DUMBING IT DOWN

Prologue

The Call from Mensa

Warringah Road was doing what Warringah Road usually does, which is to pretend it is a road while behaving more like a long, badly organised argument. Cars were edging forward, stopping, changing lanes for no obvious advantage, and then stopping again as though the whole of Sydney had agreed to practise indecision at the same time. I was behind the wheel, heading towards an appointment in the city of Sydney, with my friend and client Crutch beside me, and we were on a mission that was theirs more than mine. That distinction mattered in theory, although in practice I had already learned that other people’s missions had a habit of becoming partly mine once they brought me into the car. I was not sitting there thinking about destiny, intelligence, Mensa, or the shape of a book I might one day write, because I was watching the traffic, listening to Crutch, and trying to keep enough of my mind available for the road.

We were passing a property he was thinking of buying, or at least thinking about thinking of buying, which is often the first and most dangerous stage of property investment. There was already a house on the block, although nothing that would have made an architect fall to his knees in admiration. It was serviceable enough in the way houses can be when they are really only keeping the land warm for whatever comes next. In the fullness of time it would be knocked down, and something much grander would rise in its place, but at that moment it was still pretending to be the main event. My job, as usual, was to admire the possibility without forgetting the existing structure, the demolition cost, the council issues, the finance, the tax, the timing, the borrowings, the risk, and the small matter of whether the numbers had any intention of behaving themselves.

Crutch could see the future of it more easily than the inconvenience of it, which is not a criticism so much as a description of most property conversations before the first invoice arrives. He had enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is a dangerous but necessary fuel, because without it nobody would buy anything, build anything, or occasionally do anything more ambitious than lie quietly until the rates notice arrived. I was listening to his version of the opportunity while the other part of my mind was already pulling at the stitching. What would the purchase price allow? What would the holding costs do? What would the grand future become if the finance, timing, building costs, tax consequences and ordinary human optimism all turned up in the same room and started arguing with one another?

That was how my mind tended to work, even when I would have preferred it to sit still for a minute and behave like a normal passenger. It did not simply hear the conversation as presented. It went looking underneath it, behind it, beside it, and sometimes annoyingly past it, to the bit where the consequences were waiting. People would talk to me about a property, a business, a tax issue, a partnership, a family arrangement, or some decision they had almost already made, and I would find myself several steps down the track before they had finished laying out the first one. That sounds useful, and it often was, but usefulness is not the same thing as comfort, either for the person being helped or for the person doing the helping.

The phone rang while we were still making our way through that crawling Sydney traffic, and I answered it with the ordinary divided attention of someone who had spent years being available. Part of me was still watching Warringah Road, because even a reflective memoir does not excuse running into the back of a delivery van. Part of me was with Crutch and the property, where the existing house sat there in my mind as both shelter and obstacle. Another part was already thinking about the city appointment, the time, the next obligation, and whatever else would need to be dealt with before the day finished. The voice on the phone said they were from Mensa, and the sentence landed in the car with less ceremony than it probably deserved.

I cannot now remember the exact subject of the discussion group they mentioned, which is almost embarrassing given how much meaning I have since attached to the call. It may have been something interesting, or it may have been something that would have irritated me after ten minutes, because intelligence does not always arrive with proportion, warmth, or the ability to sit through a meeting without silently rewriting the agenda. The person on the other end was pleasant enough, and the message was simple enough: my results meant I was eligible, and I was being invited to come along. I responded politely, absorbed the information, and let it slide behind the more immediate business of the day. There was no dramatic rejection, no grand refusal, and no moment of standing at a fork in the road, unless a fork in the road can be disguised as a slow lane on Warringah Road with a friend talking property beside you.

Crutch heard the call differently from the way I did, and that is probably why the moment stayed with me long after the details of the discussion group disappeared. To him, it was a doorway. To me, in that moment, it was an interruption. He became agitated by my indifference and reminded me, almost incredulously, that it was Mensa, as though the word itself should have been enough to make me pull over and reconsider the order of my life. I probably made some dry remark, because when something comes too close to a tender place, humour is often quicker than honesty and much easier to park.

I did not let it pass because I thought I was above it, and I do not want the story to sound as though I was too grand to be bothered. If anything, the problem was closer to the opposite. I had become so trained in usefulness that the idea of giving my mind a room for curiosity, discussion or exploration seemed faintly indulgent. There was no immediate client need being met by going to a Mensa discussion group, no invoice attached to intellectual interest, and no urgent practical result that could be turned into food, fees, or fuel. Personal glory might warm the ego for a while, but in the short term you cannot eat it, and I had spent enough of my adult life making sure the edible things came first.

That sounds more brutal than it may have felt in the moment, because I doubt I had the language for it while I was still holding the phone and watching the traffic. At the time it was probably just another piece of information placed behind the next responsibility. Crutch had a property to think through. I had an appointment to get to, work to do, and a living to earn. That is how much of my life operated, not by one grand surrender but by a thousand small deferrals in which the interesting, private, unnecessary part of myself was told to wait while the useful part took the call.

Looking back, I can see that the dumbing down often began before I opened my mouth. It began in the pause, in the quick calculation of what the room could bear, and in the quiet editing of a thought that was clearer before I softened it. It began when I knew the warning but reduced it to a hint, or when I saw the likely consequence but offered only the polite version because the full one would have made the other person defensive. It was not always noble, and it was not always effective, because there were times when my impatience leaked through the softened edges anyway. Still, the habit formed because experience had taught me that the full speed of the thought could do damage to me even when I was trying to prevent damage for someone else.

The brick wall image has followed me for most of my life because it captures the absurdity of the thing better than any polished explanation. I was not usually trying to prove the wall existed so I could enjoy being right when others hit it. More often I was trying, sometimes clumsily and sometimes too bluntly, to say that the wall was there and that perhaps we might all benefit from turning the wheel before the impact. People do not always thank you for seeing the wall before they do, especially if they are enjoying the speed, the view, and the lovely belief that everything is under control. After a while, the choice is not whether the wall exists but whether mentioning it will make you the adviser, the nuisance, the pessimist, or just Jeff again.

Once people give you a role, they rarely let you escape it, and that is part of the problem this book has to sit with honestly. The person who sees the problem too early can become the negative one, even when the problem later proves to be real. The person who asks one more question can become the difficult one, even when the missing answer is the one that matters. The person who speaks before the room has caught up can become the joke, and the joke has a nasty habit of outliving the evidence. I do not say that with clean innocence, because I know there were times when my delivery gave the room plenty of help in resisting me.

That is why this cannot be a book about being clever and misunderstood, at least not in the simple and comforting way that phrase can sound. An IQ approaching 130 is a fact, but it is not a personality, a moral credential, or an exemption from being wrong, annoying, impatient, unfair, or poorly timed. Intelligence can help you see patterns, but it does not automatically teach you how to wait while others find the first piece of the pattern for themselves. It can carry insight, but it can also carry arrogance if you do not watch it carefully. In my case it often arrived as complication, speed, irritation, humour, usefulness, private rage, and a constant need to decide how much of my mind could safely be let into the room.

Primary school gave me the first version of the bargain, because rote learning rewarded memory, repetition and order. There was comfort in that for a child whose mind liked rules it could understand. Remember the answer, produce the answer, move forward, and the system appeared to approve of you. It did not mean I belonged in any deep or uncomplicated way, but it did give me a clean path through the work. At that stage, intelligence could still look like obedience, and obedience was far easier for a room to tolerate than independent thought arriving early and without invitation.

High school unsettled that order almost immediately because I lost the first term to the mumps and arrived in a world already moving without me. The classroom had its own rhythm by then, the boys had their own order, and the noise had become part of the weather. Richard Jones would say, “Keep it down to a dull roar,” and while it may have been only a teacher’s practical way of surviving a room full of boys, the phrase lodged somewhere deeper. I heard it then as classroom management, but I recognise it now as something closer to an instruction for life. The room would often be allowed to roar, while I would be expected to manage the noise inside myself quietly enough not to become the problem.

Sport became an approved doorway into belonging because physical performance is easier for others to understand than mental speed. If you can bat, bowl, run, tackle or compete, people know where to put you, and there is a relief in being placed somewhere useful. Sporting ability gave me a kind of passport that academic ability alone would not have provided, because runs, wickets, tackles and effort could be admired without requiring anyone to ask what was happening inside my head. That did not make sport false or merely strategic, because the achievement was genuine and the pleasure of it was real. It did mean that one version of me was easier for the room to accept than another.

Academic ability carried a different social charge. It could be useful when someone else needed it, but it could also be sneered at, dismissed, or treated as faintly embarrassing if it stood too clearly on its own. The economics essays at high school remain one of the sharper examples, not because they wounded me dramatically at the time, but because they revealed the pattern with almost comic neatness. Four of the gun footballers came to me with questions they had been given for the trial Higher School Certificate economics paper, even though I was not studying the subject. I was asked to draft essays for them, because the product of my mind was wanted when it served their need, and the absurdity of that arrangement seemed to trouble nobody until the consequences arrived.

That pattern became familiar enough to feel normal, which may be the saddest part of it. The answer was wanted. The work was wanted. The fix, the warning, the explanation and the rescue were wanted. The full person behind those things was more complicated, because a mind that arrives too quickly can be useful in private and inconvenient in public. I learned that distinction early, although I did not yet have the words to describe it without sounding either boastful or wounded.

Accounting became the adult version of the same pattern, and perhaps that is why I lasted in it for so long. I did not so much choose accounting as fall into it, but once I was there I found a profession that looked orderly from the outside and was full of human mess underneath. People think accounting is about numbers, which is understandable because numbers are the part that can be printed, lodged, reconciled and argued over. The numbers, though, are often only where the evidence lands after people have made decisions, avoided decisions, justified decisions, forgotten decisions, or denied that any decision was theirs in the first place. My real work was often not the arithmetic but the interpretation of the behaviour that had eventually turned itself into arithmetic.

That gave my mind somewhere to work, but not always somewhere to breathe. I became the translator, the explainer, the fixer, and the person who could look at a tax problem, a business structure, a bank issue, a family arrangement or a compliance mess and see more than the immediate question being asked. I could often sense where the pressure point would be before the client had recognised there was pressure. That ability had value, and I will not pretend otherwise, because it built a career and helped a lot of people. It also demanded constant translation, because seeing the structure behind the mess was only half the job; the other half was making the explanation small enough, calm enough and practical enough for the room to use.

At twenty-five, I became a partner in an accounting firm, which sounds clean and impressive when written in a sentence but was far less tidy to live through. Clients did not necessarily want a twenty-five-year-old adviser, no matter how capable he might have been or how much work had gone into getting there. Age gave people a simple way to doubt what they did not yet understand, and youth gave them an even simpler one. So I learned to hide my age, or at least to hide the significance of it, because I needed the answer to be heard before the date on my birth certificate was used as an objection. That was another form of dumbing it down, not by pretending to know less but by making the person behind the advice less visible.

There is a particular frustration in being underestimated by people who then depend on you, and it is not easy to explain without sounding bitter. It can make you proud and angry at the same time, which is an awkward combination even before you put it in an accounting office. I could see matters unfolding, advise on them, rescue them, tidy them, explain them, and still be treated at times as though my view required a discount because it had arrived too young, too fast, or too bluntly. That frustration did not usually throw chairs or produce dramatic speeches, which is probably fortunate for both furniture and professional indemnity insurance. It became long hours, dry humour, sarcasm, silence, softened warnings, sharper warnings than I intended, and the repeated effort of keeping everything moving while not always feeling understood by the people relying on me.

Depression fits into that story not as a separate clinical chapter but as part of the cost of functioning. It often hid behind competence, work, responsibility and the appearance of coping, which are useful hiding places because nobody looks too closely at the person who keeps turning up and getting things done. The dull roar inside could be present even while the outside version of me was solving problems, answering questions, making jokes, and moving files from one pile to another. I do not want to dress that up as noble suffering, because it was messier and less attractive than that. It was the sound of a mind that would not stop, colliding with rooms that often required it to slow down, soften down, quieten down, and then somehow still deliver the result.

Even retirement has not removed the pattern, which is one of the stranger jokes life has played on me. Retirement is often sold as freedom, as though the moment you step away from full-time work the internal machinery politely shuts itself down and takes up gardening. In reality, clients may still follow blindly without fully understanding the nature of the blind following, and the professional identity may loosen without disappearing. People can trust you deeply and still not understand what they are trusting. They can ask for the answer, accept the outcome, and miss the weight of judgement, experience, pattern recognition and restraint that sat behind the words they heard.

That is why the Mensa call unsettles me more now than it did on Warringah Road. At the time, it was simply another thing arriving into a day already crowded with obligations. There was a friend beside me, a property to think through, a city appointment ahead, and a practical world demanding attention. The call suggested there might be a room where the mind itself, not merely its usefulness, could be invited in. I did not reject that room after careful reflection; I barely gave myself enough room to wonder what it might have meant.

I am not romanticising Mensa into the great lost opportunity of my life, because that would be too neat and probably too generous to the fantasy. It may have been interesting, and it may have been irritating. It may have given me a room where my mind could stretch, or it may have given me a different room with different walls and a better class of argument. The loss was not necessarily that I declined the invitation, because nobody can know what would have followed from accepting it. The loss was that curiosity had become so easy to postpone, and responsibility had become so practised at stepping in front of it.

Usefulness can become a beautifully polished cage, particularly when it earns respect, income, gratitude and a place in the room. You can tell yourself you are helping, and you may be right. You can tell yourself people are relying on you, and that may also be true. You can build a life out of being needed, and from the outside it may look responsible, productive and even successful. The difficulty is that the part of you not immediately required can be deferred for so long that it begins to feel unreasonable for it to ask for space at all.

This is not a book about wasted intelligence, because that would be too simple and too self-pitying. I used my mind constantly, often under pressure, often in service of others, and often in ways that were practical, necessary and valuable. The question that sits underneath this book is not whether the mind was used, but what shape it had to take in order to remain acceptable. What happens when the room keeps winning just enough to make the mind smaller? What happens when the safest way to avoid being laughed at, resented, dismissed or misunderstood is to become a more tolerable version of yourself?

For most of my life, I have not been trying to prove that I was clever. I have been trying to avoid the consequences of being seen as too clever in the wrong setting, which is a different and lonelier thing. That distinction matters because it keeps the story away from the comfortable lie that I was always right and everyone else was always slow. I was not always right, and even when I was, I was not always effective, patient, kind, fair or easy to hear. The conflict was never only between my mind and other people; it was also between the speed of the thought and the flawed human being trying to carry it without doing too much damage.

So this book begins not with a certificate, a boast, or a claim that I belonged somewhere grander than the life I actually lived. It begins in a vehicle on Warringah Road, with Crutch beside me, a modest house on a valuable block sliding past the window, a city appointment ahead, and a phone call from Mensa arriving as though it had chosen the most inconvenient possible moment to ask a deeper question. It begins with my friend hearing opportunity while I heard interruption, and with the uncomfortable recognition that I had become far more practised at serving other people’s futures than pausing over my own. The real loss may not have been Mensa at all, but the fact that I had barely enough space in my life to wonder what the invitation meant. This is my story of my conflict, and for once I am going to try to tell it without making it smaller first.