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Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

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Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#71

Post by paulpauper »

RickJWagner wrote: post #19

Lots of reasons, I suspect. Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter. They are subject to thinking they’ve got it all figured out, when really they don’t. Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think. Then there are other attributes like…

Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.

I'm pretty sure he never said that. He has become like Einstein, where people have projected their beliefs onto him.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#73

Post by spencerflem »

gregw2 wrote: post #44

Ugh. This analysis starts off a little interesting with its observation that "intelligence", as analyzed historically, tends to be about solving bounded-context problems (with a known right answer) rather than open-ended problems (D&D called this "wisdom", right?) But it is lacking so, so, so much in explaining why smart people aren't happier or evaluating the premises of the question. If my teenager gave me this ana…

Great list!

Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#74

Post by whatsThisBtn4 »

Other people call me smart. I think I'm just hard working.

I read enough books to spot liars, and when people you built Idealistic trust with break it, you never leave your guard down.

No psychologist or psychology book can break it. They are just idiots. Or maybe they believe Plato's Noble lie is good for society. But once you see, you can't unsee.

Now everything in my life has ~0 trust but all supervision.

From politics to food safety to personal relationships, don't trust. Verify.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#75

Post by shermantanktop »

pixl97 wrote: post #18
Telaneo wrote: post #12

Horrors beyond your comprehension are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix.

When you look into the void, the void looks back into you. When you start empirically testing the void, the void says "Hey, what are you doing, stop touching me there".

And then the void wraps a cold clammy tentacle around your leg, just to show you that two can play that game.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#77

Post by prmph »

jwpapi wrote: post #55

All these studies suggest loneliness makes you unhappy, however I feel happiest most when lonely and doing my thing and not with people. With people I just feel frustrated or weird, because I think so different than the others.

Being alone does not equal loneliness.

And merely being with people is not an antidote to loneliness.

Being alone and being lonely are distinct concepts.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#78

Post by pessimizer »

dasil003 wrote: post #46
cmiles8 wrote: post #34

I think it’s a combination of: 1. “Smart” people tend to constantly see patterns others are missing. So they’re fretting about problems others are blissfully unaware about. Sometimes these “problems” matter and somethings they don’t. 2. Contrary to popular belief, the smartest people in the room typically despise being the smartest person in the room. They typically are starving for someone to challenge them, to deba…

I think these things are true for some people, but I think there's also a sampling bias when it comes to generalizing these things for the broader population of smart people. IMHO even just the phrase "smartest person in the room" already frames the conversation in terms of stack ranking and some form of implicit value judgement on being smart, and this in turn opens to the door to all kinds of squishy emotional bias…

> In short, I think someone who even thinks in terms of "being the smartest person in the room" is likely to have their ego tied up in the self-perception of being smart, and thus more likely to feel the lack of intellectual stimulation you describe.

Nah. I wouldn't even admit to being smart until I was nearly 40 (no matter what people said, or what I accomplished), and that's only because after taking an IQ test I decided that it was obnoxious and often insulting to other people to deny it. I still don't emotionally accept it, and I think a faithful watcher of "The 1% Club" since it came on would have probably raised their tested IQ a standard deviation. I'm always confused and lost in this world, struggling to understand, and screwing things up, and that's not my mental image of how intelligence should feel.

But when you get something, the rest of the people in the room don't, and you say that you're just an idiot, how do you think it makes them feel? I've been told how it makes people feel, in no uncertain terms.

It's better just to accept reality, and also not to let people make you feel guilty about your needs. I don't know if that's what you mean to be doing, but you're obviously trying to cast the need for intelligent people to have stimulation as some sort of morally-dubious personality flaw. It's unfair.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#79

Post by nonameiguess »

The first comment on the blog has it.

Subjectively, personally, we can all decide for ourselves what purpose we live for, but the purpose of life as a phenomenon in the world is not to enjoy itself. It's to perpetuate itself. Stay alive long enough and win a competition for scarce resources needed to reproduce. Being largely freed from the tyranny of constant threats and true scarcity, humans can aspire for more, but we're still living creatures. When bears come down from the mountains to fight to the death for winner take all access to the pool of twelve available mates, they're not happy when they win. They mate and get back to it, rest a few months, then fatten up again and prepare for another year of fighting to the death, until they finally get old and lose to a younger, stronger competitor. That's the tale of thousands of generations of ancestors spilled into all of us, humanity included.

Even just look at specific highly successful humans. Take famously miserable, no friends Michael Jordan. Win every year, enjoy it for twenty seconds, then immediately get back to work, 14 hours in the gym every day, alienating everyone you ever meet, having no friends, only to win again and feel just as hollow. Why? Because genes and behaviors that make an animal that driven, to succeed at any and all cost, including their own wellbeing, is the basis of success at the only thing that actually matters to life itself, as opposed to any individual thinking creature.

He may or may not want to be that way. I'm a reasonably smart guy, nowhere near as driven or successful as Michael Jordan, but I still often wish I was less smart and less driven than I am. The logic of life dictates that we always want more. Nothing is ever good enough. It's why we're collectively miserable no matter how much abundance and wealth we collectively create, even among those who have more than 99% of the world. We can tell each other all the stories we want about the fairness of the distribution, convince yourself your misery is especially justified because you believe you'll be the first generation of humans ever to pay more for housing than your parents. It isn't that. You're not special. None of us are. Dissatisfaction and always wanting more are core to what makes life life.

Being smart probably makes you better at life, but being better at life is barely correlated with enjoying it, if at all.

Re: Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

#80

Post by prmph »

alun wrote: post #47

Obviously a lot of depression is genetic or due to some unfortunate life circumstance. It's got nothing to do with intelligence. But what I've also noticed is that a lot of people with unbalanced lifestyles end up becoming depressed. For example, they might have a habit of going to bed at weird inconsistent times, wake up late, eat junk food, not regularly exercise or go to the gym, etc. Someone with that lifestyle i…

Have you thought about whether this is kind of backward? It is possible that having a certain genetic predisposition makes it easy or difficult to stick to a good routine.

I see this in myself: No matter what I do I find it very difficult to stick to one routine day after day after day. I just kind of get extremely bored with it quickly. I know my life would probably me noticeably better with more routine, but I'm just not wired that way.

I do have a lot of creativity and a strong analytical mind, so maybe that's the price I have to pay for that.

Long story short: people are wired very differently from each other.

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