I don’t know about this Penguin.

I completely get the phenomenon you’re talking about. Language and terminology seem to change practically overnight. It’s hard to keep up. As we age we lose that elasticity of brain that lets us absorb new stuff quickly. We hit information overload regularly.

I’m also lucky enough to have enough people in my life in such a variety of fields that I’ve been able to learn a lot about a lot of different things just by hanging out with them and letting them talk. I’m no expert, but I do seem to have a broader generalized knowledge base than most of my contemporaries.

There’s definitely something to being able to draw experts and intelligent people into conversation. A lot of them don’t get that kind engagement regularly. It’s a talent to be able to be a social and conversational bridge.

But the demeanor of smart people doesn’t land that way for me, seemingly slow and bumbling. I would say that’s it’s more true that the more you know the more you realize how much you don’t know. Most of the smart people I’ve known ... for them it’s a label that gets assigned to them. The smarter they are the more they realize intelligence is relative and not the end all be all. They do kind of revert back to a child-like curiosity oftentimes though.

Maybe it’s because I’m American and our far right has been successful in an anti-intellectualism campaign to the point where a far bigger problem is people thinking they’re intelligent enough to have an opinion in the first place based off memes and arguing points because they failed to understand how language works in the first place.

But people who are really smart? They’re mostly just chill, doing their thing. They seem to keep to themselves a lot. They mostly come across to me as quite humble.

I tend to think all the noise must give them a constant headache

You seem to be changing stride in your writing. Still struggling after your sabbatical or is this on purpose?