Hey guess what? If you’re reading this while lying around on a pile of dirty laundry, maybe eating leftover chicken wings off your belly, and you just woke up and you’re hungover and it’s 1 pm? You’re probably a f***ing genius, dude. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
I just yelled that at my mom when she came in and was all “It’s 2 in the afternoon! Why don’t you get out of bed and go find a job and move out of my house? You’re 40 years old for Pete’s sake! It smells like a distillery in here, and is that barbecue sauce on the sheets!????”
I yelled, “Shut up! I’m actually a genius and everything I do proves it! SCIENCE SAYS SO!”
And then she cried.*
No but really, those bad behaviours we’re told prove we’re never going to amount to anything and that set us back in life? There is actual evidence that they may be proof of higher IQ, general intelligence, and education level.
Read it and weep early rising neatfreaks. IN YO FACE:
Laziness: The Independent reported this week on new research, the gist of which, apparently, is that smarter people spend more time lying around and thinking about smart stuff while dumber people are out there doing things, because they’re dumb.
“New research seems to prove the theory that brainy people spend more time lazing around than their active counterparts.
Findings from a US-based study seem to support the idea that people with a high IQ get bored less easily, leading them to spend more time engaged in thought.
And active people may be more physical as they need to stimulate their minds with external activities, either to escape their thoughts or because they get bored quickly.”
Lazy = smart. Active = dumb. I’d do more research to see if there’s more evidence out there to back this up but who are we kidding? I’m too lazy.
Drinking: Moderate alcohol consumption is linked with the highest IQ, according to one study, while total abstinence is linked to lower IQ.
And according to another study, women with higher education drink more than women with less education, while still another study found that the better educated you are the more you drink, or so I choose to understand it. Mental Floss did a roundup of these studies and notes that, “The National Survey on Drug and Health use found that among college graduates, 68.4 percent reported drinking versus only 35.2 percent of those who did not graduate high school.”
Also, kids who demonstrate verbal ability at a younger age are more likely to try alcohol as teens than those who display less verbal ability. All this adds up to smarter people being drinkers and dumber people being teetotalers. Or something like that. I’m drunk.
Messiness: Research suggests that tidiness inspires good behaviour but that messiness also has its uses.
Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota reportedly found in her studies that “Being in a messy room [can lead] to something that firms, industries, and societies want more of: Creativity.” She and her fellows also found that being faced with untidiness is correlated with an interest in novelty “a signal that being in a disorderly environment stimulates a release from conventionality.”
You’re not just a slob, you’re a creative visionary.
Swearing: Research suggests that people who know a lot of swear words have better vocabularies than those who never use them. #fuckyeahscience
Staying up late: We’re always told that successful people are early risers but when compared with morning types, or “larks,” evening types, or “owls” have been found to show “more of the kind of intelligence that has been linked to prestigious jobs and higher incomes.” Owls also scored higher than larks on inductive reasoning, which the Independent says has been shown to be a good estimate of general intelligence and one of the strongest predictors of academic performance.
“A further piece of good news for the owls is that inductive reasoning is linked to innovative thinking and more prestigious occupations, and tends to earn higher incomes.”
Clearly all those people getting up at 6 to go jogging and meditate before starting work at 8 are the real dummies. But we knew that, right? All that stuff about the early bird is BS. Mornings suck and worms are gross.
I’m going back to bed. After I finish this bottle of scotch.*
*None of that actually happened
*Not really.