👋 Hi fellow dumdums,

Ever had a weird idea that felt too dumb to say out loud?

Maybe it arrived while brushing your teeth, half-asleep, thinking, “What if tacos... but for soup?” And before the thought could bloom into brilliance, your inner midwit stomped it out with a PowerPoint deck and a condescending voice that said, “Actually, the consumer appetite for broth-based hand foods is statistically unproven.”

Welcome to the Midwit Trap.

It’s a very real, very annoying cognitive Bermuda Triangle where great ideas go to die—right in the middle of the IQ bell curve.

🎩 The Bell Curve of Doom

There’s a meme — and I say this with great respect — that explains everything wrong (and right) about modern thinking. It features a bell curve of intelligence with three very different characters:

• On the left, a baby. No object permanence. Things disappear? That’s fine. So does he.

• In the middle, a glasses-wearing internet midwit, sobbing as he insists, *“No actually, object permanence is real and crucial for human development and secure attachment patterns—”

• On the right, the Buddha. Enlightened. Radiant. No object permanence. And not even mad about it.

They’ve all arrived at the same conclusion:

Reality is kind of… optional.

Only the guy in the middle is freaking out.

This is the Midwit Trap in action.

The dumb idea on the left gets dismissed, over-analyzed in the middle, and then embraced again at the genius level — only now it’s got robes and a halo.

🌸 What This Has to Do With Creativity

When you have a weird idea, it probably feels like the baby version.

Raw. Unformed. Slightly sticky.

Midwit culture will try to shame you into sanitizing it.

They’ll want to benchmark it, validate it, focus-group it to death.

But sometimes, the weird idea isn’t wrong.

It’s just pre-enlightened.

It hasn’t been over-explained yet. It hasn’t been made boring. It hasn’t lost its power in the desperate attempt to sound clever.

Let it stay weird.

Let it sit in the mystery for a bit.

Because if you protect it—if you don’t midwit it to death—

It might just grow up to be the Buddha.

(Or a billion-dollar idea. Either way, glowing.)

🧠 And Why do Smart People Often Sound So Dumb?

It’s a gift.

Truly.

Here’s the weird thing:

Some of the smartest people in history made a habit of saying things that sounded absolutely stupid—until they weren’t.

• Einstein: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
  Translation: If your idea requires a graph, a glossary, and a TED Talk, it’s probably nonsense.

• Richard Feynman explained quantum physics like he was talking to a Labrador. And somehow, the Labrador got it.

• Steve Jobs refused to put a stylus on the iPhone. Executives clutched their Blackberries like pearls at a Southern wedding.
  “What are we supposed to poke it with—our fingers?!”
  Yes, Janet. Your fingers.

• Michael Pollan, casually ending decades of nutrition discourse with:
  “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
  Meanwhile, the midwit crowd was busy designing a 90-slide deck titled:
  “The Holistic Nutritional Optimization Framework for Macro-Micro Food Synergy in the Digital Age™.”

The lesson?

Geniuses make things sound dumb.

Midwits make things sound smart.

Only one group is actually useful at dinner parties.

Simplicitude (noun) – The art of making something clear, beautiful, and uncomplicated.

Not to be confused with “simpleton,” which is what midwits will call you when they don’t understand your genius.

Used in a sentence:
“He explained blockchain using a pizza analogy, and now I finally understand what my nephew does. What simplicitude!”

The 1-Sentence Genius Test

Take something you're working on—an idea, a pitch, a project—and try to explain it in one sentence your 8-year-old niece would understand.

If you can't, it's not because you're too smart.
It's because you're midwitting it to death.