Why aren't smart people happier?

I agree entirely with what you're saying about being able to reframe a mood. I feel relatively in control of my emotions, and am normally the person to try bring a positive spin on a bad situation.

However, the happiness I get from reframing something is exactly that. It's "happiness", relative to the immediate recent sadness.

If you accept that there's any nuance or scale to happiness, then I think it's incorrect to say that happiness relative to reframing something bad is equivalent to "genuine happiness" of e.g. the success of a loved one, or a major life celebration.

> they find that the people who score high on one of the many intelligences tend to score high on the others, too, just as Spearman would’ve predicted a hundred years ago.

It keeps coming up through the article, and it feels like the author disagrees with it and doesn't want to accept it, but doesn't give a solid argument against it.

I think intelligence comes down to perceived truth. An intelligent person is someone who demonstrates awareness of something about the world that feels intuitively true that you hadn't heavily considered before.

Intelligence is the word we use to describe people or things that are able to do this truth-revealing with some consistency - for whatever reason.

I think the unhappiness associated with certain types of intellect comes from the clash of that definition of intelligence with the concept of civil society.

The dream of a civil society is where we all work together equally to solve eachothers problems, and we all coexist as peers. The reality of that definition of intelligence is that some people are just a hell of a lot better for society than others.

When a person who doesn't feel intelligent has a problem, the expectation of society is that someone intelligent somewhere, somehow, will have solved that problem for them.

An intelligent person has the opposite experience: they see their problems more clearly, and they don't have the safety net of knowing the best performing of the species working for them to solve them.

An unintelligent person is expected to take and use value in society. An intelligent person is expected to provide and create that value in society. It's pretty easy to see how some intelligent people might feel hard done by with that arrangement.

The really happy intelligent people I've met seem to be the ones who've accepted their intelligence means a life of hardship serving others, whereas the angry intelligent people seem to have an air of entitlement or expectation or feeling that the world owes them something for their genius.

I think some intelligent people are intelligent because of a need for stimulation: they need more new information, so they learn lots and keep learning and the world throws more learnings at them because they get good at it.

Intelligence becomes an emergent property of dealing/distracting from that craving for more information - a beneficial addiction.

So when someone like that stops doing stuff, or that flow of new information and experiences slows with life, that craving/withdrawal becomes sadness.

One solution is to feed the addiction. Learn more. Do stuff. Don't have any stuff to do? Well other people do! Do their stuff for them!