisable.

Also, capitalism will end. Sadly, for those of you on the Left who want to actually feel validated in your beliefs, capitalism will not end due to deliberate acts of moral depth. Rather, it will end so gradually as to prevent anyone for taking credit for its termination. The upside, of course, is that billions of future inhabitants of Earth will be saved from the suffering we all now feel so deeply in our hearts. The bad news, if it can be described as bad news at all, is that those of us whose sense of identity and purpose here on Earth is derived from "being smart" will never get any credit or social validation for being correct when it comes to our oppositional attitudes towards capitalism and the social formations that derive from this particular (and peculiar) form of economic and social organization. 

It's tough, I know. You are just going to have to find another way of getting laid. As smart as I am, I can't tell you how. Even I don't know.