It’s a thought that creeps in, usually late at night when you’re scrolling through nothing. Were people smarter in the past? You read some old book, maybe a dusty Russian novel, and the sentences are these huge, winding things with ten clauses, and you think, man, my brain would just melt. You feel like a toddler trying to read a legal document. Or you see pictures of the Parthenon or the aqueducts and you’re just… how? How did they figure all that out with no computers, no pocket calculators, nothing but their own minds?
Then you get the people who try to measure it. They talk about the Flynn effect, this trend where IQ scores actually went up for most of the 20th century. So for a while, we were supposedly getting smarter. But now, some studies are saying it’s going backward. The great decline. So are we literally getting dumber by the day? I don’t know, the whole idea of boiling intelligence down to a single number seems kind of dumb in itself, if you ask me. It’s all pattern recognition. Great if you’re a computer. Are we just computers made of meat? It misses the entire point.
My grandfather never finished high school. He could build a functioning shed from scrap wood, fix a sputtering car engine just by its sound, and he knew every bird call in the county. It was an instinctual genius. I have a master’s degree and I once spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to open a can of beans without a can opener. So who’s the smart one? It feels like we’ve traded that kind of real-world, tangible skill for… what, exactly? The ability to write a perfectly passive-aggressive email? To navigate a dozen social media apps? That kind of practical knowledge is just…gone. Replaced by a digital fluency that’ll probably be obsolete in five years when some AI does it all for us anyway. Then what?
Honestly, I think our brains are just full. Full of absolute garbage. We can’t focus. I’ll pick up a book and my hand will physically twitch towards my phone before I even finish a paragraph. It’s a reflex. People a hundred years ago didn’t have that constant, nagging pull. They could sit and think. Just think. For hours. Can you imagine? The boredom must have been titanic, but maybe that’s where the good stuff happens. In the quiet. We’ve completely lost the quiet. We don’t wrestle with ideas anymore, we just swipe past them.
But then…we have everything at our fingertips. I can pull up a lecture from a Caltech professor while I’m making toast. I can learn basic Swahili on an app while sitting on the toilet. I can have a real-time argument with a stranger in New Zealand about 17th-century naval history. Is that not its own kind of intelligence? A networked intelligence. Our brains aren’t just in our skulls anymore; they’re connected to this global, digital machine. We’ve outsourced our memory to the cloud. Which is super efficient, until the Wi-Fi goes down. Then we’re just apes in clothes again, staring blankly at a box we can’t open.
Final conclusion
So, were people smarter in the past? It’s a total mess of a question. It’s like asking if a screwdriver is smarter than a hammer. They’re built for different jobs. Our world demands a different kind of brain than the past did. A faster, more flexible one, maybe. But smarter? I really, really doubt it. Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself to feel better about the fact that my attention span is shot.
