One of the universal experiences of being an intern is realizing how many straightforward jobs people with far more experience are not only too busy to do but apparently incapable of actually doing—tasks such as arranging the return of precious designer samples or exporting a document as a PDF—and which manage to be simultaneously stultifying and fraught with anxiety. Yet, of course, there also comes a time when the once-harried intern has climbed far enough up the greasy pole that they develop their own performed ignorance of how things work: After all, it becomes easier to avoid doing tedious tasks by professing not to know how, rather than admitting you don’t want to.¹

The mindset has come to be known as weaponized incompetence—a term that gained popularity in 2021 in the midst of the pandemic, when women, on average, spent an extra working day per week doing domestic care, totally unpaid, while men’s contributions to housework and childcare remained largely unchanged. It has since been feverishly applied to 18.5 million TikTok posts and become an increasingly familiar source of bickering for those in cohabiting or parenting couples. Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch, and its subsequent film adaptation, had many women sighing in recognition of the heroine’s husband’s supposed incapability to complete basic tasks around the home. 

Social media and pop cultural conversations around weaponized incompetence center on the household, where domestic work is no longer expected to be divided along gender lines, but the term has its origins in the workplace. Coined as “skilled incompetence” by the Harvard Business Review in 1986 before being rebranded as “strategic incompetence” by The Wall Street Journal in 2007, the concept has stayed largely the same: being purposefully bad at something to avoid having to do it. Case in point, the subject of The Wall Street Journal’s landmark feature, who dodged organizing the company picnic for years. 

Once you learn how to spot weaponized incompetence, you’ll see it everywhere: On those customer service calls that ping you around to different departments in an Escher-like loop because nobody really wants to solve your problem. That one friend who never organizes the restaurant reservations, “because you know all the good places.” The relative who is somehow perfectly able to transfer money for the shared gift, but is incapable of thinking about or buying it (“But you always know what they want!”). Turn that lens on yourself, and you might even find some instances where you’re weaponizing your own incompetency.