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Why aren't smart people happier?

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Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#171

Post by elevatortrim »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #87
zdragnar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Happiness is just chemicals, it has nothing to do with that.

It has some because expectations and satisfaction of those alter hormones.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#173

Post by pickledonions49 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #87
zdragnar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Happiness is just chemicals, it has nothing to do with that.

chemicals are released by one part of the brain and interpreted by another. the parts of the brain that release those chemicals release it when that part of the brain is stimulated. this kind of mental stimulation can be heavily reliant on quality of life.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#174

Post by kaicianflone »

asah wrote: post #168
kaicianflone wrote: post #60

This answer might upset some people, but it’s really about balance. Spiritual healing is something many intelligent people quietly need. Too often, “intellectuals” dismiss the Bible outright. Relying on arguments they half-remember from TikTok or high-school debates instead of actually reading it and forming their own conclusion, like they would with any other subject. I’m just a developer, but I think intelligence c…

lol, the majority of the world isn't remotely Christian...

Sure - How clever of you. It’s also the world’s largest religion by far. That alone says something about how deeply the message of Jesus resonates across cultures and centuries. Billions of people have found truth, hope, and transformation in Him. Not because they were born into it, but because the story holds up when you actually look into it.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#175

Post by xboxnolifes »

AngryData wrote: post #154
vorpalhex wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's trivially false. Ancient people were always working, and we can see this in people who maintain primative lifestyles. Take bread. You start the oven at 4am. By 5am it is hot enough for your meats. By 7am extinguish, by 8am start your bread and go until 6-7pm. Now you get to start your dough for tomorrow, typically working until 11pm. Historically bakers were known to sleep in flour hoppers as they were spared…

To me it sounds like you already partially contradicted yourself. Bakers sleeping while at work? That would never fly today even if you had literally nothing to do except wait for bread to rise. Their hours away from home may be similar in many cases, but that doesn't mean they had as high of a workload or had to work as fast as the modern equivalent. Most of them were working for themselves, and set their own pace a…

> To me it sounds like you already partially contradicted yourself. Bakers sleeping while at work? That would never fly today even if you had literally nothing to do except wait for bread to rise.

You're telling me, in a SF-based startup community, nobody has ever slept over-night at the office?

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#176

Post by Razengan »

Maybe because once you know enough you realize a lot of people + other lifeforms are suffering, so even if your own life is awesome this world kinda sucks and the universe seems indifferent. It's hard not to be vaguely depressed/pissed most of the time unless you minimize your care sphere.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#177

Post by kstrauser »

wahern wrote: post #131
kstrauser wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree, although I wouldn't limit it to one religious tradition, or even to religion at all. For example, mindfulness meditation doesn't require any spiritual believe whatsoever. (In before: "But isn't that Buddhist?" Reply: "Who invented it is irrelevant. The practice itself is areligious, unless you go out of your way to make it otherwise for yourself.") I find that being mindful of the world around me, an…

> mindfulness meditation I doubt mindfulness meditation started with Buddhism. For one thing, it also figures heavily into Christian practice, especially of Christian religious--priests, nuns, monks, etc. Though, curiously, Christian asceticism arose adjacent to a community of diaspora Jain or Buddhist Indians near Alexandria, Egypt. Institutional religion provides structure to help people pursue these practices. Whi…

That's probably all true, but it's the complaint I hear from people where I grew up in the Midwest when talking about meditation. "I can't do that, I'm a Christian" is an all too common refrain, as though it were inherently not Christian (or pro- or anti- anything else).

And yes, in this specific case, if you attended a Zen Buddhist temple, you'd probably get a lot of assistance meditating, if requested. That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#178

Post by curmudgeon22 »

borroka wrote: post #98
Ardon wrote: post #53

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. Accomplishmen…

"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…

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.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#179

Post by twoodfin »

snowwrestler wrote: post #116

Seems like most of the comments are focusing on the happiness angle, but I am liking the framework that some people are good at solving poorly-defined problems. It makes me think of people who have huge impact and success in life, with little obvious explanation. People like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, etc. People to whom a lot of success is attributed, but it’s hard to say exac…

“Musicians play their instruments, I play the orchestra.” – Seiji Ozawa by way of Steve Jobs by way of Aaron Sorkin

“I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.” – “Frank Costello” by way of William Monahan by way of Martin Scorsese

I think humans have a deeply rooted inner sense of how much our destiny lies within our own hands, subject to our own will. That’s in some part a matter of intelligence, surely, but as social animals it’s also dependent on a dynamic set of emotional, historical, economic, political structures and our ability to navigate them, much of which is likely not directly aligned with success in mathematics or French.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#180

Post by B-Con »

My own personal reflections, that I realize may not be true for everyone.

Hypothesis: Living in the moment and being content is a key aspect of happiness. The more you know, the smarter you are, the harder it is to live in the moment or be content.

1) The more you understand, the more problems you see.

When you understand little, everything is ind of random. You have minimal expectations. The more you understand, the more connections you make, the more you see how things could be and how far away they are from an ideal state. You focus more on the potential, and thus the future, than on the present.

2) The more you understand, the less novelty there is.

The first time you play video game in a particular genre (or watch a movie, etc), you take it all in and experience as it is. Little interactions are delightful, as your brain is happy to see two things make an unexpected connection.

After you complete a few, you understand how the system works. The balances and trade-offs that make up the nature of the genre. When you start a new one, you instantly start breaking it apart into a mental spreadsheet, rather than experiencing the literal thing in front of your face. The unexpected elements become expected because you know how even the unexpected stuff tends to work.

The more of life you experience, the less novelty there is to any part of it.

3) The more you understand, the easier it is to live in the future.

"I should try this", "I should do that". You get locked into intellectual responsibilities with long-term goals. The short term becomes just a nuisance to achieve long-term goals. You aren't only not living in today, you aren't even living in tomorrow, you're actually living 6-24 months from now.

4) The more you understand, the less of a point you see.

If you're a pattern solving machine, eventually you realize there's no bottom to find. There's always just another chaotic pattern to pick apart. Another thing to learn. The same things play out over and over again, mildly differently. You can't fix the majority of the problems you see. You can barely understand yourself.

You're good at min/max-ing problems. But what's the ultimate thing to min/max? You have no idea.

So you ask yourself, what's the point to the whole process? Simply maximizing brain chemistry? You know you can't just focus on happy brain chemicals because that will also ruin your life (ie, heroin).

5) The more you understand, the less you hope in magic.

Some optimism depends on magical thinking. "Maybe this will work out because X will happen!" Except X can't happen. But if you believe it could happen, you are genuinely more happy.

The more you understand, the more quickly you can solve all known aspects of a problem and get left with the parts that can't be solved. You know all the things that can't happen to fix a problem. The world isn't magical. Medicine isn't magic, doctors aren't magic, technology isn't magic, politicians aren't magic, problems don't just disappear over night.

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