Foibles, fumbles and follies
To err is human; to forgive is also human.
Our stupidity is a core part of our humanness. Without it, life would be so dull and without giggles! We’re universally connected with ourselves and fellow animals by our innate ability to flaw. We lie, cheat, escape responsibility, gossip, judge, and obsess over ourselves. We are selfish, neglectful, uncaring, foolish, and perpetually afraid. We’re also quite stupid and laughworthy. I write today of this deep stupidity we garner.
We search for our phone while talking on it, pressed between the shoulder and ear.
We lose our keys every day and continue to not put them in the right place the next day.
We think a torch will help us find anything and everything.
We dance and make our dogs and babies dance to random shit on TikTok.
We fake laugh when we don’t get the joke.
We stumble and fall on the sidewalk even though we walk on it every single day for years.
We talk out loud to no one in particular, after said fall, and express anger on a rock that came in our way.
We pretend to talk on our phones all the time, to avoid embarrassment of having nothing to do in public.
We yell at our phones when they do not obey our commands.
We walk like a total star, when listening to a song we like, with headphones on, as if there are a million cameras on us.
We watch reality shows that drain the very essence of our own reality.
We wear heels that kill our feet.
We rehearse arguments and conversations with someone we hate, in a mirror.
We put the empty jar of jam back in the fridge.
We let fruit go bad right in front of our eyes but don’t eat it.
We believe Google that we’re going to die with the symptoms it shows us for a common cold.
We hoard on toilet paper in response to the first sign of a crisis.
We roam outside during lockdowns and wear our masks on the chin.
We are paranoid about germs, and yet we don’t bathe for days.
We make up conspiracy theories and spread rumours just to tickle our bored selves.
We panic at the first sign of an AI bot writing an email for us, and start to oppose it by saying it’ll steal our jobs.
We give too much importance to the newspapers and media, forgetting to live our actual lives.
We eat and drink every day of our lives, but we still manage to spill on our white shirts, and let drinks dribble down our chins like we’re infants.
We deny our eternal clumsiness and pick delicate things up confidently, only to break them the next second, because we don’t have a grip on ourselves.
We are social animals since centuries, but small talk is still beyond our circle of competence.
We spend an inordinate amount of time looking for our glasses, while they rest peacefully on our noses.
We open and reopen the refrigerator 50 times a day to see if some food fairies magically kept something delicious in there.
We get flustered by niceness and reply happy birthday to someone wishing us happy birthday.
We lie to our doctors about our food and drinking habits and expect them to heal our very soul.
We get triggered by inanimate objects and cry woe-is-me every time the printer is jammed or the wifi doesn’t connect.
We feel weird singing the Happy Birthday song but we continue to mumble along and mess up the person’s name.
We never know how much eye contact is enough eye contact, and we end up creeping people out.
There is ample evidence of centuries worth of human stupidity. And yet, we fail to accept it in ourselves and in others. We pull ourselves into a cycle of shame and undignified blaming. Learning to laugh at ourselves and our glorious silliness is a moral act of forgiveness. To err is human, to forgive is also human, and to laugh at our idiocy is the most humane thing we can do. Nobody is beyond error. And nobody is beyond reform.