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Why aren't smart people happier?

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Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#101
post #98
post #34

I'm not especially smart, or happy, but, personally, I don't know how to be it, or what it feels like. I know pleasure, but being in a constant pleasurable state is not what is meant by happiness as far as I know. Slavoj Žižek (someone who does seem to be especially smart): “Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dre…

Pleasure is not the right goal. Homeostasis, balance, equanimity, peace are much better. Learn to appreciate beauty. Learn to create beauty. Learn how to get better at both.

These are good. Possibly the strongest competition with happiness is satisfaction. Happiness itself all on its own tends to be stupid and boring.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#102
The whole premise is weird. Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes. A cat almost certainly doesn't think about things more than one day in the future.

Many people eventually give up thinking about things too much and give up to various forms of hedonism, but that's not real happiness. When it happens after 40s it's called a 'mid life crisis', I don't think it has a name when it happens earlier, but fundamentally it's the same thing.

Real happiness would require advanced transhumanism or even more (ie. uploading) - without it, we are all trapped only being able to imagine perfection.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#104
post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

> But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things.

You don't need to be very smart to get existential dread from "climate change will kill us all and I can't influence much", "the upper class can still fully rule our lives" or "at some point, someone will create an AI that might kill us and there's not much anyone can do about it". Even someone hardly qualified to work at McDonalds can think that, usually in addition to "I can never handle a job to get a living wage", which I'd actually consider to be more serious downers on ones happiness.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#105
post #35

When I used to battle my depression I came across an article/paper that stated that smart people are more prone to depression. Same with "creative" people. I have overcome depression and I am "satisfied" with my life (I prefer the word "satisfied" to the overinflated one: happiness). And now that depression is in my past I think that was a puff-piece article, and so is this. One could say that more intelligent people…

You can know better to not overthink and still overthink.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#106
post #34

I'm not especially smart, or happy, but, personally, I don't know how to be it, or what it feels like. I know pleasure, but being in a constant pleasurable state is not what is meant by happiness as far as I know. Slavoj Žižek (someone who does seem to be especially smart): “Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dre…

There's a beautiful poem by Giovanni Pascoli, "Aléxandros" in which Alexander the Great gets to the Indus river with his army after having conquered half of Asia; he knows it's the end of his conquest and thinks - it was better when I was dreaming of it, I was happier when more challenges, road, destiny where ahead than behind.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#108
I actually would not expect smart people to be happier. In fact, I wouldn't expect any group of people to be particularly happier than anyone else.

Happiness and suffering are two sides of the same coin and we evolved these feelings (or they were bestowed upon us by God, either way) in order to guide us. We do more of what feels good, less of what feels bad.

If we're happy all the time, happiness loses its intended purpose. Same for suffering.

That's why, no matter what financial windfall you may experience, give it 6 months and you'll be just as miserable (or worse) as you were before. But because you got a high off of it initially, you keep pursuing more and more, always convinced the next upgrade in your life is what will do the trick. But it doesn't. All you're doing is raising the bar for what it takes to make you momentarily happy.

It's the "poverty of affluence", as described by Paul Wachtel in his book by the same name.

So our minds are constantly adapting to our circumstances and rebalancing things so that we come back to the center.

Chasing happiness, much like running away from suffering, is a fool's game. We are hard wired to feel both in roughly equal measure, regardless of our circumstances, over the long haul.

For this reason, I think the buddhists and stoics have it right. The best thing we can do is nothing. Sit down and shut up. Get off the wheel of suffering, observe the world as dispassionately as possible, and accept both joy and suffering as inconsequential inputs meant to guide us.

It's the closest any human will ever be allowed to experience peace in their mortal life. If you chase the highs of life, expect massive lows, as well. Accept life on life's terms. Stop chasing things and you may not be happier, but you'll probably be less miserable and experience fewer bouts of crippling depression and anxiety.

Or as Charles Bukowski's epitaph famously reads: Don't try.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#109

The whole premise is weird. Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes. A cat almost certainly doesn't think about things more than one day in the future. Many people eventually give up thinking about things too much and give up to various forms of hedonism, but that's not real happiness. When it happens after 40s it…

> Logically, smarter people should be less happy, because they realize that important issues are borderline unsolvable in any realistic timeframes.

You don't need to be very intelligent to consider climate a very hard problem. In fact, if we follow this logic, less smart people should be unhappier, since they are in an even worse position to do something, while smart people might choose to go into an engineering job to help solve the problems or gain enough influence in politics to change things for the better.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#110
post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

It sounds like you're confusing intelligence with depressive realism and cynicism. :) Sure, the universe itself is indifferent at best, but that doesn't mean you can't find meaning in life, or that you can't experience happiness. On the contrary, admitting that most things are completely outside one's control seems to be a key to being happy with life.

Realism is seeing an issue and recognizing that it is a problem.

Intelligence is seeing an issue and recognizing that it is a problem and recognizing the root issues to how it became a problem.

Proper action is seeing both of the above and addressing the immediate issues and the longer term ones so the problem does not happen again.

Cynicism comes from when you are not allowed any sort of action and actively denied the ability to fix cause root issues. Then gaslighted into thinking you are wrong for wanting the change or forced into fixing the wrong things.

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