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Why aren't smart people happier?

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Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#171

Post by wonderwonder »

wiseowise wrote: post #66
bryanlarsen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short term happiness is the wrong goal. The hedonic treadmill is one reason why. Long term life satisfaction is the correct goal. For example, having children decreases the former yet increases the latter.

> yet increases the latter How?

Having kids is insanely stressful in the beginning. Your entire life shifts to revolve around them and its utterly exhausting. I could not manage having kids and maintaining friendships at the same time and lost most of my friends due to inaction on my part. As kids get older though for me ~10 years old, they begin to have a lot of autonomy. You see the results of all of your efforts and you realize that everything you have done has contributed to create these small awesome little people with their own thoughts and goals. I have not cried since I was a small child, even when close family died I just shrugged and trudged on. I am for the most part relatively unemotional. My kid came into my room the other day, just smiling and telling me about something and it was suddenly the proudest I have ever been, I almost cried in happiness. It was one of the most surreal things I have ever experienced. I am really looking forward to see what he does next in life and am actually happy about getting to find out.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#172

Post by willcipriano »

YeahNO wrote: post #166
_gabe_ wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You would be better served studying philosophy directly, rather than a book filled with misogyny, slavery, thought-crime and magic. Quite a hot take. Most famous philosophers lived in similar environments. I don't know how your environment precludes you from wisdom.

Which famous philosophers incorporated magical thinking, thought-crime, misogyny and slavery into their philosophy? What is the wisdom imparted by officially sanctioned chattel slavery, wherein beating your slave to death is perfectly acceptable [as] long as they live a few days after the beating: "And if someone strikes his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies at his hand, he shall be punished. If, how…

> Which famous philosophers incorporated magical thinking, thought-crime, misogyny and slavery into their philosophy?

Plato, father of most modern philosophy. You have a lot of reading to do my friend.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#174

Post by slothtrop »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #138
nickelcitymario wrote: post #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 p…

Stoicism and buddhism never worked for me—observing the world as dispassionately as possible is the most dead I’ve ever felt inside. Pouring myself out as passionately as possible to what I consider my life’s work is the happiest, most satisfying feeling in the world, and that’s despite the setbacks. I still come across as stoic to some people, though, just because it takes a lot (if at all) to upset me, but my calmn…

Ditto. My view of this disparity in outlooks now is that the important thing is to be honest with yourself about your nature, i.e. figure out if you're a slacker or a go-getter. Some people take comfort in coasting and consuming, they likely never needed a buddhist parable to figure that out. I could attempt to give myself "permission" to do nothing using an -ism but I can't believe it, and I don't find it satisfying. Striving affords a higher-order level of living. I certainly had to "try" to resolve issues like insomnia, and had to "try" to create new habits, "try" to reach a state of flow at work, "try" to strive towards mastery in an art.

I'm actually more perplexed by creatives who would suggest they don't actually try, but I imagine this is only because they've created habits long ago, sparked by a mere interest, to the extent that biasing towards action (pursuing those habits) requires no effort. I found myself having to create new habits because I was in a state of complete disarray, purely trying to avoid pain.

As for Bukowski, he was an alcoholic and seemingly a miserable misanthrope. Seems like "don't try" was of little comfort.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#175

Post by nautilius »

Jensson wrote: post #151
tartoran wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly my strategy for shutting down the existential dread mill. Whenever it bothers me too much I’m pointing my attention to how it all eventually turns to dust. The effect of that enables me to try to enjoy the now.

To me it is mostly that life is boring. At some point you have seen everything interesting and anything you see hence are just fitting into the same basic patterns. Discussions, tv shows, books etc. Living is still better than not living, but every time you experience something new the things left to experience becomes smaller. A few romance movies and you have seen all of them, a few action movies etc, or even psych…

True when you focus solely on consuming.

Turn to creating (art, science, a better mousetrap), and there’s no end in sight.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#176

Post by ben_w »

"Happy" and "intelligent" are just different axes.

Being intelligent[0], I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. And I choose to work on the hardest problems I can manage.

Dogs are not known for their intellect, and can be made incredibly happy just by the appearance of their favourite person (who may be a human or another dog). Anyone who expects dogs to be anxious about global warming, AI alignment, or the thermodynamic heat death of the universe, has probably overestimated them.

[0] any comment which contains claims of this type must contain at least one unfixed tupo or autocorrupt error, it's traditional.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#177

Post by gorjusborg »

pdamoc wrote: post #98
dusted wrote: 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.

> Pleasure is not the right goal. Homeostasis, balance, equanimity, peace are much better.

Along with these, sustainability. Imagine finding balance and peace, but seeing clearly that the tools and techniques used to get and stay there are temporary. Pretty unsettling. We have to get there in ways that are long lasting and unlikely to change radically.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#178

Post by Jensson »

nautilius wrote: post #175
Jensson wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it is mostly that life is boring. At some point you have seen everything interesting and anything you see hence are just fitting into the same basic patterns. Discussions, tv shows, books etc. Living is still better than not living, but every time you experience something new the things left to experience becomes smaller. A few romance movies and you have seen all of them, a few action movies etc, or even psych…

True when you focus solely on consuming. Turn to creating (art, science, a better mousetrap), and there’s no end in sight.

I think you need bias for the things you create for that to work. For me, if I create something then it isn't more interesting than if someone else created it, and creating something that is really interesting is really hard, people who can do that get rich.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#179

Post by throwaway0asd »

Here is how I correlate with the article as a developer.

I believe myself to be pretty good at programming because I can achieve execution performance that almost nobody else can and solve problems most people cannot. After 20 years of practice my greatest enabling skill is better organizational skills.

I am not good at bad programming though. I have spent a good deal of effort in the first half of my career to thoroughly refine my precise which also means recognizing and avoiding anti-patterns. I avoid things like frameworks because they are much slower, super large, get in the way, and really slow me down. As a result people dependent upon frameworks probably think I am a really bad programmer.

As somebody who has learned to increase their own productivity by doing more from less, better organizational skills and higher conscientiousness, encountering excess complexity in other code makes me unhappy. It’s really depressing. Often solving simple problems in such code is a tip-toe dance through a minefield unless I have the bandwidth to write it again with test automation.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#180

Post by donkeyd »

lostmsu wrote: post #149
h0l0cube wrote: post #89

The crux of the article: > Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice…

That's wish-washing the answer where none is needed. I bet you smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed. Cursory search on IQ vs marital status confirms that.

> smarter people are better at answering all of the questions you listed

Define 'better'. For example:

> “How do I get my child to stop crying?”

Lots of 'dumb' parents are very good at solving this question, they give the kid what they want and put them in front of the TV or give them a bunch of candy. Smart parents might overthink the question, read a book on parenting, try a naughty chair, fail and get stressed.

The smart parents answer might be the one that's best in the long term, but it might not and really doesn't solve the actual problem right now. So is it the better answer? That depends, because it's not a well-defined problem, which I think is the point.

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