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?