I wonder what it's like to be stupid

I wonder what the difference between curiosity and intelligence is. Whenever I see something, my mind instinctually tries to visualize everything that is going on. Whenever I’m in the elevator, I see this little motor at the top rotating the counter weight down in order to lift us up. When I am putting clothes in the dryer, I visualize the air path in the machine. It’s been instrumental to my career as a software engineer.

When talking to most people, I feel like they aren’t instinctually creating this model. They don’t see religion for what it is, they don’t have the same models around social interaction. They seem fundamentally unaware of what is actually happening. I feel like they are blind. I never understood how to talk to women. Some few women actually understand me (Laura and Vaibhavi) come to mind here. Like they actually understood the mental models that I was creating. But with most women, I feel like we talk past each other when we talk. Just too many hormonal differences.

I feel like throughout college, attention was the bottleneck. I have always struggled with a terrible attention span. Most things I start finding boring really quickly. Actually that’s not true. When studying anything that is actually complicated, I get a series of mini emotional breakdowns because the first thing that I try doesn’t work. My mind immediately goes “Is this every going to work? Should I abort and do something more productive?” The problem is that I feel like this is more fundamental than set a timer, and take breaks often. Like when working on the research paper that I was having trouble understanding, it took me a really long time to motivate myself to work on it. And the worst part was that I