Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?
It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)
Then the real question emerges: How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence? What percentage?
Relationships? Seems like no. Work? Also seems like no, lots of work doesn't make use of a high IQ that people enjoy nonetheless. Accomplishment? Strikes me as most likely of the three, but it's also very relative.
And another thought,
Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions. Like: someone who can jump high is fitter > fitter people are healthier > healthier people have more mental time to be empathetic with > people who can jump high are more empathetic.
For intelligence, we say smart people are happier. Same thing, happiness is not directly correlated. Instead: Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier.
(These are illustrations of the idea, not actual logical chains or claims.)
As I heard someone say, happiness is your reality minus your expectations.
Smart people see more variables that could be changed, more components that could be modified, and are less likely to accept things as they are. This creates a false sense of ease by which reality could be modified, and thus higher expectations for the world around them.
I suspect this misplaces happiness and contentment, but the two are also very strongly correlated for many people.
I think smart people are told much more often as kids how bright of a future they have. So they build up expectations of "succeeding" in some sense (becoming a doctor, getting rich, etc.). These are the sort of expectations you mention in your quote. Not only is there often pressure put on you if you're smart, you adopt those expectations yourself. Or at least hold yourself to that standard. Of course, being smart doesn't automatically equal success, there are so many other factors. So people often fall short of expectations and feel shitty about themselves and are unhappy. Then there's also the fact that high achievers often hold themselves to unrealistic standards even if they "succeed", so they also struggle to be happy.
Yes, and also, being able to perceive the world in high resolution when everyone else is blind has its own challenges.
Less intelligent people may be asking you to step in front of a bus because they don't see the bus and you cannot convince them that the bus exists because they're looking in the same direction as you and they don't see anything there. They don't trust your judgement, especially when others who also have equally poor vision agree with them and side against you.
The majority of people have poor vision and so they see the same vague blurry shapes as each other. Because of this, they will often agree with one another and side against intelligent people; who are a minority.
Moreover, it's easier to form consensus over blurry/vague concepts. This is the principle behind fortune-telling. Intelligent people will tend to disagree about details. Because they can see much more detail, there are more contentious points to argue about. It's harder for intelligent people to form consensus.
Being intelligent is a source of unhappiness because it is isolating to not be able to discuss what you see with others. It's like living alone in a parallel universe. You can see lower dimensions but you can't communicate to anyone else about the extra dimensions that exist in your reality because they are incapable of comprehending them. Plato's Allegory of the Cave comes to mind.
It had some interesting ideas, and one of the things that stuck with me is the idea of your brain being a "difference engine" in that the variation is what matters. If we don't experience pain, we can't experience pleasure.
It seems a bit simplistic when stated that way, but I think there is something to it.
Another thing I have come to believe as I have aged is that our western (American especially) society places too much emphasis on happiness, in that we think happiness is (and should be) the prime goal of every human. I have come to believe that less and less, and think something like satisfaction, contentment, and purpose are much more important as life goals than happiness. Happiness is an important part of life, and is important for reaching the other goals I mentioned, but it is not the end goal (to me). I think most of us somewhat intuitively understand this, although our response is often to redefine what happiness is rather than concluding happiness isn't our end goal.
If happiness was everything, we would be much more accepting and encouraging towards hedonism than we are. A heroin addict who has a good clean supply and no responsibilities would be the ultimate dream life if we truly believed pure happiness was the most important thing.
"Smart" tends to be used such that includes intelligence (rate of learning) and knowledge (how much is known).
Satisfaction comes from accepting what is outside our control (accurate expectations), and making continuous progress/improvement on what is within our control (our own perceptions and actions).
Intelligence and knowledge maybe don't correlate as much with wisdom as one would expect. I have met people who learn slow and don't know much but are very wise, and satisfied.
Lastly, happiness is always fleeting. Happiness can't be enduring, but it can be blocked by ego and high expectations. Satisfaction can be enduring, but correlates with virtuous actions, not intelligence.
> As I heard someone say, happiness is your reality minus your expectations.
I don’t think that’s true, e.g. from my personal experience, I’m far more optimistic than my wife, but even though she has far lower expectations she still takes negative things with far more disappointment than I do when we face the same hardship. So generally I’m a much happier person despite having higher expectations.
This is independent of intellect too for us, she would readily admit I’m more intelligent.
I don’t know whether it’s a innate thing or something learned but the key seems to be that I am always primed to look on the bright side, like my brain automatically weights positives much stronger than negatives, whereas hers does the opposite.
For both of us this seems to be self-reinforcing too because we always have confirmation bias because I’ve focused on the positives and can say “see it wasn’t that bad” and she will be like “see, I thought it would be bad” for the same thing.
Polymaths in particular could be good or great at many things. It’s a matter of choice and opportunity. But they can’t be great at absolutely everything. So one choice closes another. And the grass is greener on the other side.
There’s a great book by Arthur Brooks called From Strength to Strength which has a slightly different take on “reality minus expectations”: think of it as a fraction, where what you have is the numerator and what you want is the denominator. If you keep ratcheting up what you want (which is what the hedonic treadmill is all about —- you reach a goal and enjoy it for a nanosecond and then suddenly you need an even bigger achievement to satisfy you), you push happiness further away. And conversely, if you learn to want things that are actually in reach, you become happier as you achieve them.
I'd heard "happiness is reality minus expectations" before but never thought much of it. I had high expectations of myself in certain areas of life and worked hard towards them and I thought that they were realistic, so despite not having achieved them I still had hope.
And now over time reality has caught up to me and I've become sadder because I've realized that my expectations were indeed higher than my circumstances. I was just a naive oblivious idiot and life has now shown me that. It's sad but I now have just let go. I still am working towards stuff just playing to my strengths and inclinations instead of my wants.
That's a good quote, but it suggests that unhappy people are those who overthink and have unrealistic expectations, whereas truly happy people have expectations that match their reality. so in the end, maybe smart people are those who are better at setting their expectations compared to others (maybe more ambitious type A folk)
"Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two"
- I disagree. If we consider happiness, as we should, as something that can be achieved and not simply granted (for example, the ability to walk is granted, it is not something that humans, apart from pathologies and special cases, have to develop through conscious effort), there should be a positive correlation between intelligence and happiness.
To jump higher than you currently can, assuming there is no coach to develop a program, you need to understand what the limiting factors are and train to improve the functioning of the “mechanism,” for example, by losing weight, increasing maximum and explosive strength, using the correct jumping technique, etc.
I believe that often the most intelligent people tend to enjoy thinking more than doing, and thinking too much does not lead to being happier or jumping higher. The limiting factor, more often than not, is not thinking, assuming sufficient intelligence, but the execution part.
I remember reading on Twitter a few years ago about an academic researcher explaining how they had come to the conclusion that exercise would improve their quality of life. They cited a series of articles, reasoned in terms of life expectancy and biomarkers, and concluded that exercise would be a net positive factor in their lives. A lot of neurotic reasoning that needs to quibble over the obvious before taking action.
I agree with this. I quibble with the wording "enjoy" thinking. It's probably also true, but it's not always the enjoyment of it, but a general propensity to overthink or dig into the weeds more, with the resulting less actual doing.
And if you dig into the weeds enough, you can find alternatives and counterarguments which can lead to analysis paralysis.
I can tell you I do not enjoy thinking. I hate it. It is a compulsion that I cannot avoid. I know that it makes most interactions in my life more difficult. I know it's a source of unhappiness. I cannot stop thinking.
I want to do. Not think. I fail to do. I think about failure.
> Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions.
I think the reason to expect a correlation is simple: Intelligence should produce a better ability to recognize patterns and identify the most useful ones. In a chaotic world, the things that can lead to a desired outcome are not always clear. It takes time and reasoning to cut through the noise and figure out how to get things done. There is absolutely a reason to suspect that reasoning faster and abstractly would make this easier, and thus produce more overall rewards.
Anytime intelligence is not associated with something, I interpret that to mean the topic is likely not a "hard" min/max problem.
Turns out, most of the human aspect of life is not a hard min/max problem.
I'd take a different answer to this question: philosophy. In times before Abrahamic religion developing or adopting a life philosophy was seen as a practical obligation for a man. This is where you saw the rise of everything from the Pythagorean to the Stoics. It seems that the rise of Abrahamic religions is what largely brought an end to this and mandated a sort of one-size-fits-all philosophy for everybody.
Now in modern times many people have moved away from religion, yet most aren't replacing that philosophical void with anything comparable. And I think this naturally leads to things like hedonism which is completely unsatisfying over time, or even nihilism which is even less satisfying. One could even argue this issue is directly related to the collapse of fertility in developed nations.
I think that a personal life philosophy is absolutely critical for having a contended life. And I use contended instead of 'happy' as part of my own philosophy of life. I don't think happiness is or should be a goal. Happiness is a naturally liminal emotion. And seeking to extend it is only likely to leave one 'unhappy', so to speak. So instead I think we should pursue contentedness. Being satisfied or pleased with one's life does not mean one is necessarily happy, but it certainly means you're content with it.
The miniscule amount of written work that survives to the present really makes it difficult to do any more than speculate about the philosophies broadly held in the times before Abrahamic religion.
I think happiness is an inevitable byproduct of honestly following your innate sense of self. Intelligent people can be dishonest with themselves, not know themselves and be (more) capable of lying to themselves and coming up with justifications to do what they mentally want (rather than following their innate sense), thereby trapping themselves in endless dishonest but justified loops.
You could also say that the hedonic treadmill runs faster. Getting a result that takes a smart person a day instead of lets say a week means repeating that 7 times (successfully) to feel like the week was well spent.
>Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic.
I laughed at this. However, I have to slightly disagree. I think there is a connection. I find the smarter people I know are actually happy, but they tend to be people who read books, who follow the news, and who care about the world at large and that is something that can easily make you sad. I'm not saying you need to be extra smart to do those things, I'm saying that smart people tend to do those things more than others.
> It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)
Thats absolutely wrong and this is the reason why nothing works and being happy became and endless quest in the western culture.
In the eastern spiritual tradition they found the exact ways of managing body, mind, emotions and energy to reach highest peaks of bliss and ecstasy, and I speak from my own experience, its possible to feel so good that no amount of money, relationships, fame, power, whatever other things you can imagine will make you ever feel.
Because the real thing is happening inside, all the outside things you use to try to provoke inner experience, but it only works for a little bit.
> Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?
This is the age old question. For me at least, the quest for meaning lead me to reason. Reason and logic, then led me to two choices. First is there is no meaning, no purpose, and life is what you make or not make of it; this is more commonly known as nihilism. The second choice is a literal leap of faith; this argues that humans are incapable of understanding of the purpose of life and we need to have faith in the existence of a benevolent God. The leap of faith ultimately leads me back to the question of what is God? Catholic tradition defines God as the source of caritas also known as agape.
It might be the case that the nuance is insufficient (false dichotomy).
Suppose someone asks the [emotionally loaded] question:
"Is abortion wrong?"
Technically this is a yes or no question; a binary.
One can quite easily answer that it depends, and then all the nuances can try to be enumerated in more detail. The fact is that the information presented was not actually nuanced enough to answer yes or no despite being worded as such.
You performed some similar gymnastics here. You assume it must be the case that it is one or the other when it may not be. Maybe meaning is local. Maybe it is real but subjective. Maybe it isn't a meaningful term (lol). Maybe it contains an intrinsic paradox!
A perhaps alternative question might be: "What is it that wishes to know the answer to that question?"
Figuring that out might be a necessary prerequisite.
Reason and logic lead you to only two choices, where one choice immediately begs you to abandon reason and logic and just believe what feels right? I think reason and logic can take you further than that. We can explore a spectrum of ideas without committing immediately.
I think you've hit on something important with work and accomplishment. I've heard software developers say over and over again they don't feel like they've actually accomplished anything when they complete some coding task. It's not just bug fixes, but tasks in general. Some of them take up hobbies like woodworking, where the results of your work are something tangible you can see and touch. But it's not just software development, a lot of jobs involve work that seemingly produces nothing despite the time and effort spent. It's not hard to see why so many people find their work miserable.
Yeah I mean literally cleaning my house, watching dirt suck up, and reorganizing can be much more satisfying than fixing some stubborn backend systems bug that takes years of knowledge to have the mental tools to fix - lol
> How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence?
Well, theoretically all of them, depending on how you define "intelligence" and, oh boy, if the last 3-ish years have taught me anything, it's definitely not that.
I think there is some value in being able to live in the moment, like say a cat: one moment you have a death scare, the next you're kind of hungry or sleepy. I feel that smart people see a lot more in the past, present and future, all the things themselves, and the things behind the things, and it's a whole lot harder to live in the moment and not ruminate and dwell on things.
Alternatively, maybe it's just that overthinking that is driving some aspect of what we call intelligence; the ability to plan and see things in complex layers.
Good amounts of happiness surely require some selective blindness.
Don't most people have their own base level of happiness? Some people are just always happier than others, regardless of circumstances. It's a personality trait.
It also varies during one's life. During my twenties, internal/intellectual stimulation was 90% of what I was seeking. After 35~ the need for family, social bonding, overshadowed that pretty much completely. I still need and like intellectual growth, but only after the other needs are taken care of. Being smart for its own sake kinda hurts now.
Technically, it's hormones. What makes brains produce them is the perceptions of external world, but the details are different for every culture and then different for every individual.
Now, proverbially, more knowledge brings more sadness^W stress, so perceptive people must have extra hurdles to overcome than blissfully ignorant ones.
Smarts can impact all thos heavily. Relationships get complicated after years of exclusion and jealousy, work might not be as satifying if you see all the problems and solutions and things that are accopmplishments might not feel like they are.
These are very common and well documented issues among gifted people.
There are explanations for the equal happiness stats other than the validity of IQ tests. People’s top goal might be something other than happiness. Happiness and other goals might trade off. Happiness reports may be relative to an expected baseline that’s higher for smart people.
Yep, and the logical chain itself can often be pretty clear where the discrepancy lies. In order for it to have a noticeable effect, you'd need to be looking at people smart enough to correctly identify circumstances that will make them happy in advance and then be able to influence things in average more than factors outside their control influence them. I don't think most "smart" people are more smart than life is random, without even getting into how common the requisite level of self-awareness is.
> It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)
That's the point. Smarter people tend to have more stable relationships, satisfying work, accomplishments. ( and many, many more ).
> How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence?
All of them. You get better jobs with intelligence. You achieve greater accomplishments via intelligence. And your relationships tend to be better because you are in a far better position intellectually, socially and financially.
> There's no direct link between the two
You are contradicting yourself here. There is a direct link to the criteria you listed - relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment.
> Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier.
No. The problem is that intelligent people eventually realize that all of it is fleeting and utlimately meaningless - relationships, work, accomplishments. (and many, many more).
Yeah, I suspect the reason the author didn't find a relationship between IQ and happiness / life satisfaction is probably because those studies were overcontrolling for intermediate variables. If money makes us happier and people with high IQ make more money, you will underestimate the relationship if you control for income.
I have an opportunity to try this, and I am absolutely horrified at the prospects. I've just got a bad feeling about it. Plus, I am on a medication that is quite dangerous to mix with it, so that further complicated matters.
I think its much simpler. Look around at your country, at the world. Who is most celebrated, who is biggest achiever, who gets most ladies/men (stupid metric but works fine on our animal side and we are still animals deep down). People celebrate that piece of sh*t musk for ffs because he is a good manager/sales guy, while ignoring deeply flawed amoral person behind.
Its very rarely a smart decent person (and most smart folks are decent), those end up as quiet grey mouse in some lab or university position, seldom recognized for their added value. Extroverts, aggressive (to certain point at least), self-centered narcissistic egomaniacs seem to take the cake since ancient times. Those (and worse) are true decision makers, those people shape the world and its to their liking, which usually far off from what smart folks prefer seeing.
Another reason - once you are way above the crowd, you realize how stupid people often behave, how easily is to manipulate those via emotions like hate, envy, fear or inferiority complex(magas are a prime example but such folks are everywhere). If they destroy just their lives with their stupidity who cares, but since everything is connected in societies and we have ie elections, it permeates everybody's lives and you have little defense. You know the situation - clearly a stupid decision that shoots off one's foot, yet crowds cheers and yell for it, willing to fight for it. And smart decent folks are dragged along whether they like or approve it or not. It can be on a small scale but also national/global level. Who wouldn't be frustrated, continuously, during their whole lives?
Also warfare, almost always a supremely stupid move that is a loss for mankind as a whole while very few benefit. Yet look around. We should be reaching to the stars, fixing our environment properly so we can actually look in our children's and grandchildren's faces without a deep shame, yet look where world is heading steadily.
To be happy these days, you have to have lowish IQ or be an utter ignorant, or both. I can find some smaller pieces of joy like kids, hikes or other sports in mountains and so on, but I have to keep ignoring big picture continuously, how powerful do harm all of us.
I think beyond a certain level surplus IQ begins to cause problems. While still useful, the amount of self-sabotage and thought spirals the brain can generate with the extra power can cause neuroses and unhappiness on a larger scale than those less intelligent are capable of. Combine it with higher societal expectations and it's no great mystery to me why smarter people seem unhappier.
Just my thoughts anyways. I'm a dev, not a psychologist.
Not true at all: 1) more intelligent people are happier (author of the blogpost cherrypicked 2 studies, one of which in fact showed that iq is positively correlated with hapiness. 2) IQ negatively correlates with neuroticism. 3) In fact IQ correlates positively with almost every positive facet of human experience - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2212794120
Being on the tail can make you feel very alone. Especially as a child you can end up having only sparse, if any, access to anyone that can meet you in conversation. If you happen to be adopted then you can be alone in your family too. In some cases they are not only unmet but ostracized, vilified, or attacked for being "weird", able to see things that make people uncomfortable, or ask questions that break people's ways of thinking and unintentionally leaving them adrift. Teachers and other adults that are responsible for fostering your success commonly cheer your failures, root against you, and sabotage your efforts. Because everything must be so good for you, you don't need support and can be safely ignored. Over time you become a target for control and manipulation by people that believe your agency is their disadvantage and will use violence, subterfuge, and social arrangement to subdue you.
There are many benefits but it can be a real liability.
One thing I really love about that is that since correlation goes both ways, a happy non neurotic person is more likely to solve puzzles, which seems stupidly obvious in hindsight.
In the Bay Area, I feel surrounded by such people. They solve imaginary problems to get a promotion. But they are competing with thousands of other, equally smart people, to also get promotions. So it's non-stop change for no reason, and wasting resources.
Sportsmen compete in imaginary competitions with equally physially gifted people just to win a prize. And yet, many are fulfilled by it. For some people, competing is what drives them.
This has been a somewhat popular line of thought in internet circles for a while and I'm inclined to agree. I also believe the threshold past which these problems begin to crop up may be considerably lower than commonly thought… One doesn't need to be a chart topper to fall into these cognitive patterns.
That said, it probably doesn't need to be this way and I would suggest that the root issue lies with the way that modern society is structured. It's not really optimizing for happiness on any level, which is greatly exacerbated when one has the mental acuity to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
>> which is greatly exacerbated when one has the mental acuity to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Do you think this comes with age, or are some people born with the ability regardless of age to see the bigger picture?
For myself, I just plodded along through high school and then things started to click more when I was in college, contemplating life in the real world. Many of my classmates in HS seemed to have the majority of their lives planned out already while I was just content to play sports, chase girls and learn about computers.
I agree. I know a guy who is just brilliantly smart but he can get caught up in ruminating or "thought spirals" as you say and is constantly imagining all the ways things can go wrong and is therefore afraid to take any risks or start anything new.
I feel like high intelligence is crippling itself, the more intelligent you are and the more issues to solve you find and the more conscious of your environment you become, awaking you to new sets of information and again, new sets of issues.
This overflow might contribute to less happiness as a result.
Same thing, not a psychologist, just some thoughts.
I don't think it's so much the IQ that causes self-sabotage. The thing that happens is that if you have a big brain, you tend to try to use it to solve every problem. Guy who has a hammer sees a nail everywhere. After all, IQ is seen as a kind of tool for everything, so why not?
So you get these smart people who think they can rationally work themselves out of emotional issues.
Well, if you lift with your back, you hurt your back.
> I think beyond a certain level surplus IQ begins to cause problems.
YES, with an emphasis on the idea of "surplus IQ". If you are similarly blessed with high EQ, great social skills, athletic talent, etc. - not much of a problem. Vs. if you're nothing special (or worse) in some of those other areas, while having a metaphorical Mjölnir in your IQ toolbox - Big Problems. "Solve it with IQ" becomes your go-to strategy in far too many situations, you tend let other skills type atrophy...and treating everything as a metaphorical nail really doesn't work well.
I don't disagree, but I have seen a few counter examples in my life.
Some of the smartest people that I have known are also the kindest. It is like they are so smart that are able to understand and empathize with other people thoughts and feelings. In any place I go, I look for the kindest people and frequently you also find they are also really smart and interesting.
Or, you could just ask "Why aren't people happy?". I don't see how IQ could make you happier. Smart people are not as smart as they think, they usually perform better because they're overspecialized.
Now, emotional intelligence, that would greatly influece your happiness. The hurdles you're talking about are emotional, not intellectual.
usually when people talk about emotional intelligence, they mean Big 5 Agreeableness plus Openness, which can be measured. If your hypothesis is correct there should be data on the potential correlation between those traits and self reported happiness
A properly disciplined person is capable of great things according to the measure of his intellectual power and his discipline. However, without discipline, that extra horsepower can be a force multiplier for error, and more intricate rationalizations can make it easy to lodge yourself in a web of false justifications.
This is one reason why the ancients and the medievals always emphasized the importance of the virtues. Intelligence is just potential. What we want is knowledge and ultimately wisdom. But there is no wisdom without virtue. Without virtue, a man is deficient and corrupt. His intellect is darkened. His mental operations dishonest. His hold on reality deformed. Virtue is freedom; a man of vice is not free, but lorded over by each vice that wounds him and holds him hostage. His intellect is not free to operate properly. Good actions are strangled and stifled, because his intentions are corrupt, because his impure will cripples and twists the operations of his intellect, because his vices dominate him and cause disintegration.
Idk about the modern meaning of virtue but doesn't "virtus" in roman mean something like "bravery" and "manliness". (Probably cognate to sanskrit "vIryam"
You are confusing medium intelligence with high intelligence I fear.
Truly intelligent people won't be getting into doom spirals and self-sabotage. They will - obviously - use their superior intelligence to avoid that situation (or mitigate it before it becomes an issue), but the merely middling folks get trapped by it and cannot work their way out of it because they're just not intelligent enough to realise it is happening and/or work out how to stop it.
My experience is that intelligence is not one-dimensional or a cure-all. It is possible for someone to be able to solve a difficult math problem much quicker than their peers, but still have a really hard time managing emotions or dealing with everyday life.
Anecdotally, expectations and identity (through narcissism) do a lot of the lifting. When we see ourselves as "smart" while still being emotionally immature, then falling short of certain signals and accomplishments we project on that is thought to be tantamount to being a failure.
What should be impressed upon us far earlier is that our actions dictate our identity. If they are in harmony with your real desires, as opposed to surrogate desires, you'll be happier.
As I said in another comment, I think the expectations and probably parts of the narcissism are definitely on the "nurture" side. Smarter people are noticed in school and told how bright their future is. They're not as often told how hard they need to work for that bright future. This sets up expectations of success without developing all the tools needed besides raw intelligence.
I think the answer to this question is that the most consistent way to make people happy is to have them partake in social group activities - going out drinking, playing/watching team sports etc, watching movies - there's something hardwired into people's consciousness that when in groups, people tend to forget their own troubles and kind of adopt a common jolly mood,
In contrast, almost all 'smart people' activities are solo activities or stuff with infrequent socialization - reading/writing, programming, playing/practicing instruments etc.
Many of these activities are quite challenning as opposed to the former ones, so more likely to bring negative emotions to the forefront.
'Smart' people also tend to have elevated expectations of themselves, and they expect to either do better in general, or succeed in some niche that most people don't really concern themselves with - that leads to perpetual feelings of inadequacy.
I'm not saying smart people are required to engage in these activities, I'm saying people should be more amenable to socializing and just chilling out together.
It's very difficult for most (not all) people to relate to others who are either significantly more or significantly less intelligent than them. So, for example (using IQ as a proxy), most people of average intelligence (~100IQ) would find it difficult to relate to those of ~65IQ, and equally difficult to find much in common with someone much more intelligent than them (140+IQ). Given power laws / bell-curve distribution, most people on the tails of intelligence distribution will spend most of their time surrounded by people they can't really relate to. This does not seem like a recipe for happiness.
Yes. A useful analogy is to imagine being an adult in a world populated only by children. Aside from the social alienation of it being hard to relate to others, there would be practical matters. The entertainment would all be tedious and predictable, all the rationalizations for bad behavior would be transparently self-interested. Enhanced capabilities for observation, prediction, and planning would make you a super-hero at problem-solving, but really, what does that get you except repetitive unfulfilling effort? Don't sweat the small stuff is good advice, but you couldn't actually ignore the futility. Don't focus on the negative is good advice, but in a world like that pessimism and realism are the same thing. Anyone would be miserable. The good-aligned person would likely withdraw or self-lobotomize. More cynical characters would harden their heart, seize power, and become king of all the blind babies and try to yoke them together and build a pyramid or something. (Yes, I've recently reread Understand by Ted Chiang, No a pyramid is not a plot point per se ;)
Thankfully the situation isn't actually this extreme, but I think what we're talking about is just a difference in degree and not a difference in kind. Seeing more clearly than others seems very uncomfortable at best, and frequently maladaptive and/or a recipe for derangement.
It is indeed not that extreme, but sometimes it feels pretty close. It is hard to find entertainment that isn't tedious and predictable. The public seems to eat up rationalizations for bad behavior which are obvious nonsense.
I'm happy at work because I'm surrounded by people smarter, more motivated, and more conscientious than I am. Outside of work, well, some days I dream that Anderson's Brain Wave would come true, the Earth would move out of some magical interstellar intelligence-suppressing field, and everyone's IQ would quintuple overnight.
yes and those children have money, power and jobs and you have to navigate that somehow without sparking their very irrational, very easily sparked ire.
I haven't found this to be true. For marriage, sure, pick someone close to you. But I've found that IQ is mostly irrelevant for friendship. Character and compatibility matter more than IQ.
I've noticed that many smart people have never learned how to enjoy spending time in mixed-IQ settings. I feel a bit sorry for smart people who were raised with smart parents and smart siblings and smart friends etc. I find their perspectives very limited.
>will spend most of their time surrounded by people they can't really relate to.
But society tends to bring together like-minded people e.g. in schooling, professional work, sports teams, art school, or whatever other community.
Also, I think social compatibility is less about matching IQs and more about matching senses of humor. If someone finds your jokes distasteful or downright bland, it's never going to work out. My friends are my friends because we laugh at the same things.
This doesn’t seem obviously true. There’s a bell curve of how knowledgeable people are with tech and somehow people I spend time with end up in the tail end. There’s a bell curve of how much they like board games and I end up spending a lot of time with people at the tail end as well. In general, the people you spend time with are not selected by a process which is even close to random.
- Happiness is fixed, perhaps. Short-term, it isn't (coke and hookers work!). Long-term, it is. People fall back to a baseline. So then, being smart doesn't help you.
- Dumb people might be misreporting their happiness. So smart people are making themselves happier, but all the studies are done on self-reported happiness, and the dumb people report that they are happier than they really are.
- There's a difference between intelligence and wisdom: if you're intelligent, you have good models. If you're wise, you make good decisions. You might think that you need to be intelligent to be wise, but you also need wisdom to navigate uncertainty, ie you need to exercise your decision making for when you don't have a good model. Dumb people have to do this a lot.
- It may just be that you can make yourself happier, but being intelligent doesn't give you differential access to the levers that you need. Eg to be happy maybe you need an active social life. Well, there's no particular reason having high IQ would help that. We generally have a tendency to think that IQ is a kind of magic substance that can do anything, but why would that be?
- Being smart could actively harm your happiness. I told my kid he needed to wait for his friends to grow up, they will stop only caring about football (luckily the prophesy came true and they are having a great time in their little nerd group). Another friend has the same problem with his kid, they just don't have the social ties available yet. BTW, I really do think there's something to this one, you need the social side to be happy. There's a few HN people who also give me that "finally found my tribe" vibe when they write. I met a guy on the train who saw me coding, and he had the same story.
What do you mean on baseline? Generally speaking, I’m definitely less happy post COVID, than before 2020. I met the first utterly broken, toxic person in my life, whom I allowed to hurt me. This is on top of all the bat shit crazy things happened with me that year, and not just because of COVID. I’m a different person since then. My baseline definitely moved, as I mean.
When he was stationed abroad with a load of meatheads, they would be happy spending their down time drinking beer and getting a tan. He would miss libraries of home. When people around him didn't care about the problems of the World, he saw the intractable nuance of the World's problems and felt a deep helplessness.
Some of this was clearly depression, but I have to admit, 30 years after he shared those stories with me, there have been times I've been jealous of people who did not think through the detail and nuance and see the risks and lack of mitigations in so many circumstances. I'm not exceptionally smart, but I do seem to be a step or two ahead of ~30% of my colleagues and friends, and that seems to be enough to make life feel quite sad, quite a lot of the time.
A further level of intelligence may recognize the futility in worrying, accept the situation and your inability to impact it, and purposefully take the approach of a meathead.
A man’s search for meaning is an incredible book you may enjoy based on your comment. My strongest takeaway was that in situations where I cannot make an impact or control something, I still control how I react.
First, being intelligent (as defined in the article) doesn't relate to being happy. There is nothing inherent about being intelligent that means happy.
Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them. For example, the focus on "more" rather than "enough". We are shaped to always desire more and never be content with what we have. Even intelligent people are shaped by this. Consider the fall in terms of people who have hobbies.
> Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them.
The usual trope here is that smarter people recognize this and see through the cage, leading to less overall happiness vs. "ignorance is bliss" where you don't recognize you are in a cage at all.
It's just that though, a trope. I'd argue happiness is more determined by emotional intelligence than anything, which an IQ test isn't going to measure.
Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them.
More than that, society spends an increasing amount of time and money trying to convince people that they should be mad at each other for arbitrary reasons. I don't think this has much to do with intelligence, though.
See recently: Andrew Cuomo's racist AI-generated mayoral ad & Trump's AI generated truth post where he shits on Americans. It's hard to have a general feeling of happiness when the people with money & power in this world feel the need to go out of their way to spread their disdain for me because of how I look, what I do for a living, or the fact that I wasn't born into wealth.
People are more often trying to avoid being unhappy than trying to be happy. People who prioritize doing things that make them happy are called drug addicts usually.
The upshot is that society also values that we create value. Doing things that others find valuable can foster a sense of meaning and belonging.
What you touched on is desire (see: hedonistic treadmill), and while that can be inflamed by messaging in society, it transcends any given society. If we didn't have desires, we wouldn't suffer for art or create great things. Tautologically, manifesting changes like that necessitate dissatisfaction with status quo.
Intelligence isn't the same thing as happiness, but it could be correlated, because if IQ does measure generalized problem-solving ability, as it seems to, then smart people could apply themselves to the problem of happiness and have more success than average in it. Then the question is "why don't they"? As you indicated, one reason may be that there's not much encouragement to, because as a society we're still in "rat race" mode.
It’s because everyone else is dumber than them…. So they constantly see avoidable mistakes and misunderstandings that could have been avoided…. Yet they cannot make the other people understand….because they think differently about it, and the people who don’t have that intelligence will not necessarily even be able to reorient their brains for the new information to be absorbed correctly.
I constantly get demoralized by stupid people….. it’s truly horrific. It’s a disability as far as I can see…I am disabled by others stupidity….
You just sound like a misanthrope. If you’re so smart, why are you surrounding yourself with stupid people? Is it possible you’re not as smart as you think, and in fact, just as fallible as the rest of us?
How can I not surround myself with stupid people, though? There are so many. No matter where I go, there will be huge numbers of them. I'm surrounded by smart people at work. I can try to only socialize with smart people, but it's hard when a lot of socialization is determined by family. And there's absolutely nothing to be done about the general public on the street, working retail, etc. And worst of all: working in, running, or leading governments.
To be fair, if you are significantly smarter than the average, surrounding yourself with stupid(er) people is the default, as the majority will be less smart than you
or maybe they have spent time with some really brilliant people and they know they are not brilliant, but they also know they are not as dumb as the person they are talking to? they don't have to be mutually exclusive.
I recently encountered someone who spoke like this and I researched what might be the issue.
I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance. But the truth is most people are smarter than you in some ways and less smart in others, but you’re unable to see it because you’re in this black and white mode where preserving your ego relies on you being the smart guy amongst the idiots.
It’s very common in tech to see this. Maybe because we were all exceptional at maths when we were young and got the idea that meant we were super smart and this compensated for our nerdiness.
I worked with a bunch of physicists and every single one of them was smarter than me at maths and physics, I wasn’t even close. But they sometimes talked about politics and current affairs, which I’m very well read in. I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked at how little they knew and how overconfident they were.
None of those folks were narcissists, thankfully they were lovely people, but for sure it highlighted how poor people were at judging their own expertise in an area.
It’s so easy to dismiss people, criticising is easy, and so hard to see just how stupid you can be yourself.
I don't think a bunch of physicists is the best example if you're trying to make the point that most people are smart but just in different ways. Physics requires and attracts intelligence, of course a bunch of physicists were smarter than you in some ways.
Try it with, say, a parole officer's case list, a group of high school dropouts, or people who have not touched a book in the past ten years. You'll certainly find things they know that you don't, but that's mostly going to be a matter of experience, not them being smarter in that area. No doubt the average petty thief knows more about shoplifting than I do, but I'm pretty sure I could learn quickly and become a much better shoplifter than them if I put my mind to it. And those groups will certainly contain some really smart people who just happen to have ended up in those groups, but that's going to be a small number of them.
> I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance.
This may be the colloquial description of how narcissism manifests, but it isn't even close to (and possibly completely opposite) clinical narcissism. The grandiosity isn't so much a belief as it is a "false self" put on to garner caretaking from others. It's not "I got all the toys as a kid, so I deserve more stuff!" but a failure to individuate from caregivers. "Mom (as a tool, not a wholly independent person) came when I cried as a kid, so I need you to lavish attention on me and make me feel better now as an adult. I can't see myself without external input; I only see myself as a reflection through you."
Perhaps there are some people like you say that are grandiose narcissists and ALSO some people that are genuinely smarter than most others in the room and can see the obvious through the fog.
I think the frustration they're experiencing is more likely to do with a lack of control over their environment (including the lack of ability to control others).
I do know for sure that I am able to share my intelligence with anyone.
Moreover I do enjoy it.
I cannot conceive a lot of things more pleasant than making people smart.
And to me that should be your responsibility to do so, as a gifted person.
You should cease to complain about other people being dumb, and just work on being understandable by anyone.
That's a very complex job, as it may lead to what I'd call "extravagant analysis" (i.e. unfolding abstractions to the point you reach atoms or "implementations", [note, I do remember of a (joke) book titled "How to ride a bike" where the author explained literally everything you needed to know to be able to ride a bike, to the point it became absurd]).
Anyway, you should at least try it. Smart people often are terrible at explaining stuff because they don't need to do the work of diving into the atoms of abstractions, and because sometimes also language is not their primary tool to think about things.
Readit News
It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)
Then the real question emerges: How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence? What percentage?
Relationships? Seems like no. Work? Also seems like no, lots of work doesn't make use of a high IQ that people enjoy nonetheless. Accomplishment? Strikes me as most likely of the three, but it's also very relative.
And another thought,
Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions. Like: someone who can jump high is fitter > fitter people are healthier > healthier people have more mental time to be empathetic with > people who can jump high are more empathetic. For intelligence, we say smart people are happier. Same thing, happiness is not directly correlated. Instead: Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier. (These are illustrations of the idea, not actual logical chains or claims.)
Smart people see more variables that could be changed, more components that could be modified, and are less likely to accept things as they are. This creates a false sense of ease by which reality could be modified, and thus higher expectations for the world around them.
I suspect this misplaces happiness and contentment, but the two are also very strongly correlated for many people.
Less intelligent people may be asking you to step in front of a bus because they don't see the bus and you cannot convince them that the bus exists because they're looking in the same direction as you and they don't see anything there. They don't trust your judgement, especially when others who also have equally poor vision agree with them and side against you.
The majority of people have poor vision and so they see the same vague blurry shapes as each other. Because of this, they will often agree with one another and side against intelligent people; who are a minority.
Moreover, it's easier to form consensus over blurry/vague concepts. This is the principle behind fortune-telling. Intelligent people will tend to disagree about details. Because they can see much more detail, there are more contentious points to argue about. It's harder for intelligent people to form consensus.
Being intelligent is a source of unhappiness because it is isolating to not be able to discuss what you see with others. It's like living alone in a parallel universe. You can see lower dimensions but you can't communicate to anyone else about the extra dimensions that exist in your reality because they are incapable of comprehending them. Plato's Allegory of the Cave comes to mind.
It had some interesting ideas, and one of the things that stuck with me is the idea of your brain being a "difference engine" in that the variation is what matters. If we don't experience pain, we can't experience pleasure.
It seems a bit simplistic when stated that way, but I think there is something to it.
Another thing I have come to believe as I have aged is that our western (American especially) society places too much emphasis on happiness, in that we think happiness is (and should be) the prime goal of every human. I have come to believe that less and less, and think something like satisfaction, contentment, and purpose are much more important as life goals than happiness. Happiness is an important part of life, and is important for reaching the other goals I mentioned, but it is not the end goal (to me). I think most of us somewhat intuitively understand this, although our response is often to redefine what happiness is rather than concluding happiness isn't our end goal.
If happiness was everything, we would be much more accepting and encouraging towards hedonism than we are. A heroin addict who has a good clean supply and no responsibilities would be the ultimate dream life if we truly believed pure happiness was the most important thing.
"Smart" tends to be used such that includes intelligence (rate of learning) and knowledge (how much is known).
Satisfaction comes from accepting what is outside our control (accurate expectations), and making continuous progress/improvement on what is within our control (our own perceptions and actions).
Intelligence and knowledge maybe don't correlate as much with wisdom as one would expect. I have met people who learn slow and don't know much but are very wise, and satisfied.
Lastly, happiness is always fleeting. Happiness can't be enduring, but it can be blocked by ego and high expectations. Satisfaction can be enduring, but correlates with virtuous actions, not intelligence.
I don’t think that’s true, e.g. from my personal experience, I’m far more optimistic than my wife, but even though she has far lower expectations she still takes negative things with far more disappointment than I do when we face the same hardship. So generally I’m a much happier person despite having higher expectations.
This is independent of intellect too for us, she would readily admit I’m more intelligent.
I don’t know whether it’s a innate thing or something learned but the key seems to be that I am always primed to look on the bright side, like my brain automatically weights positives much stronger than negatives, whereas hers does the opposite.
For both of us this seems to be self-reinforcing too because we always have confirmation bias because I’ve focused on the positives and can say “see it wasn’t that bad” and she will be like “see, I thought it would be bad” for the same thing.
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And now over time reality has caught up to me and I've become sadder because I've realized that my expectations were indeed higher than my circumstances. I was just a naive oblivious idiot and life has now shown me that. It's sad but I now have just let go. I still am working towards stuff just playing to my strengths and inclinations instead of my wants.
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Similarly, stress is the difference between ones expected reality and ones actual reality.
Less expectation, less stress. More acceptance, more happiness.
- I disagree. If we consider happiness, as we should, as something that can be achieved and not simply granted (for example, the ability to walk is granted, it is not something that humans, apart from pathologies and special cases, have to develop through conscious effort), there should be a positive correlation between intelligence and happiness. To jump higher than you currently can, assuming there is no coach to develop a program, you need to understand what the limiting factors are and train to improve the functioning of the “mechanism,” for example, by losing weight, increasing maximum and explosive strength, using the correct jumping technique, etc.
I believe that often the most intelligent people tend to enjoy thinking more than doing, and thinking too much does not lead to being happier or jumping higher. The limiting factor, more often than not, is not thinking, assuming sufficient intelligence, but the execution part.
I remember reading on Twitter a few years ago about an academic researcher explaining how they had come to the conclusion that exercise would improve their quality of life. They cited a series of articles, reasoned in terms of life expectancy and biomarkers, and concluded that exercise would be a net positive factor in their lives. A lot of neurotic reasoning that needs to quibble over the obvious before taking action.
Many such cases.
And if you dig into the weeds enough, you can find alternatives and counterarguments which can lead to analysis paralysis.
I can tell you I do not enjoy thinking. I hate it. It is a compulsion that I cannot avoid. I know that it makes most interactions in my life more difficult. I know it's a source of unhappiness. I cannot stop thinking.
I want to do. Not think. I fail to do. I think about failure.
I think the reason to expect a correlation is simple: Intelligence should produce a better ability to recognize patterns and identify the most useful ones. In a chaotic world, the things that can lead to a desired outcome are not always clear. It takes time and reasoning to cut through the noise and figure out how to get things done. There is absolutely a reason to suspect that reasoning faster and abstractly would make this easier, and thus produce more overall rewards.
Anytime intelligence is not associated with something, I interpret that to mean the topic is likely not a "hard" min/max problem.
Turns out, most of the human aspect of life is not a hard min/max problem.
That definitely is not min/max problem.
Now in modern times many people have moved away from religion, yet most aren't replacing that philosophical void with anything comparable. And I think this naturally leads to things like hedonism which is completely unsatisfying over time, or even nihilism which is even less satisfying. One could even argue this issue is directly related to the collapse of fertility in developed nations.
I think that a personal life philosophy is absolutely critical for having a contended life. And I use contended instead of 'happy' as part of my own philosophy of life. I don't think happiness is or should be a goal. Happiness is a naturally liminal emotion. And seeking to extend it is only likely to leave one 'unhappy', so to speak. So instead I think we should pursue contentedness. Being satisfied or pleased with one's life does not mean one is necessarily happy, but it certainly means you're content with it.
My pet theory is that once societies stop enslaving women, enough choose not to bear children to skew the stats below replacement level.
They replace it with postmodernism. It's incomparable on the scale of propaganda, yeah.
>nihilism which is even less satisfying
That's a myth. Nihilism is fine if you do it correctly.
Or because information space was monopolized by oligarchs, then they decide what you think.
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Now just burdened with debt/in suburbs, trying to get out and then live on a ranch
Staring at a big body of water or the stars is calming too
I laughed at this. However, I have to slightly disagree. I think there is a connection. I find the smarter people I know are actually happy, but they tend to be people who read books, who follow the news, and who care about the world at large and that is something that can easily make you sad. I'm not saying you need to be extra smart to do those things, I'm saying that smart people tend to do those things more than others.
Thats absolutely wrong and this is the reason why nothing works and being happy became and endless quest in the western culture.
In the eastern spiritual tradition they found the exact ways of managing body, mind, emotions and energy to reach highest peaks of bliss and ecstasy, and I speak from my own experience, its possible to feel so good that no amount of money, relationships, fame, power, whatever other things you can imagine will make you ever feel.
Because the real thing is happening inside, all the outside things you use to try to provoke inner experience, but it only works for a little bit.
Here its explained in a better way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY5l0k6BTvc
This is the age old question. For me at least, the quest for meaning lead me to reason. Reason and logic, then led me to two choices. First is there is no meaning, no purpose, and life is what you make or not make of it; this is more commonly known as nihilism. The second choice is a literal leap of faith; this argues that humans are incapable of understanding of the purpose of life and we need to have faith in the existence of a benevolent God. The leap of faith ultimately leads me back to the question of what is God? Catholic tradition defines God as the source of caritas also known as agape.
Suppose someone asks the [emotionally loaded] question:
"Is abortion wrong?"
Technically this is a yes or no question; a binary.
One can quite easily answer that it depends, and then all the nuances can try to be enumerated in more detail. The fact is that the information presented was not actually nuanced enough to answer yes or no despite being worded as such.
You performed some similar gymnastics here. You assume it must be the case that it is one or the other when it may not be. Maybe meaning is local. Maybe it is real but subjective. Maybe it isn't a meaningful term (lol). Maybe it contains an intrinsic paradox!
A perhaps alternative question might be: "What is it that wishes to know the answer to that question?"
Figuring that out might be a necessary prerequisite.
You say it as if it's something bad. It's not unprecedented: inquisitors believed spinning Earth was bad, but now it somehow isn't.
but there is a direct link! have you ever watched a Slam Dunk competition? people strive to jump the highest, and zero empathy is shown
Well, theoretically all of them, depending on how you define "intelligence" and, oh boy, if the last 3-ish years have taught me anything, it's definitely not that.
Alternatively, maybe it's just that overthinking that is driving some aspect of what we call intelligence; the ability to plan and see things in complex layers.
Good amounts of happiness surely require some selective blindness.
Technically, it's hormones. What makes brains produce them is the perceptions of external world, but the details are different for every culture and then different for every individual.
Now, proverbially, more knowledge brings more sadness^W stress, so perceptive people must have extra hurdles to overcome than blissfully ignorant ones.
Ecclesiastes 1:18
A hypothesis: intelligence makes it possible to realize how unfair you are treated by other people and society.
This is also a premise in the respective part of the well-known science-fiction novel "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes.
These are very common and well documented issues among gifted people.
It’s basically about a whole bunch of really smart, super-educated people, working together, or in opposition.
The relationships they depict are total chaos. Not happy at all.
I think it’s probably fairly realistic.
Many of my heroes have two-digit IQs.
Sometimes, I feel as if smart is overrated.
That's the point. Smarter people tend to have more stable relationships, satisfying work, accomplishments. ( and many, many more ).
> How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence?
All of them. You get better jobs with intelligence. You achieve greater accomplishments via intelligence. And your relationships tend to be better because you are in a far better position intellectually, socially and financially.
> There's no direct link between the two
You are contradicting yourself here. There is a direct link to the criteria you listed - relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment.
> Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier.
No. The problem is that intelligent people eventually realize that all of it is fleeting and utlimately meaningless - relationships, work, accomplishments. (and many, many more).
My dear friend. These are the only types of meaning that matters, and its fleeting nature is why we need to appreciate and savor them.
Wellbutrin
What's so good about Bupropion?
Its very rarely a smart decent person (and most smart folks are decent), those end up as quiet grey mouse in some lab or university position, seldom recognized for their added value. Extroverts, aggressive (to certain point at least), self-centered narcissistic egomaniacs seem to take the cake since ancient times. Those (and worse) are true decision makers, those people shape the world and its to their liking, which usually far off from what smart folks prefer seeing.
Another reason - once you are way above the crowd, you realize how stupid people often behave, how easily is to manipulate those via emotions like hate, envy, fear or inferiority complex(magas are a prime example but such folks are everywhere). If they destroy just their lives with their stupidity who cares, but since everything is connected in societies and we have ie elections, it permeates everybody's lives and you have little defense. You know the situation - clearly a stupid decision that shoots off one's foot, yet crowds cheers and yell for it, willing to fight for it. And smart decent folks are dragged along whether they like or approve it or not. It can be on a small scale but also national/global level. Who wouldn't be frustrated, continuously, during their whole lives?
Also warfare, almost always a supremely stupid move that is a loss for mankind as a whole while very few benefit. Yet look around. We should be reaching to the stars, fixing our environment properly so we can actually look in our children's and grandchildren's faces without a deep shame, yet look where world is heading steadily.
To be happy these days, you have to have lowish IQ or be an utter ignorant, or both. I can find some smaller pieces of joy like kids, hikes or other sports in mountains and so on, but I have to keep ignoring big picture continuously, how powerful do harm all of us.
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Just my thoughts anyways. I'm a dev, not a psychologist.
There are many benefits but it can be a real liability.
That said, it probably doesn't need to be this way and I would suggest that the root issue lies with the way that modern society is structured. It's not really optimizing for happiness on any level, which is greatly exacerbated when one has the mental acuity to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Do you think this comes with age, or are some people born with the ability regardless of age to see the bigger picture?
For myself, I just plodded along through high school and then things started to click more when I was in college, contemplating life in the real world. Many of my classmates in HS seemed to have the majority of their lives planned out already while I was just content to play sports, chase girls and learn about computers.
That though of spirals is really a scary thing.
This overflow might contribute to less happiness as a result.
Same thing, not a psychologist, just some thoughts.
So you get these smart people who think they can rationally work themselves out of emotional issues.
Well, if you lift with your back, you hurt your back.
YES, with an emphasis on the idea of "surplus IQ". If you are similarly blessed with high EQ, great social skills, athletic talent, etc. - not much of a problem. Vs. if you're nothing special (or worse) in some of those other areas, while having a metaphorical Mjölnir in your IQ toolbox - Big Problems. "Solve it with IQ" becomes your go-to strategy in far too many situations, you tend let other skills type atrophy...and treating everything as a metaphorical nail really doesn't work well.
Some of the smartest people that I have known are also the kindest. It is like they are so smart that are able to understand and empathize with other people thoughts and feelings. In any place I go, I look for the kindest people and frequently you also find they are also really smart and interesting.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah
Our horns got too big. What once was an advantage is now getting stuck in the tree branches.
Now, emotional intelligence, that would greatly influece your happiness. The hurdles you're talking about are emotional, not intellectual.
This isn’t true at all.
A properly disciplined person is capable of great things according to the measure of his intellectual power and his discipline. However, without discipline, that extra horsepower can be a force multiplier for error, and more intricate rationalizations can make it easy to lodge yourself in a web of false justifications.
This is one reason why the ancients and the medievals always emphasized the importance of the virtues. Intelligence is just potential. What we want is knowledge and ultimately wisdom. But there is no wisdom without virtue. Without virtue, a man is deficient and corrupt. His intellect is darkened. His mental operations dishonest. His hold on reality deformed. Virtue is freedom; a man of vice is not free, but lorded over by each vice that wounds him and holds him hostage. His intellect is not free to operate properly. Good actions are strangled and stifled, because his intentions are corrupt, because his impure will cripples and twists the operations of his intellect, because his vices dominate him and cause disintegration.
Without virtue, we are but savages and scum.
Truly intelligent people won't be getting into doom spirals and self-sabotage. They will - obviously - use their superior intelligence to avoid that situation (or mitigate it before it becomes an issue), but the merely middling folks get trapped by it and cannot work their way out of it because they're just not intelligent enough to realise it is happening and/or work out how to stop it.
Good luck.
What should be impressed upon us far earlier is that our actions dictate our identity. If they are in harmony with your real desires, as opposed to surrogate desires, you'll be happier.
In contrast, almost all 'smart people' activities are solo activities or stuff with infrequent socialization - reading/writing, programming, playing/practicing instruments etc.
Many of these activities are quite challenning as opposed to the former ones, so more likely to bring negative emotions to the forefront.
'Smart' people also tend to have elevated expectations of themselves, and they expect to either do better in general, or succeed in some niche that most people don't really concern themselves with - that leads to perpetual feelings of inadequacy.
I'm not saying smart people are required to engage in these activities, I'm saying people should be more amenable to socializing and just chilling out together.
Thankfully the situation isn't actually this extreme, but I think what we're talking about is just a difference in degree and not a difference in kind. Seeing more clearly than others seems very uncomfortable at best, and frequently maladaptive and/or a recipe for derangement.
It is indeed not that extreme, but sometimes it feels pretty close. It is hard to find entertainment that isn't tedious and predictable. The public seems to eat up rationalizations for bad behavior which are obvious nonsense.
I'm happy at work because I'm surrounded by people smarter, more motivated, and more conscientious than I am. Outside of work, well, some days I dream that Anderson's Brain Wave would come true, the Earth would move out of some magical interstellar intelligence-suppressing field, and everyone's IQ would quintuple overnight.
I've noticed that many smart people have never learned how to enjoy spending time in mixed-IQ settings. I feel a bit sorry for smart people who were raised with smart parents and smart siblings and smart friends etc. I find their perspectives very limited.
But society tends to bring together like-minded people e.g. in schooling, professional work, sports teams, art school, or whatever other community.
Also, I think social compatibility is less about matching IQs and more about matching senses of humor. If someone finds your jokes distasteful or downright bland, it's never going to work out. My friends are my friends because we laugh at the same things.
That very much depends on where you are born & brought up, and how willing you are to leave all that behind.
- Happiness is fixed, perhaps. Short-term, it isn't (coke and hookers work!). Long-term, it is. People fall back to a baseline. So then, being smart doesn't help you.
- Dumb people might be misreporting their happiness. So smart people are making themselves happier, but all the studies are done on self-reported happiness, and the dumb people report that they are happier than they really are.
- There's a difference between intelligence and wisdom: if you're intelligent, you have good models. If you're wise, you make good decisions. You might think that you need to be intelligent to be wise, but you also need wisdom to navigate uncertainty, ie you need to exercise your decision making for when you don't have a good model. Dumb people have to do this a lot.
- It may just be that you can make yourself happier, but being intelligent doesn't give you differential access to the levers that you need. Eg to be happy maybe you need an active social life. Well, there's no particular reason having high IQ would help that. We generally have a tendency to think that IQ is a kind of magic substance that can do anything, but why would that be?
- Being smart could actively harm your happiness. I told my kid he needed to wait for his friends to grow up, they will stop only caring about football (luckily the prophesy came true and they are having a great time in their little nerd group). Another friend has the same problem with his kid, they just don't have the social ties available yet. BTW, I really do think there's something to this one, you need the social side to be happy. There's a few HN people who also give me that "finally found my tribe" vibe when they write. I met a guy on the train who saw me coding, and he had the same story.
If I catch myself feeling grumpy or down, it is pretty easy to reframe and summon genuine happiness.
Even during intense suffering of various kinds. To a large extent you get to decide which universe you live in.
How?
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When he was stationed abroad with a load of meatheads, they would be happy spending their down time drinking beer and getting a tan. He would miss libraries of home. When people around him didn't care about the problems of the World, he saw the intractable nuance of the World's problems and felt a deep helplessness.
Some of this was clearly depression, but I have to admit, 30 years after he shared those stories with me, there have been times I've been jealous of people who did not think through the detail and nuance and see the risks and lack of mitigations in so many circumstances. I'm not exceptionally smart, but I do seem to be a step or two ahead of ~30% of my colleagues and friends, and that seems to be enough to make life feel quite sad, quite a lot of the time.
A man’s search for meaning is an incredible book you may enjoy based on your comment. My strongest takeaway was that in situations where I cannot make an impact or control something, I still control how I react.
First, being intelligent (as defined in the article) doesn't relate to being happy. There is nothing inherent about being intelligent that means happy.
Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them. For example, the focus on "more" rather than "enough". We are shaped to always desire more and never be content with what we have. Even intelligent people are shaped by this. Consider the fall in terms of people who have hobbies.
The usual trope here is that smarter people recognize this and see through the cage, leading to less overall happiness vs. "ignorance is bliss" where you don't recognize you are in a cage at all.
It's just that though, a trope. I'd argue happiness is more determined by emotional intelligence than anything, which an IQ test isn't going to measure.
More than that, society spends an increasing amount of time and money trying to convince people that they should be mad at each other for arbitrary reasons. I don't think this has much to do with intelligence, though.
See recently: Andrew Cuomo's racist AI-generated mayoral ad & Trump's AI generated truth post where he shits on Americans. It's hard to have a general feeling of happiness when the people with money & power in this world feel the need to go out of their way to spread their disdain for me because of how I look, what I do for a living, or the fact that I wasn't born into wealth.
Why aren't intelligent people doing [able to do] things that make them happy? Or at least happier that someone who is less intelligent?
If that doesn't work, various hypotheses come to mind, but I don't know how to test them.
What you touched on is desire (see: hedonistic treadmill), and while that can be inflamed by messaging in society, it transcends any given society. If we didn't have desires, we wouldn't suffer for art or create great things. Tautologically, manifesting changes like that necessitate dissatisfaction with status quo.
I constantly get demoralized by stupid people….. it’s truly horrific. It’s a disability as far as I can see…I am disabled by others stupidity….
How can I not surround myself with stupid people, though? There are so many. No matter where I go, there will be huge numbers of them. I'm surrounded by smart people at work. I can try to only socialize with smart people, but it's hard when a lot of socialization is determined by family. And there's absolutely nothing to be done about the general public on the street, working retail, etc. And worst of all: working in, running, or leading governments.
But I am convinced that I am pretty stupid, which makes the whole situation even more painful ("ffs, I'm dumb and these people are even dumber!")
I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance. But the truth is most people are smarter than you in some ways and less smart in others, but you’re unable to see it because you’re in this black and white mode where preserving your ego relies on you being the smart guy amongst the idiots.
It’s very common in tech to see this. Maybe because we were all exceptional at maths when we were young and got the idea that meant we were super smart and this compensated for our nerdiness.
I worked with a bunch of physicists and every single one of them was smarter than me at maths and physics, I wasn’t even close. But they sometimes talked about politics and current affairs, which I’m very well read in. I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked at how little they knew and how overconfident they were.
None of those folks were narcissists, thankfully they were lovely people, but for sure it highlighted how poor people were at judging their own expertise in an area.
It’s so easy to dismiss people, criticising is easy, and so hard to see just how stupid you can be yourself.
Try it with, say, a parole officer's case list, a group of high school dropouts, or people who have not touched a book in the past ten years. You'll certainly find things they know that you don't, but that's mostly going to be a matter of experience, not them being smarter in that area. No doubt the average petty thief knows more about shoplifting than I do, but I'm pretty sure I could learn quickly and become a much better shoplifter than them if I put my mind to it. And those groups will certainly contain some really smart people who just happen to have ended up in those groups, but that's going to be a small number of them.
This may be the colloquial description of how narcissism manifests, but it isn't even close to (and possibly completely opposite) clinical narcissism. The grandiosity isn't so much a belief as it is a "false self" put on to garner caretaking from others. It's not "I got all the toys as a kid, so I deserve more stuff!" but a failure to individuate from caregivers. "Mom (as a tool, not a wholly independent person) came when I cried as a kid, so I need you to lavish attention on me and make me feel better now as an adult. I can't see myself without external input; I only see myself as a reflection through you."
I think the frustration they're experiencing is more likely to do with a lack of control over their environment (including the lack of ability to control others).
You should cease to complain about other people being dumb, and just work on being understandable by anyone. That's a very complex job, as it may lead to what I'd call "extravagant analysis" (i.e. unfolding abstractions to the point you reach atoms or "implementations", [note, I do remember of a (joke) book titled "How to ride a bike" where the author explained literally everything you needed to know to be able to ride a bike, to the point it became absurd]).
Anyway, you should at least try it. Smart people often are terrible at explaining stuff because they don't need to do the work of diving into the atoms of abstractions, and because sometimes also language is not their primary tool to think about things.
Tldr; are you sure you are understandable ?
> Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?