Why aren't smart people happier?

This is a question I have been giving some thought to. I am certainly not a genius, and I have known many people smarter than I am, but I have cognitive abilities above the average of the population and of my social circle.

But we associate and measure intelligence (think g) with respect, broadly speaking, to abstract problem solving; it is mathematical ability, logical thinking, shape rotation, vocabulary, working memory. In fact, for people who are "smart," but not in the sense we normally associate with that term (e.g., typically not good at math), we use "street smarts." Picasso, who was an artistic genius, is not defined as "intelligent," and we don't say, "Picasso was an artist, why wasn't he happy (assuming he wasn't)?

The idea is that happiness and cognitive ability live in the same space, but why should that be true? All of us have seen many people with low IQs happy, cheerful, satisfied. We might think it's because they don't understand much, and we'd be approaching an important insight.

Why are we surprised that smart people are not as happy as we think they should be (which is not true, as far as the literature tells us), but not that smart people are not more physically fit (if you are so smart, you can't lift weights three times a week on a rational program, can't you use your brain to eat moderately and be satisfied with 2k calories instead of 5k), and not that smart people don't get laid as much as we think they should, since that should be a positively selected trait?

Why? I'd think the opposite.

Smart people will on average probably be better of financially, but that doesn't transfer directly to happiness.

A characteristic of "smart people" is the ability to identify and solve problems across a range of domains. That works well when the problem is some programming task, drawing a new house, gathering data for a report you write or whatever.

But what if you identify problems you cannot solve? E.g. a smart person might realize, that the "American democracy" is fundamentally broken, but there's no way to solve this (vote all you want, the top of both parties gets their way anyway, so unless you're 100% aligned with Pelosi or Trump you're shafted). A smart person will identify the challenges their children have and will try to solve it by choosing the right school, but will fret forever that it wasn't the right choice.

A not-so-smart person will believe, that as long as his party wins the next election everything will be better. A not-so-smart person will send their children to the default school for the district where they live.

So a smart person will every day identify problems there are out of their realm to solve. They know their actions only have very limited - and perhaps even detrimental - impact on solving these things. All the while the not-so-smart people goes with the flow, doesn't worry too much, because they don't realize there was a problem to begin with.

(I'm doing "averages" here. Of course a not-so-smart and poor person might be acutely aware of their dire financial situation which reflects negatively on their happiness, but at least they're being told they have the power to change that)

Smart people are just as given as anybody to the idea that happiness is about controlling outcomes, hence they are no happier. The desire to control outcomes is correlated with unhappiness because that very desire is predicated on the belief that happiness is a small target - if one would be happy with any outcome then there'd be no need to control which one eventuates. Put another way: happy people aren't the ones who win every game of chess, happy people just like playing chess.

Another aspect of this is that smart people - people good at solving well-defined problems - tend to see well-defined problems everywhere, tend to try and reduce things to well-defined problems, so that they can apply their unique gifts. This manifests as an apparent discomfort with ambiguity, which poses a problem, because comfort with, or at least an openness to, ambiguity is a prerequisite for happiness. The analytical mind is quick to label things and categorise them, including whether they are good or bad, but I find that happiness is more about refraining from applying such labels to things.

It's like with dealing with an incident. The unhappy say "the website is down, this is terrible", whereas the happy merely say "the website is down".

> Generally the people who were most concerned about others well-being were gifted with a light and pleasant demeanour

Kinda like the light and pleasant demeanor of Robin Williams? This is crazy ovservation bias, you have no idea of the actual, lived experiences of these people. Honestly, my experience is that people who really suffer with depression are consistently some of the nicest, most thoughtful people. They understand how shitty it is to be down and do as much as they are capable of to try and stop the spread and help themselves, and being appreciative and positive are, as you point out, pretty excellent at making one feel better. People who are constant downers and negative, in my experience, are more self-obsessed and trying to get something.

> Smart people will on average probably be better of financially, but that doesn't transfer directly to happiness.

eh, not exactly true: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118

> But what if you identify problems you cannot solve?

then you shouldn't take it personally