191–200 of 452 posts
I am considered smart and yes I am unhappy from very young age. Mostly due to my family situation too but still: I don't see many kids realized unfair the world is at 6.
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My dad once told me that being smart was a curse in some ways, but he framed it as having a World view that few others had. I think however your take on it is closer: when you're smart, you're told you're smart (both as a positive and as a negative - I was bullied for it), it just becomes part of your self dialogue and identity and it gets in the way. It's taken years of therapy for me to get to the point where I rea…
RE self dialogue: I think it is also self-reinforcing in a positive way. "I am competent and capable of this" is certainly less distracting internal dialogue than "maybe I'm not smart enough" to children. I believe most adults eventually get better at ignoring this type of thing altogether, since it isn't really useful or productive.
Additionally, the more intelligent you are the more skilled you become at thinking about things logically. An intelligent person can convince themselves of anything using logic without realizing that all logic depends on unproven axioms and assumptions. Combined with cynicism, logic leads to a negative outlook on life that is hard to shake off.
Maybe happy smart people know better than to spend all their time taking IQ tests and participating in psychological studies?
I've learned that the more intelligent you are the more models you know and the more trust you place in them being actual reality vs just being models. This leads to overconfidence in things being a certain way so when life calls for flexibility, your rigidity will make you suffer. Cynicism develops from this rigidity. Additionally, the more intelligent you are the more skilled you become at thinking about things log…
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As a single and childless person, I don't like the implication that those are marks of a less fulfilling life. I know some people married with kids who seem very happy and fulfilled, and some profoundly miserable and trapped. I may be missing out on some good things, but I'm also avoiding some extreme misery, and generally do feel content and fulfilled.
Strongly agreed, and it's also worth it for those who think too narrowly along those lines that those aren't even the same axis. I used to be single and childless, and my happiness fluctuated a lot, but now I'm married and much more consistently happier. Neither my wife or I want kids, so if we had them, suddenly we'd be back to being less happy again. There are also plenty of single parents, and I'm sure many of the…
Happiness should be the end goal. Contentment is part of it. Compromise. Quality over quantity and the quality doesn't have to always be great, just no regrets according to modern death bed speeches. Being happy can mean chasing one thing and not the other, which would lead to some unspoken regret, loud enough in our head.
Lots of reasons, I suspect. Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter. They are subject to thinking they’ve got it all figured out, when really they don’t. Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think. Then there are other attributes like…
> Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter. This is patently untrue. My middle school kid finished Calculus 1/2 last year and got a 5 on AP without breaking a sweat. He’s taking college calculus this year and we need to figure out what math he’s going to do next year already. He has friends who are younger and even more advanced. There are genius level kids that are at another plane of i…
It does not require genius level intelligence to do Calculus. It takes a genius to discover Calculus in the first place. Genius refers more to curiosity in my opinion, and not being able to do something at a young age.
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It is hard to abstain from news completely. The mainstream media is becoming increasingly like social media, feeding on shared sentiment and vague feelings of outrage.
It really isn’t. I haven’t watched the news on tv in probably 20 years, I haven’t had any social media accounts ever, and at this point I use the internet as part of my day job, to do my job. It is absolutely amazing to be so disconnected and I encourage everyone to try it. People at work tell me about interesting things happening in the world, and my role and my spouses role at her job have the (mis) fortune of keep…
There are all kinds of effective approaches for becoming happier, ranging from things like changing one's circumstances, to cognitive-behavioral therapy, to Eckhart Tolle style present-moment awareness beyond mental narratives, to what some pick-up artists call "getting in state", and many other approaches as well.
Being smart does potentially make it easier to learn, because it makes it easier to understand the concepts that other people use to describe skills and to apply them to one's own situation. Being smart also makes it easier to originate one's own ideas for how to become happier. And on the other hand, being smart can also cause problems if it makes one hyper-aware of problems, and so on. Emotional intelligence does not automatically increase just because verbal or mathematical types of intelligence increase. It's its own kind of intelligence. I have no idea whether it is correlated positively with the other kinds of intelligence, but certainly there are many people who have high emotional intelligence and low intellectual intelligence, and people who have low emotional intelligence and high intellectual intelligence.
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I think it's pretty frustrating being an outlier in any dimension. Your specific needs are always ignored. Being smart is no different. At least when I was in school they were always like "eh he'll do fine, let's concentrate on the borderline dunces". When you leave school you can find your level a lot easier - go to a university and get a job where other people are at the same skill level. At least that's what made…
That's one of the only real downsides of apparent intelligence that I've seen: people in positions which exist to be supportive tend to assume you don't actually need their help. Which, comparatively, might be true. But just because someone else needs more help doesn't mean it wouldn't be welcome. Parents, teachers, advisors, supervisors, they just let you figure it out because they know you can, and they need to foc…
People don't like to hire people who are smarter than them. They want to hire people who are obedient and competent.
If you are too smart, the government will probably put you in prison, if you challenge the status quo and are not obedient.