Smart people knows too much, knows what they’re missing out.
Why aren't smart people happier?
481–490 of 651 posts
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#482RTFM: "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow"
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think smart people are told much more often as kids how bright of a future they have. So they build up expectations of "succeeding" in some sense (becoming a doctor, getting rich, etc.). These are the sort of expectations you mention in your quote. Not only is there often pressure put on you if you're smart, you adopt those expectations yourself. Or at least hold yourself to that standard. Of course, being smart do…
For me this has 100% been the main source of unhappiness in my life. I wish nobody had ever told me how smart I was as a child. The reality was that I was above average but in an unremarkable collection of kids mostly. I’ve done fine in life academically and career wise but I’ll never live up to the expectations that were planted in my head. Thankfully you can get over this/yourself and let go of ego, ambition, achie…
I think most kids in this situation eventually hit a wall where things become difficult and being "smart" on its own is not enough. And people hit that at different age, maturity and availability of support. They need to transition to working hard and that is tough.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#484I think beyond a certain level surplus IQ begins to cause problems. While still useful, the amount of self-sabotage and thought spirals the brain can generate with the extra power can cause neuroses and unhappiness on a larger scale than those less intelligent are capable of. Combine it with higher societal expectations and it's no great mystery to me why smarter people seem unhappier. Just my thoughts anyways. I'm a…
You are confusing medium intelligence with high intelligence I fear. Truly intelligent people won't be getting into doom spirals and self-sabotage. They will - obviously - use their superior intelligence to avoid that situation (or mitigate it before it becomes an issue), but the merely middling folks get trapped by it and cannot work their way out of it because they're just not intelligent enough to realise it is ha…
My experience is that intelligence is not one-dimensional or a cure-all. It is possible for someone to be able to solve a difficult math problem much quicker than their peers, but still have a really hard time managing emotions or dealing with everyday life.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
This gets to the heart of why visualization works. When you’re conscious mind visualizes outcomes, around say work or sport performance or really anything, your subconscious mind can’t differentiate it from reality; the better you are at visualizing the harder it is for your subconscious mind to tell this. It is why visualization is such a powerful performance technique. Negative self talk is really bad for you.
This is more or less the basis of a lot of western esotericism and ceremonial magick. Consider it a weaponization of the placebo effect, or the closest thing to creatio ex nihilo one can personally experience. Dialogue with the purveyor of negative self-talk is another modality in this space.
The coolest thing about the placebo effect is that it works even if you know it’s a placebo so the more you believe in science the more you can pick some random bs and be like “This will help me because I think it will, and the placebo effect is real” And it will actually. fkn. work.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#486The word “smart” is doing a lot of work here. And I think both the author and a lot of commenters in this thread are equating it with IQ.
What about EQ? I would also consider people with high EQ to be smart. It is a different kind of smart, and provably one more correlated with happiness.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#487"Here’s one last advantage of dividing intelligence into well-defined problem-solving and poorly defined problem-solving: it reminds us to give some respect where respect is due."
There is another way of looking at this. A problem seems "well-defined" when it is presented in terms of your current paradigm. This means that it uses the thought apparatus with which you and everyone around you is familiar. So what appears to be a property of the problem is actually a state of affairs, a property of the whole problem/problem-solver/paradigm system. On the other side of the coin, an ill-posed or "poorly-defined" problem may actually be well-defined in an alternate paradigm. In the alternate paradigm one has new thought apparatus that suddenly make the ill-posed problem tractable.
On this view, what you call "stupid" may be identical to what you don't yet understand and what you call intelligent is that with which you are most familiar. So intelligence is not a property a human can possess but a network effect that is quite intellectually bereft.
Wisdom then is the experience of watching many paradigm shifts over time and realizing that what is stupid today may be smart tomorrow and vice versa.
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me this has 100% been the main source of unhappiness in my life. I wish nobody had ever told me how smart I was as a child. The reality was that I was above average but in an unremarkable collection of kids mostly. I’ve done fine in life academically and career wise but I’ll never live up to the expectations that were planted in my head. Thankfully you can get over this/yourself and let go of ego, ambition, achie…
I think most kids in this situation eventually hit a wall where things become difficult and being "smart" on its own is not enough. And people hit that at different age, maturity and availability of support. They need to transition to working hard and that is tough.
Yep, I’ve hit this a couple of times. I think it’s the reason I left academia at the end of my PhD - that was a way of escaping the discomfort of the required hard work. The second time was as my tech career progressed and my field (ML) grew. There was less low hanging fruit and more competition and the only way to continue was to work harder. That wasn’t until my late 30s though!
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#489Well you just said they are smart, so...
Re: Why aren't smart people happier?
#490This might be pedantic, but I think "happy" is not the right metric. I would love to run a survey which instead asks "are you unhappy" or "are you content"