How do I become smart? All I do are online courses for tech and such. I have an established career. Good money, house family and shit

Congrats, you are smart.

The challenge you have now is to acknowledge and feel it.

but I want the prestige of at least having a degree

So here's the problem. you want the prestige, not the intelligence. You can get a degree in various ways if you want, and have the time. You can attend a university course part time, or through their online facilities. Choose a topic you've done a lot of online courses for and try for a degree.

But I’m functionally retarded with math.

There's resources online to help with this, maybe the new methods will help you understand math concepts better. Common core, khan academy, and the sponsor of this lemmy post, skillshare

You don't need to be smart. Back in my uni, there were student initiatives to record the questions and answers of previous exams. The Math department itself gave out previous years exams to study from.

The key to remember: exams aren't written my professors, they're written by the postdocs who have better things to do, and so they just rehash the same stuff from the year before.

If you want to get a useless piece of paper that tells you that you are an expert in topic X, then don't learn X, learn to pass the papers for the X exam, and learn X later in your free time if you're still interested in it.

Something, something judging a fish by it's ability to climb a tree

I think you're a smart person that's terrible at math. It's ok to be bad at math, I am too and I have a degree in computer science with a union job. Now that I've thrown away a bunch of money, I've learned that CS is awesome and I love it but I don't feel like I can qualify myself as being smart with it. With age I learned that I'm really smart with labor militancy and history, and if I could go back I'd get a degree in labor studies. I think you just need to find your topic.