Fight Off Stupid Questions with Stupid Questions of Your Own

When you’re an introvert in this extroverted world of ours, you face your share of stupid questions about how you run your life and why.

In high school and especially college, people always used to ask me a question that I just couldn’t understand.

Not “couldn’t understand” as in “what are you asking?” but, rather, “couldn’t understand” as in “why are you asking?”

The question:

How come you don’t drink?

It’s true: I didn’t drink back then, and I rarely do even now.

But “how come?”?

There was no “how come?”

I just didn’t have any interest in drinking. It was as simple as that.

I wasn’t (and I’m still not) against drinking. I didn’t (and still don’t) have some moral or ethical or religious stance against it.

I just didn’t (and still don’t) think about it.

It wasn’t (and still isn’t) on my daily radar screen.

If anything, I didn’t drink back in my younger days because it appeared that the only reason for doing so was to get drunk and lose control.

And I didn’t—and still don’t!—like feeling out of control.

I’ll take in control any day.

So I just never really knew what to do with stupid questions like this one.

Until one day, a genius response (if I do say so myself) somehow flew out of my mouth.

My reply:

How come you don’t smoke?

The Shoe’s on the Other Foot

Once I’d said this, the person who had posed the question to me would be knocked off balance a bit.

They would then say something like this through the perplexed look on their face:

Wait, what?! Well, uh, I just don’t.

Or, if they were really sharp—which was rare, since they often had themselves been drinking already—they would immediately back off, because they realized what I was saying between the lines:

That’s a dumb fucking question.

Ask Your Own Stupid Questions

I still think about these, um, fruitful conversations today, along with the stop-it-in-its-tracks technique I developed to handle them.

Because it’s a strategy that works perfectly when you’re an introvert and you face your own version of stupid questions—“how come you this?” or “why don’t you that?”—from people in your life.

For example:

How come you don’t you go out more?

Again, there’s probably no real answer to this question from where you sit.

You just like what you like, which is to say that most of the time you’d rather, say, stay home and read a book than go out.

But for whatever reason, that response often just isn’t good enough for others in your life, particularly if they are extroverts.

So … how about this head-spinning response instead?

How come you don’t stay in more?

Here’s another question you may have gotten once or twice (or a hundred times) in your life:

Why don’t you talk more?

“Why don’t you shut your —?”

NO!

No.

Yes, that response is tempting. Just try it a little nicer:

Why don’t you talk less?

OK, that’s not very nice either.

How about:

Why don’t you like quiet?

Quieting the Questioners

Don’t expect any answers to your own stupid questions.

There aren’t any.

But they will at least serve as a silencing comeback to the stupid questions posed by others in your life far too often.