The Importance of Being Utterly Stupid

Platogoat was sitting on a rock that may or may not have been a rock. It could have been a router. Everything looks like infrastructure when you stare at it long enough. The sky was humming, the mind deciding which way is up, or is it down.

Platogoat had just published something serious. Thoughtful. Measured. Carefully edited. Words about systems and ownership and cages you cannot feel anymore. Platogoat felt proud. Also tired. That is usually the signal.

Then a thought drifted by, slow and dumb and perfect.

What if I write something completely stupid.

Not accidentally stupid. Intentionally stupid. The kind of stupid that has no monetization strategy, no call to action, no algorithmic posture. The kind of stupid that exists because the brain needs to stretch in the other direction sometimes or it will calcify into a LinkedIn post forever.

This is the part nobody tells you when you get good at thinking.

If you are very intelligent, truly intelligent, not just credentialed, you spend an enormous amount of energy being correct. You track systems. You see second and third order effects. You notice when the abstraction leaks. You cannot turn it off. It follows you into the shower. It sits with you while you listen to music. It shows up at three in the morning and asks uncomfortable questions.

Eventually, if you do not let yourself be stupid on purpose, your brain rebels. It starts chewing on itself. You get brittle. Everything becomes serious. Every sentence has to justify its existence.

Platogoat refuses that fate.

This blog is not a brand. It is a pasture. Sometimes Platogoat chews complex thoughts about cloud time share and invisible cages. Sometimes Platogoat eats a tin can and stares at the sun because the sun feels weird today.

Both are necessary.

The big platforms do not like this. They want consistency. They want tone. They want you to pick a lane and stay in it forever like a well behaved packet. Serious thoughts only. Or jokes only. Or outrage only. Never all of it. Never messy. Never human.

Platogoat does not live there.

On a personal blog, Platogoat can write something sharp one day and something utterly ridiculous the next. A deep systems essay followed by a rant about why goats would make terrible product managers. No one dies. The internet does not collapse. Life continues.

This is not lack of discipline. It is surplus humanity.

Being stupid on purpose is not the absence of intelligence. It is intelligence taking its boots off and sitting down for a minute. It is the mind reminding itself that it is allowed to wander, to play, to be inefficient, to make noises that do not optimize anything.

Platogoat knows this because Platogoat has tried the other way.

Life is too short to only publish things that sound impressive. Life is too short to pretend every thought needs to be useful. Some thoughts exist to air out the room. Some exist to make you laugh at yourself. Some exist because you are enlightened enough to realize that none of this is as serious as we pretend, including the pretending.

So yes, this blog has serious essays about technology and power and abstraction.

It also has nonsense.

Because sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop being smart for a while, eat the grass, stare at the clouds, and remember that thinking is supposed to be fun.

Platogoat has spoken. Then immediately forgot what was said and laughed about it.

That is fine too.

--Where Thoughts
-Bryan