While recovering from a Burn-Out, I learned to ask "Why?" to everything that I do, questioning the motivation of my actions. I do all the things you mention (except for the backwards thing). But for totally different reasons. I sometimes prefer to be an idiot, someone without opinion, than to throw myself into the never-ending stream of uneducated opinions, thrown out in a hurry with fractional knowledge at best, before the next hashtag is trending. I'm a fan of the original translation of Idiot - a private person, that is not a public figure. In a world of super-smart people, trying to reach their full productive potential to keep feeding the system - yes, I prefer to be an idiot.
Why do you want to be more intelligent?
I don't recall saying I, "wanted to be more intelligent", only that this was the topic of conversation on this occasion and based on some things heard during that day.
Okay, in that case I failed in my interpretation somewhere :-D