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Why aren't smart people happier?

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Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#71

Post by necovek »

alberth wrote: post #39

Shouldn’t the real question be “why aren’t more people happy”. Lack of happiness isn’t relegated only to “smart people”. My observation: managing stress related to ever growing amount of responsibilities (as comes with age), finances, and spouse can have a disproportionate impact on one’s happiness. None of which are tied to intelligence.

What do you mean are not tied to intelligence?

If you use your smarts to conclude that having a spouse will negatively affect your happiness, don't have one.

A very intelligent person should be able to figure out a way to improve their finances.

The article makes the distinction between well-defined problems (eg. increase my monthly income) and poorly defined problems (eg. find a spouse that matches you for life), and clearly suggests that intelligence helps with one but not the other.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#72

Post by zaphar »

okamiueru wrote: post #20
willcipriano wrote: post #9

Being smart isn't enough, you have to be wise. Intelligence can help you climb to the highest positions in business and academia, wisdom allows you to understand that it isn't really worth it.

I don't know if wisdom really helps. Or, maybe I just feel that way, because I lack it. How would wisdom help with happiness, when you see a likely worsening climate, rampant inequality for really no good reason, which together with the former is bound to cause significant sivil unrest and wars in the coming decades? In my limited version of it, is to strive to be humble, and the happiness for those around you. Find…

The relationship between wisdom and intelligence is complicated in practice. But the benefit of wisdom is often that it allows you to accept the bad that you can't fix or affect and move on.

You can't single handedly fix any of the problems you highlight. The most you can do is alter your own behavior but let go of the consequences of other peoples behavior. You can't do anything about it.

The balancing act of wisdom is that:

* You can care about and advocate for solutions.

* But you can't own the success or failure because it's not realistic for you to do so.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#73

Post by latexr »

klik99 wrote: post #62
Apreche wrote: post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

Serious question - how old are you? Anecdotally I’ve noticed smart people tend to have this attitude until their late 20s when it starts mellowing out. Now I’m a bit older I see my smarter friends happier than anyone and the less smart just about the same as always

Ding! At a certain point constant existential dread becomes tiring. You spend years mulling on it and the answer continues to be there’s nothing you can do, so what’s the point in worrying? Might as well go do something else and enjoy yourself.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#74

Post by necovek »

bodge5000 wrote: post #41

I'm not sure theres such a thing as smart people to begin with. Plenty of people know their own domain very well, but it seems only a few domains are arbitrarily chosen as intelligent ones. Seeing as we're still struggling to define what intelligence even is, I don't see how we can start labelling people as intelligent or not. At that point, the question is just "why aren't people happier". I doubt theres any one ans…

It might help to read the actual article.

There is a widely accepted definition of intelligence in there, and the article attempts to delineate between problems intelligent people are good at and not-so-good at (at least not better than everybody else).

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#76

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

Apreche wrote: post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

It sounds like you're confusing intelligence with depressive realism and cynicism. :)

Sure, the universe itself is indifferent at best, but that doesn't mean you can't find meaning in life, or that you can't experience happiness. On the contrary, admitting that most things are completely outside one's control seems to be a key to being happy with life.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#77

Post by Bayart »

klik99 wrote: post #62
Apreche wrote: post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

Serious question - how old are you? Anecdotally I’ve noticed smart people tend to have this attitude until their late 20s when it starts mellowing out. Now I’m a bit older I see my smarter friends happier than anyone and the less smart just about the same as always

That's been my experience as well.

I'm much happier in my 30s, having enough experience that I've learned to let go and accept existential dread for the useless bother that it is, than I was in my 20s. Truly realizing that nobody's that special also was a qualitative leap.

Not that I'd call myself « smart » with a straight face, but I certainly used to care a lot about things outside of my control.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#78

Post by willcipriano »

jraph wrote: post #49
willcipriano wrote: post #9

Being smart isn't enough, you have to be wise. Intelligence can help you climb to the highest positions in business and academia, wisdom allows you to understand that it isn't really worth it.

> wisdom allows you to understand that it isn't really worth it Ah, what a relief. Phew! (I'll choose to believe you, short of understanding this, but this is probably enough to be happy)

Get to know your bosses. Like really get to know them.

Mine have told me stories about how their wives left them because they made less than a million one year. Or how their kids are strung out on drugs beacuse they failed to be around them often enough growing up. When they have a conversation, 90% of the time it's about how many widgets the widget factory is going to pump out next month. Old friends come out of the woodwork to ask for money. They are hungry ghosts[0].

Advertising has been effective in putting people on a treadmill. They compete with neighbors for who has the more expensive car, the most attractive wife, the biggest house, who went to the most expensive school. Their days are full of jealous resentment. People who are among the wealthiest to ever live on this planet, feel poor, not beacuse they lack the ability to provide for themselves or their children, but beacuse don't have everything they see on Instagram.

I'm not a religious man, but religion can offer wisdom if you are willing to read beyond the claims of magic.

Christianity prohibited the coveting of your neighbor not because it would make God angry, but because it makes your life worse.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_ghost

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#79

Post by jrochkind1 »

Apreche wrote: post #40

The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congra…

I was expecting the OP to say that smarter people were less likely to be happy, because that is the sense a lot of us who believe ourselves to be "smart" have.

But that's not what OP is about, and it suggests that's not really what the research says either, there's maybe a bit of hint of a small negative correlation like that, but mostly it says: no correlation.

Rather than making the argument you are making, which I have heard before, I found the OP argument to be novel to me, and find really thought-provoking:

The model of "well-defined" vs "poorly-defined" problems, and that what we call "smart" is skill at solving "well-defined" problems, but that happiness actually depends on skill at solving "poorly-defined" problems. Which is probably not correlated to skill at solving well-defined problems at all, that being "smart" at solving well-defined problems doesn't help or hurt happiness, it just doesn't matter.

This rings really true to me, and isn't quite as depressing as the oft-heard theory that you're saying here, that smart people are more likely to be miserable because they see the awful. Not what OP is saying, OP is even disagreeing, really.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier?

#80

Post by 2000UltraDeluxe »

latexr wrote: post #73
klik99 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question - how old are you? Anecdotally I’ve noticed smart people tend to have this attitude until their late 20s when it starts mellowing out. Now I’m a bit older I see my smarter friends happier than anyone and the less smart just about the same as always

Ding! At a certain point constant existential dread becomes tiring. You spend years mulling on it and the answer continues to be there’s nothing you can do, so what’s the point in worrying? Might as well go do something else and enjoy yourself.

Precisely! In the end, life will kill all of us at some point. Until then we have two choices: We either do what we can with what we have, or we don't.
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