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Why aren't smart people happier?

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Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#431

Post by int_19h »

65 wrote: post #122
GolfPopper wrote: post #12

Because, whatever its merits, the world is a pretty grim and existentially terrifying place once you think about it?

You can be smart and think the world is a beautiful place and life is a gift.

You can, but only if you avoid actually trying to reason about this and taking all available evidence into account.

If you do, best case, the world might be a beautiful place for you specifically. But thinking about it makes you realize just how rare it is and just how lucky you are. And just how fucked it is for most everybody else.

And if you keep thinking, then you realize that any luck can run out and you can join said everybody else in an instant.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#433

Post by fransje26 »

no_wizard wrote: post #143
Mouvelie wrote: post #75

Are smart people even fulfilled ? How many smart people work on industries they can't wait to quit ? On problems they don't even care ? I feel like everyone within 2-standard division of the IQ mean is still susceptible to the never-ending that being rich and having money is all that matters instead of, I don't know, supporting life on the only habitable planet we know.

It makes one wonder why we didn't and continue not to steer our systems to reward supporting life on the planet vs being a destructive force. What drives us to this short term consumption model

> What drives us to this short term consumption model

As Mister Crabs would say: Money?

Or, with a bit more nuance: the need to support oneself in the environment and society one finds him/herself in.

With ever-increasing living costs comes the need for an ever-increasing income. Our evolutionarily ingrained search for a "safe" living situation means that we will prioritize a sufficient income over the larger goal of transforming the society we live in.

So although changing the society we live in would lead to a greatly improved life situation, we are biased towards staying in the rat race to make sure we are not missing out at this exact moment. (And potentially in the future, as a societal change will only work out if a sufficient amount of people are willing to take the risk of stepping out of the rat-race).

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#434

Post by int_19h »

kaicianflone wrote: post #174
asah wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do realize that most countries that are Christian today have been made so by force sometime in the past, not because the locals were so happy about it?

Where I'm from, they're still celebrating the "national baptism" event where the ruler basically forced the entire (allegedly) population of his capital into the river for mass baptism by Greek priests invited for the occasion.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#435

Post by jongjong »

I think it's partly because smart people are hated by society. Consider the negative connotations of the words 'geek' and 'nerd'.

I think this resentment is grounded in jealousy. Like Schopenhauer observed, less intelligent people perceive the intelligence differential when they interact with people who are more intelligent than themselves and this leads to a profound sense of resentment.

It's not just about intelligence, I think less intelligent people are jealous of more intelligent people because more intelligent people are more aware, more conscious. There is a deep jealousy. In the same way that someone can be jealous of someone's good looks, someone can be jealous of one's intelligence... And it goes deeper than just the kind of intelligence which is valued by the markets. People can be jealous of intangible forms of intelligence, even someone's 'emotional sensitivity' can the the subject of envy...

Though of course people's mental models of whether or not someone possesses certain intellectual capabilities are not always accurate, overall people do have a relatively good sense of other people's psychological profiles...

Some people are really good at sensing other people's psychological profiles and these people tend to be the most jealous. Like the bully who picks on the nerd at school. The bully has a strong sense of the nerd's intellectual capabilities and his jealousy fills him with resentment and anger which he cannot explain in words (as he lacks the intellectual capability of even processing his own feelings rationally). His heightened sense of others' psychology may be a bully's only intellectual asset. This can be very frustrating and some of them will make the most of their understanding of psychology to manipulate others because their success in controlling others helps to compensate for their shortcomings in other intellectual areas.

Being able to control others is a form of intelligence, but it's also a pathology once exercised.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#436

Post by int_19h »

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…

You know, I am jealous of religious people sometimes precisely because they can believe in things that give them something to pin their hopes on in situation where there really isn't any hope, and even more so, to give them some higher meaning in life that is universally applicable.

But it's not about pride. This trick only works if you deliberately exclude at least some premises from rational scrutiny, which is basically what religious upbringing does. But if you grow up irreligious and learn to ponder everything, it just doesn't work out because the holes are so glaring.

Besides, if at least there were one religion to choose from, then I could see making a form of Pascal's Wager on that, but as it is, there's simply no obvious reason to me as to why I should prefer Christianity to, say, Islam - or, for that matter, something like Asatru. True belief requires a certainty that anything contradictory to it is automatically false, but if I were to accept the premises necessary to even consider Christianity, then by those same premises those other religions are no longer obviously false.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#438

Post by int_19h »

yuvalkarmi wrote: post #420

For anyone interested the tl;dr, here it is: smart people aren’t necessarily happier because intelligence mostly helps with well-defined problems (logic, puzzles, work tasks). Happiness depends on poorly-defined problems (relationships, meaning, values, identity). Being good at solving structured problems doesn’t equal being good at navigating the messy, ambiguous ones that actually determine well-being. Oh well

It's even worse than that. If you try to apply pure reason to a problem like meaning or values - because you're conditioned to approach any problem this way - the results are often outright depressing.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#440

Post by hopelite »

impossiblefork wrote: post #104
badpun wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but then you know it's a game, so there's no self-deception that you're actually doing something meaningful. This realization thus gives the whole sportsmanship concept.

I don’t get the sense that the participants in a game actually know it’s a meaningless game. We have several domains beyond professional sports in which people have utterly persuaded themselves of their success simply due to external factors, like fans of celebrities and pop musicians who are essentially living in a delusional feedback loop fed by their fanatics. In tech and business in general it is more often how people have convinced themselves of their success based on “successful exists” or revenue growth in an economy that is solely a function of money printing and deficit spending/debt, not some objective measure of improvement. It’s the same kind of thing that on a geopolitical stage has resulted in America with its $1T+ military budget being effectively checkmated by hypersonic missiles, etc.; the delusion that $ = success and superiority and dominance, when all it really did was blind us in all the ways possible.

But if you are truly smart, just telling people the truth, effectively explaining that their disfigured baby is ugly is so jarring to their coping mechanisms that they are browbeat to maintain the fiction of the beauty of the baby. This is also where power and abuse comes in. The ones who will destroy even the smartest people, often specifically because their intelligence threatens those on power and who are abusing humanity. Truly smart people simply have a hard time with lying to themselves though. That’s why they’re less happy in a world of lies, manipulation, and delusion. Truely smart people see the world dominated by the worst kind of narcissistic psychopaths, but they cannot actually let on to that fact or all the narcissistic psychopaths immediately turn on them in the most aggressive and intense way. It’s the nature of dealing with narcissistic psychopaths, and it leads to quite a bit of unhappiness if you are not also a narcissistic psychopath but have to live in the world you see for what it is. It’s probably the origin of the phrase “ignorance is bliss”; the cattle on the ranch are the happiest, until the day they are not at all.

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