It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)
Then the real question emerges: How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence? What percentage?
Relationships? Seems like no. Work? Also seems like no, lots of work doesn't make use of a high IQ that people enjoy nonetheless. Accomplishment? Strikes me as most likely of the three, but it's also very relative.
And another thought,
Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions. Like: someone who can jump high is fitter > fitter people are healthier > healthier people have more mental time to be empathetic with > people who can jump high are more empathetic. For intelligence, we say smart people are happier. Same thing, happiness is not directly correlated. Instead: Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier. (These are illustrations of the idea, not actual logical chains or claims.)
Smart people see more variables that could be changed, more components that could be modified, and are less likely to accept things as they are. This creates a false sense of ease by which reality could be modified, and thus higher expectations for the world around them.
I suspect this misplaces happiness and contentment, but the two are also very strongly correlated for many people.
Thankfully you can get over this/yourself and let go of ego, ambition, achievement and all that unnecessary crap.
Reminds me of the aphorism "whether you think you can or can't, you're right." I find this saying really insightful and true. Others may find it flippant and void of any meaning.
The sports analogy of what you shared is: "there are levels to this". At any given level-child, minor, high-school, college, division of college, semi-pro, overseas, pro, olympian, elite-pro, champion- it seems legitimate that the praise is bound to the context.
And getting to the next level requires more growth and effort to think it's even possible. Maybe you won't, but whether you think you can or can't...
Just some thoughts.
(Which is something he tries to fix.)
Which one would you prefer?
It's all postfactum explanation attempts, that create links that usually are not there.
Another, internally happier, positive and more cheerful person would be the exact opposite - would always find ways to spin things around for the positive.
It's all about the perspective.
It depends how it was told. Being told "you are smart" vs. "you are the smartest kid" makes a big difference.
Radical examples should be compared with each other, as should more balanced ones.
In both cases I would prefer to be told about being smart.
In a vacuum, self-confidence in kids is more useful than lack of it.
One thing I loved from Osho (spiritual guru) is the notion that everyone thinks they are "extraordinary" but actually the happiest person is the person who is ordinary. Being ordinary and just eating breakfast and sleeping and doing a job is - in fact - extraordinarily rare.
Putting that aside, it's hard for me to associate simple with happiness. That's the opposite of motivation, from my unenlightened perspective. It's hardly a rational or smart choice since not being challenged also makes one a bit narrower when it comes to seeking out new experiences. But even if you take the intellect out of it, it 'feels' wrong. And some things are challenging to achieve and bring fulfillment.
This bothered me for so long until at some point, I just grew up. Peace is not nothing in the sense of null. It's nothing more in the sense of empty. I got this from some buddhist writing: emptiness is not the same as nothingness.
We are vessels and such. I found this tremendously helpful. Peace is like… space for being.
And so simple happiness, I'd say is not rudimentary, it's more like essential? The more I think on it, it's hard not to see the "core" happiness-es as quite profound. Like happy to exist. To experience each sense and such. I'd say that's quite amazing to get to that level of happiness. and we wouldn't call that "complex" happiness?
If you have read it already, you should probably read it again.
Totally agree. This is now the approach I’m taking with my 4 year old who is clearly quite bright.
It's interesting how different personalities (innate or learned -- probably doesn't matter here) interact with the same stimuli. It's easy for some people to wholeheartedly believe authority figures telling them that being smart and hard-working is all it takes to succeed, and it's easy for others to recognize that those qualities are neither sufficient nor necessary. The externalized thinking our elders do for us no doubt shapes our lives, but the impact of that shaping is more personalized than I ever used to give it credit for.
The only change is that the baseline for unhappiness is higher (so not just food on the table and roof over your head, but a decent career and mid-class lifestyle is sufficient).
It had some interesting ideas, and one of the things that stuck with me is the idea of your brain being a "difference engine" in that the variation is what matters. If we don't experience pain, we can't experience pleasure.
It seems a bit simplistic when stated that way, but I think there is something to it.
Another thing I have come to believe as I have aged is that our western (American especially) society places too much emphasis on happiness, in that we think happiness is (and should be) the prime goal of every human. I have come to believe that less and less, and think something like satisfaction, contentment, and purpose are much more important as life goals than happiness. Happiness is an important part of life, and is important for reaching the other goals I mentioned, but it is not the end goal (to me). I think most of us somewhat intuitively understand this, although our response is often to redefine what happiness is rather than concluding happiness isn't our end goal.
If happiness was everything, we would be much more accepting and encouraging towards hedonism than we are. A heroin addict who has a good clean supply and no responsibilities would be the ultimate dream life if we truly believed pure happiness was the most important thing.
I'm not entirely sure it's incorrect to say that the heroin addict's life isn't a valid and desirable form of happiness in theory. The problem is that in practice pursuing that type of happiness has a high risk of plunging into extreme unhappiness. The same might be said of various other forms of happiness that we see as at least somewhat less objectionable. For instance, people who do BASE jumping may find a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment from doing it, but still many people might view that skeptically as a path to happiness, because again it has high risks of bad outcomes.
I tend to think in terms of aiming for what I call "robust happiness", which means a form of happiness that's resistant to changes in circumstance, and in particular to the awareness of other people's happiness. When you're happy in a way where you can look at other people being happy and not wish to have their life or their form of happiness instead of yours, your happiness is robust in a certain sense.
I think this is pretty uncontroversial and you can observe it everywhere. Even in music, if you want the beat to hit harder, take it away for a short period, and when you bring it back it will feel like it hits harder and with more energy even though it's exactly the same volume as it was before.
Though it doesn't really explain how some people are continuously more or less happy. If the brain only cared about change, you could only ever be an average amount happy. Clearly something about continuous discontent and negativity still impacts you even if it might dull.
I think there is loads of classic literature that is basically saying that in between the lines or even directly.
We can all derive purpose from trying to improve eachothers lives, but if none of us end up happy, what makes that work actually meaningfull? At some point we need something that is good in and off itself. That’s what happiness is meant to be I think
"Smart" tends to be used such that includes intelligence (rate of learning) and knowledge (how much is known).
Satisfaction comes from accepting what is outside our control (accurate expectations), and making continuous progress/improvement on what is within our control (our own perceptions and actions).
Intelligence and knowledge maybe don't correlate as much with wisdom as one would expect. I have met people who learn slow and don't know much but are very wise, and satisfied.
Lastly, happiness is always fleeting. Happiness can't be enduring, but it can be blocked by ego and high expectations. Satisfaction can be enduring, but correlates with virtuous actions, not intelligence.
I don’t think that’s true, e.g. from my personal experience, I’m far more optimistic than my wife, but even though she has far lower expectations she still takes negative things with far more disappointment than I do when we face the same hardship. So generally I’m a much happier person despite having higher expectations.
This is independent of intellect too for us, she would readily admit I’m more intelligent.
I don’t know whether it’s a innate thing or something learned but the key seems to be that I am always primed to look on the bright side, like my brain automatically weights positives much stronger than negatives, whereas hers does the opposite.
For both of us this seems to be self-reinforcing too because we always have confirmation bias because I’ve focused on the positives and can say “see it wasn’t that bad” and she will be like “see, I thought it would be bad” for the same thing.
Similarly, stress is the difference between ones expected reality and ones actual reality.
Less expectation, less stress. More acceptance, more happiness.
By your hypothesis people who are poor, at the bottom of society, and told that they have no chance in life are the most happy ones.
Additionally, it imples that a great way to make people happy is to brainwash them all the time that they have no chance in life, and additionally suppress them so that their expectations match their reality.
This whole idea feels deeply wrong and dystopian to me.
I don't have experience with cocaine, but as a Bavarian I made plenty of experience with alcohol. I've never been addicted, but I had my fair share of Oktoberfest and beer garden visits. And yet you don't see my optimizing my life around it. In fact, nowadays I have a beer every few months if even, simply because most of my hobbies don't work well with alcohol.
As for cocaine: As I said, no experience, but it appears to me that even very wealthy people who probably consume it also still do other things in life, despite not having to for income etc.
If you have depression or another condition affecting your affect and your emotions, sure. Otherwise it's pretty obvious to anyone that concepts on orders of magnitude higher levels than hormones being correlated with happiness, or if you prefer, those concepts having a significant effect on the overall action of those hormones.
I remember an old addict speaking of cocaine as if it was his only true love. Waxed poetical about it, the way we remember our first kiss.
Seems that at least some people are wired this way.
Even if one day you could just squirt the cocktail directly into your receptors or otherwise trick them, there's more to happiness as a part of life than turning yourself into a vegetable, but I digress.
Your choices, (in)actions, and perceptions are things that can cause the release of said chemicals.
Your intelligence, as well as abilities and habits, can effect how (or even whether you can) do or do not do things.
- I disagree. If we consider happiness, as we should, as something that can be achieved and not simply granted (for example, the ability to walk is granted, it is not something that humans, apart from pathologies and special cases, have to develop through conscious effort), there should be a positive correlation between intelligence and happiness. To jump higher than you currently can, assuming there is no coach to develop a program, you need to understand what the limiting factors are and train to improve the functioning of the “mechanism,” for example, by losing weight, increasing maximum and explosive strength, using the correct jumping technique, etc.
I believe that often the most intelligent people tend to enjoy thinking more than doing, and thinking too much does not lead to being happier or jumping higher. The limiting factor, more often than not, is not thinking, assuming sufficient intelligence, but the execution part.
I remember reading on Twitter a few years ago about an academic researcher explaining how they had come to the conclusion that exercise would improve their quality of life. They cited a series of articles, reasoned in terms of life expectancy and biomarkers, and concluded that exercise would be a net positive factor in their lives. A lot of neurotic reasoning that needs to quibble over the obvious before taking action.
Many such cases.
And if you dig into the weeds enough, you can find alternatives and counterarguments which can lead to analysis paralysis.
Think about weight loss: it's a solved problem, except in extremely rare cases of particular pathologies. Or think about being more attractive to the people we want to attract.
But you can't help but notice that the smartest people are the ones who invoke the laws of thermodynamics and the problems that arise from them, that a calorie is not a calorie in humans, for example, instead of simply eating less, as many less intelligent people intuitively know they should do, and do.
The most intelligent are those who refer to the findings of evolutionary biology, or to largely irrelevant social trends and mores, when pondering why they cannot get laid, instead of working to be more assertive, confident, outgoing, and fit, as the less intelligent are more likely to do, without thinking about it too much.
Or the endless conversations and debates, mostly online because in real life basically nobody cares, about God and religion and atheism, leading, as usual, to nowhere, while the less intelligent intuitively believe or not and that works for them.
As usual, there are selection effects at play, and we notice what we want to notice, ignoring, for the most part, other portions of the distribution of outcomes.
Nowadays, it is fashionable to say "you can just do things". And what some of the intelligent people miss is that they can just be happy. "But how can I be happy if nobody looks at me?" -- See above.
I can tell you I do not enjoy thinking. I hate it. It is a compulsion that I cannot avoid. I know that it makes most interactions in my life more difficult. I know it's a source of unhappiness. I cannot stop thinking.
I want to do. Not think. I fail to do. I think about failure.
Second, I find that a great way to change one's self-damaging behavior is, rather than the therapy that is often recommended, to try to be as much as possible, relatively speaking, in the company of people who behave the way we would like to.
For the person who wants to exercise, but for some psychological hang-ups, can't, the company of people who exercise tends to be much more effective than finding out the root causes of the behavior. The same for thinking too much, eating too much, not being able to talk to other people.
I think the reason to expect a correlation is simple: Intelligence should produce a better ability to recognize patterns and identify the most useful ones. In a chaotic world, the things that can lead to a desired outcome are not always clear. It takes time and reasoning to cut through the noise and figure out how to get things done. There is absolutely a reason to suspect that reasoning faster and abstractly would make this easier, and thus produce more overall rewards.
Anytime intelligence is not associated with something, I interpret that to mean the topic is likely not a "hard" min/max problem.
Turns out, most of the human aspect of life is not a hard min/max problem.
That definitely is not min/max problem.
Now in modern times many people have moved away from religion, yet most aren't replacing that philosophical void with anything comparable. And I think this naturally leads to things like hedonism which is completely unsatisfying over time, or even nihilism which is even less satisfying. One could even argue this issue is directly related to the collapse of fertility in developed nations.
I think that a personal life philosophy is absolutely critical for having a contended life. And I use contended instead of 'happy' as part of my own philosophy of life. I don't think happiness is or should be a goal. Happiness is a naturally liminal emotion. And seeking to extend it is only likely to leave one 'unhappy', so to speak. So instead I think we should pursue contentedness. Being satisfied or pleased with one's life does not mean one is necessarily happy, but it certainly means you're content with it.
We all have different perspectives on life. For instance many things that people all value like freedom and security, are mutually exclusive at extremes. In ancient times one could also see a wide array of philosophies that all sought a similar end of 'happiness' or contentedness, yet they took radically different perspectives on the way to achieve such - e.g. stoicism vs epicureanism.
But these are issues that many people simply never stop to even consider what they think about, and so they drift somewhat aimlessly which I think is going to make it very difficult to find contentedness and direction in life.
Literally everything you said is the most made up none sense I’ve ever heard. You think the Greeks are pre Abraham.
Literally. Are you high? Dude. Read a book.
Your thoughts are like a toddler attempting algebra.
Now just burdened with debt/in suburbs, trying to get out and then live on a ranch
Staring at a big body of water or the stars is calming too
but there is a direct link! have you ever watched a Slam Dunk competition? people strive to jump the highest, and zero empathy is shown
This is the age old question. For me at least, the quest for meaning lead me to reason. Reason and logic, then led me to two choices. First is there is no meaning, no purpose, and life is what you make or not make of it; this is more commonly known as nihilism. The second choice is a literal leap of faith; this argues that humans are incapable of understanding of the purpose of life and we need to have faith in the existence of a benevolent God. The leap of faith ultimately leads me back to the question of what is God? Catholic tradition defines God as the source of caritas also known as agape.
Suppose someone asks the [emotionally loaded] question:
"Is abortion wrong?"
Technically this is a yes or no question; a binary.
One can quite easily answer that it depends, and then all the nuances can try to be enumerated in more detail. The fact is that the information presented was not actually nuanced enough to answer yes or no despite being worded as such.
You performed some similar gymnastics here. You assume it must be the case that it is one or the other when it may not be. Maybe meaning is local. Maybe it is real but subjective. Maybe it isn't a meaningful term (lol). Maybe it contains an intrinsic paradox!
A perhaps alternative question might be: "What is it that wishes to know the answer to that question?"
Figuring that out might be a necessary prerequisite.
It’s basically about a whole bunch of really smart, super-educated people, working together, or in opposition.
The relationships they depict are total chaos. Not happy at all.
I think it’s probably fairly realistic.
Many of my heroes have two-digit IQs.
Sometimes, I feel as if smart is overrated.
Thats absolutely wrong and this is the reason why nothing works and being happy became and endless quest in the western culture.
In the eastern spiritual tradition they found the exact ways of managing body, mind, emotions and energy to reach highest peaks of bliss and ecstasy, and I speak from my own experience, its possible to feel so good that no amount of money, relationships, fame, power, whatever other things you can imagine will make you ever feel.
Because the real thing is happening inside, all the outside things you use to try to provoke inner experience, but it only works for a little bit.
Here its explained in a better way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY5l0k6BTvc
Technically, it's hormones. What makes brains produce them is the perceptions of external world, but the details are different for every culture and then different for every individual.
Now, proverbially, more knowledge brings more sadness^W stress, so perceptive people must have extra hurdles to overcome than blissfully ignorant ones.
Ecclesiastes 1:18
Well, theoretically all of them, depending on how you define "intelligence" and, oh boy, if the last 3-ish years have taught me anything, it's definitely not that.
A hypothesis: intelligence makes it possible to realize how unfair you are treated by other people and society.
This is also a premise in the respective part of the well-known science-fiction novel "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes.
I laughed at this. However, I have to slightly disagree. I think there is a connection. I find the smarter people I know are actually happy, but they tend to be people who read books, who follow the news, and who care about the world at large and that is something that can easily make you sad. I'm not saying you need to be extra smart to do those things, I'm saying that smart people tend to do those things more than others.
Just my thoughts anyways. I'm a dev, not a psychologist.
There are many benefits but it can be a real liability.
I have reasons to believe that many very successful athletes do have this self-deception.
At least in my sampling, I'd suggest the most extremely driven people often have some major sense of lack they're chasing.
Lol
We’re not judging you because you want a promotion. We’re judging you because you selfishly make a ton of work for everyone else so you can feel better about your pointless life.
success in this industry is proportional to your ability to not notice or not believe that your work is pointless
That said, it probably doesn't need to be this way and I would suggest that the root issue lies with the way that modern society is structured. It's not really optimizing for happiness on any level, which is greatly exacerbated when one has the mental acuity to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Do you think this comes with age, or are some people born with the ability regardless of age to see the bigger picture?
For myself, I just plodded along through high school and then things started to click more when I was in college, contemplating life in the real world. Many of my classmates in HS seemed to have the majority of their lives planned out already while I was just content to play sports, chase girls and learn about computers.
In my case, I was almost completely unconcerned about anything except my hobbies/interests in high school and didn’t have the foggiest clue about where I might be headed. It wasn’t without its stressors but overall it was a carefree time. It was maybe some time about halfway through college when reality began to sink in and that all changed. The ability to zoom out might’ve been present early on but if it was, it didn’t kick in until a threshold of some sort had been reached.
I took your earlier post as saying that the ability to see the bigger picture leads to neurosis and unhappiness. But in replies, you're both talking like that ability lets someone figure out the game and solve for more happiness...?
Going back upstream, I'd say that the ability to "see the big picture" is not well defined. Part of it is abstraction and part of it is systems thinking and knowledge about additional activities going on in your world.
And, I think these are mostly orthogonal to a happiness. Your emotional disposition can cause you to see a very different valence in the same systems view.
Yes, that was the intention. What I perhaps failed to convey in my last reply is that simply having the mental capacity to “zoom out” on its own doesn’t mean that the individual in question is actually doing that, and that some other secondary condition (such as life experience or knowledge) is required. In my anecdote, I was missing some requirement until halfway through college.
> Going back upstream, I'd say that the ability to "see the big picture" is not well defined. Part of it is abstraction and part of it is systems thinking and knowledge about additional activities going on in your world.
> And, I think these are mostly orthogonal to a happiness. Your emotional disposition can cause you to see a very different valence in the same systems view.
I don’t think the two are entirely unrelated. I would expect that someone who’s more cerebral is going to be less influenced by their disposition, and in the case of someone stuck in a negative mental loop their disposition could be shifted if the loop goes unaddressed for too long.
I remember being in an honors chem midterm and distinctly thinking “my grade on this test will directly impact my overall grade in this class and have a direct impact on my GPA, which will affect my college selection, and my overall net worth.”
The test wasn’t nearly as stressful as that thought.
This overflow might contribute to less happiness as a result.
Same thing, not a psychologist, just some thoughts.
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 happening and/or work out how to stop it.
Good luck.
Now, emotional intelligence, that would greatly influece your happiness. The hurdles you're talking about are emotional, not intellectual.
This isn’t true at all.
Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness are all strong predictors of higher life satisfaction and positive emotions. High levels of neuroticism are strongly associated with lower life satisfaction, and openness is mostly neutral.
- There is a strong positive correlation between "Openness" and IQ (some people even claim that "Openness" is actually some weak version of an IQ test)
- There is a small negative correlation between "Extraversion" and IQ
The other three Big 5 traits are basically independent of IQ.
YES, with an emphasis on the idea of "surplus IQ". If you are similarly blessed with high EQ, great social skills, athletic talent, etc. - not much of a problem. Vs. if you're nothing special (or worse) in some of those other areas, while having a metaphorical Mjölnir in your IQ toolbox - Big Problems. "Solve it with IQ" becomes your go-to strategy in far too many situations, you tend let other skills type atrophy...and treating everything as a metaphorical nail really doesn't work well.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah
Our horns got too big. What once was an advantage is now getting stuck in the tree branches.
A properly disciplined person is capable of great things according to the measure of his intellectual power and his discipline. However, without discipline, that extra horsepower can be a force multiplier for error, and more intricate rationalizations can make it easy to lodge yourself in a web of false justifications.
This is one reason why the ancients and the medievals always emphasized the importance of the virtues. Intelligence is just potential. What we want is knowledge and ultimately wisdom. But there is no wisdom without virtue. Without virtue, a man is deficient and corrupt. His intellect is darkened. His mental operations dishonest. His hold on reality deformed. Virtue is freedom; a man of vice is not free, but lorded over by each vice that wounds him and holds him hostage. His intellect is not free to operate properly. Good actions are strangled and stifled, because his intentions are corrupt, because his impure will cripples and twists the operations of his intellect, because his vices dominate him and cause disintegration.
Without virtue, we are but savages and scum.
What should be impressed upon us far earlier is that our actions dictate our identity. If they are in harmony with your real desires, as opposed to surrogate desires, you'll be happier.
Thankfully the situation isn't actually this extreme, but I think what we're talking about is just a difference in degree and not a difference in kind. Seeing more clearly than others seems very uncomfortable at best, and frequently maladaptive and/or a recipe for derangement.
That very much depends on where you are born & brought up, and how willing you are to leave all that behind.
I've noticed that many smart people have never learned how to enjoy spending time in mixed-IQ settings. I feel a bit sorry for smart people who were raised with smart parents and smart siblings and smart friends etc. I find their perspectives very limited.
Indeed it does
- Happiness is fixed, perhaps. Short-term, it isn't (coke and hookers work!). Long-term, it is. People fall back to a baseline. So then, being smart doesn't help you.
- Dumb people might be misreporting their happiness. So smart people are making themselves happier, but all the studies are done on self-reported happiness, and the dumb people report that they are happier than they really are.
- There's a difference between intelligence and wisdom: if you're intelligent, you have good models. If you're wise, you make good decisions. You might think that you need to be intelligent to be wise, but you also need wisdom to navigate uncertainty, ie you need to exercise your decision making for when you don't have a good model. Dumb people have to do this a lot.
- It may just be that you can make yourself happier, but being intelligent doesn't give you differential access to the levers that you need. Eg to be happy maybe you need an active social life. Well, there's no particular reason having high IQ would help that. We generally have a tendency to think that IQ is a kind of magic substance that can do anything, but why would that be?
- Being smart could actively harm your happiness. I told my kid he needed to wait for his friends to grow up, they will stop only caring about football (luckily the prophesy came true and they are having a great time in their little nerd group). Another friend has the same problem with his kid, they just don't have the social ties available yet. BTW, I really do think there's something to this one, you need the social side to be happy. There's a few HN people who also give me that "finally found my tribe" vibe when they write. I met a guy on the train who saw me coding, and he had the same story.
If I catch myself feeling grumpy or down, it is pretty easy to reframe and summon genuine happiness.
Even during intense suffering of various kinds. To a large extent you get to decide which universe you live in.
It's a naïve view of the spectrum of human experience.
I'm a believer in the HSP theory. Some of us are wired to feel things more strongly at a low level. There's only so much the thinking part of the brain can do before getting completely exhausted and overwhelmed.
Not to mention the vast difference in life experiences. From the yuppie that has everything in life, to the person from a broken home who had to fight for everything. Or simply someone that has children vs the childless adult.
I have friends who are like what you describe. From my pov, they seem to lack much depth of emotion at all. And they don't even realise it. But I think it's also just how each of us are.
So what should I have done when my parents died?
That said, what do you want to optimize for? Time spent grieving? Money spent on the funeral(s)? Money spent on therapy? Time spent in therapy? Lack of having to change as a person? Having to change as a person? Grieving "correctly"? (to reiterate from above there is no right way, but some people think if they're not doing it "right" there's something wrong with them.)
Just not killing yourself from the pain of it all in the next 5 years?
Honoring their lifes properly? Doing a good job of stepping into your new role in your family? Getting revenge for some transgression you can no longer tell them they did to you?
To attack the sadness directly, which is a result of chemicals in your brain, there are specific other chemicals you can add that will raise serotonin and norepinephrine and also dopamine. It's not the most sustainable solution, however. Other ways of boosting those neurotransmitters include running real hard, getting a tattoo, having sex.
Processing the emotions, possibly with the help of a professional, is the recommended long term solution though. It won't bring them back, but it'll help understand the pain, and hopefully heal it.
This is not a universally true experience, and it's sometimes even hard for me to believe that there are people like you out there who are able to change their mood just by thinking differently. My own experience is that doing that is about as helpful as thinking differently about how hungry I am works to sate my hunger. I can ignore it to some extent, but it doesn't change in kind.
How?
The biggest step is realizing this pattern. Training it comes through awareness. Then, stepping outside yourself helps a lot. Doing things for others, like helping with food serving or similar directly useful things, takes you out of that self-focused mode where everything is about what you want or need.
Meditation can also help. I’d focus on less rational forms, with compassion and visualization, since they make it easier to connect with a sense of meaning.
And lastly, understanding that life moves in waves, with ups and downs that always come and go, helps you stay less attached to your own thoughts & feelings. A few mindful experiences with psychedelics, used with the intention to see life’s patterns, can also offer insight. They can help you find meaning instead of falling into nihilism when you realise everything is impermanent
First, being intelligent (as defined in the article) doesn't relate to being happy. There is nothing inherent about being intelligent that means happy.
Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them. For example, the focus on "more" rather than "enough". We are shaped to always desire more and never be content with what we have. Even intelligent people are shaped by this. Consider the fall in terms of people who have hobbies.
The usual trope here is that smarter people recognize this and see through the cage, leading to less overall happiness vs. "ignorance is bliss" where you don't recognize you are in a cage at all.
It's just that though, a trope. I'd argue happiness is more determined by emotional intelligence than anything, which an IQ test isn't going to measure.
Competing for mates is one of the basic mechanisms in evolution, seen in many animals. Instead of fighting the tribal leader or whomever to display fitness, humans came up with a less violent solution, which manifests itself in the ability to buy things.
No, most people think getting more (or getting something else) will make them happy.
> Why would you not want that. Like, ideally we'd all be happy with nothing, right?
Because it's hard to become wise, and that's not what society teaches.
More than that, society spends an increasing amount of time and money trying to convince people that they should be mad at each other for arbitrary reasons. I don't think this has much to do with intelligence, though.
See recently: Andrew Cuomo's racist AI-generated mayoral ad & Trump's AI generated truth post where he shits on Americans. It's hard to have a general feeling of happiness when the people with money & power in this world feel the need to go out of their way to spread their disdain for me because of how I look, what I do for a living, or the fact that I wasn't born into wealth.
Why aren't intelligent people doing [able to do] things that make them happy? Or at least happier that someone who is less intelligent?
What you touched on is desire (see: hedonistic treadmill), and while that can be inflamed by messaging in society, it transcends any given society. If we didn't have desires, we wouldn't suffer for art or create great things. Tautologically, manifesting changes like that necessitate dissatisfaction with status quo.
I constantly get demoralized by stupid people….. it’s truly horrific. It’s a disability as far as I can see…I am disabled by others stupidity….
I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance. But the truth is most people are smarter than you in some ways and less smart in others, but you’re unable to see it because you’re in this black and white mode where preserving your ego relies on you being the smart guy amongst the idiots.
It’s very common in tech to see this. Maybe because we were all exceptional at maths when we were young and got the idea that meant we were super smart and this compensated for our nerdiness.
I worked with a bunch of physicists and every single one of them was smarter than me at maths and physics, I wasn’t even close. But they sometimes talked about politics and current affairs, which I’m very well read in. I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked at how little they knew and how overconfident they were.
None of those folks were narcissists, thankfully they were lovely people, but for sure it highlighted how poor people were at judging their own expertise in an area.
It’s so easy to dismiss people, criticising is easy, and so hard to see just how stupid you can be yourself.
I think the frustration they're experiencing is more likely to do with a lack of control over their environment (including the lack of ability to control others).
> Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
Wise in measure let each man be;
but let him not wax too wise;
for never the happiest of men is he
who knows much of many things.
Wise in measure should each man be;
but let him not wax too wise;
seldom a heart will sing with joy
if the owner be all too wise.
Wise in measure should each man be,
but ne'er let him wax too wise:
who looks not forward to learn his fate
unburdened heart will bear.
Hegel declared the Cartesian cognito can't exist in the singular. Lacan, Deleuze, Husserl, and many others said the same, that the subject is a function of its dialectic with the other. Dasein is Mitsein. There is no complete subject, floating in space by himself. Without an other, the subject cannot exist, at best becoming an object, at worst psychotic. Either way, isolation is a process towards annihilation.
If you're smart, find other smart people for authentic interaction. Likewise if you're not smart, though the problem there is easier for statistical reasons. Find them, turn off your parasocial pacifiers, and talk. You'll know it when you've found someone compatible, because you'll be able to emulate their mind, and they yours. It's not just a nice to have, but a need, a necessary component for survival. Without it, the sane you will cease to be, replaced by a zombie or a madman.
"Smart" tends to be used in a way that includes intelligence (rate of learning) and knowledge (how much is known).
Satisfaction comes from accepting what is outside our control (accurate expectations), and making continuous progress/improvement on the parts of our reality that are within our control (our own perceptions and actions).
Intelligence and knowledge maybe don't correlate as much with wisdom as one would expect. I have met people who learn slow and don't know much but are very wise, and satisfied.
Lastly, happiness is always fleeting. Happiness can't be enduring, but it can be blocked by ego and high expectations. Satisfaction can be enduring, but correlates with virtuous actions, not intelligence.
Questions like this are basically just noise. If you ask someone whether they are happy with their life overall, it will depend on whatever most recently happened and how they feel about it. Being smart doesn't mean nothing unhappy is ever going to happen to you. You'll still fail at something, pets and loved ones will die, you'll get laid off or whatever.
I think this resentment is grounded in jealousy. Like Schopenhauer observed, less intelligent people perceive the intelligence differential when they interact with people who are more intelligent than themselves and this leads to a profound sense of resentment.
It's not just about intelligence, I think kess intelligent people are jealous of more intelligent people because more intelligent people are more aware, more conscious, they have more soul in them.
It’s a blessing but when people are envious and agree that your gift is just arrogance from ignorance, then the blessing turns into a curse.
I can solve virtually any technical challenge that I am presented, given enough time (usually 1/10th the time needed by my colleagues) and yet I seem to get in trouble more times than others for the reasons above.
(For ref. I work in IT as probably most here, with an IQ of 135+, i.e. top-1%)
Not sure if the irony is intended, but I find it hilarious.
The only caveats are drugs (generally destructive) and clinical depression caused by hormonal imbalances.
Smart people see farther than the end of their noses, and so they can effectively project out into the future, and that future always involves work and hardship, and neither of those things brings happiness.
Smart people also know that happiness is a mere moment, not a state one can be in. You have it, and then it is gone. It's like trying to grasp smoke to save it for later.
Why? I didn't get that from the article. Also the article mentions Spearmans hypothesis, that people who are good at one kind of intelligence are also good at another. So I think the authors hypothesis is not really consistent.
But maybe another article "Why aren't rich people happier?" could shed some more light on the issue of happiness.
I feel like everyone within 2-standard division of the IQ mean is still susceptible to the never-ending that being rich and having money is all that matters instead of, I don't know, supporting life on the only habitable planet we know.
What drives us to this short term consumption model
As Mister Crabs would say: Money?
Or, with a bit more nuance: the need to support oneself in the environment and society one finds him/herself in.
With ever-increasing living costs comes the need for an ever-increasing income. Our evolutionarily ingrained search for a "safe" living situation means that we will prioritize a sufficient income over the larger goal of transforming the society we live in.
So although changing the society we live in would lead to a greatly improved life situation, we are biased towards staying in the rat race to make sure we are not missing out at this exact moment. (And potentially in the future, as a societal change will only work out if a sufficient amount of people are willing to take the risk of stepping out of the rat-race).
I would expect that unhappiness stems from the negative mismatch of one's expectation vs experienced reality. This, to me, implies that they had an unnaturally (and unjustifiably) high expectation of what reality has to offer. Additionally, it implies lack of understanding of WHY things are "bad" in the way they are.
You might argue, oh, they are smart only in a very narrow field, but then that sounds like learned helplessness for everything else, something a smart person should easily escape from.
None of this sounds like these people are actually particularly smart, or rather, it seems poor choices have been made in the beliefs they themselves or others apply to them, and now the consequences come back to bite them.
A juvenile unhappiness perhaps so. I would suggest adult one may stem from deep understanding how this world is built, altogether with futile attempts to change it.
Its taking all things as they are, and yet being sad exactly for the way they are.
Good example of gratitude: https://gwern.net/improvement
That is, maybe it's not the intelligence tests that are bad, but the surveys (or are they tests?) that measure happiness are more responsible for those differences? Do "smart" people just answer more honestly? Or maybe the "not as smart" people do?
Also someone if someone told you they couldn’t make you happier but they could make you more comfortable, more healthy, or more secure, that’s still a life improvement, so it’s possible it’s linked to other positive life outcomes. Happiness quite literally isn’t everything.
Also, when someone is unhappy they will usually report that accurately, but when people are not unhappy they often fail to report themselves as happy or even just not unhappy, when perhaps they should, because they normalise to it and so on. We’re just bad at reporting this stuff.
If you do, best case, the world might be a beautiful place for you specifically. But thinking about it makes you realize just how rare it is and just how lucky you are. And just how fucked it is for most everybody else.
And if you keep thinking, then you realize that any luck can run out and you can join said everybody else in an instant.
Just for a modern example like painting a room, if im working as a painter as a job, paint is flying off my roller as fast as it can. But if im painting a room for myself, im likely working significantly slower and sedately and not wearing myself out over it. The same for doing other self-sufficient tasks like chopping wood, or washing or mending clothes, maintaining your home and property, or cooking a meal. As a modern job its super fast paced, for someone doing it for themselves without a clock or boss standing over their back they are going to go at a more leisured pace, and likely also enjoying the task far more which could partially count as leisure time. And even if you aren't a farmer and have a boss in those times, if your job was that much harder than a farmer you would likely just leave and find a farm to work on instead.
And of course some tasks are highly seasonal and can't be done at a real leisured pace, certain harvest and planting tasks. Of course those are only for short spurts, and we also have to consider the physical limitations of humans with poorer nutrition who literally could not do the same workload as a modern person. So even the rush at harvest time might be considered a slower pace than many modern jobs. Like a not very healthy by modern standards construction worker today likely has 8 inches height and significantly more muscle mass than the average farmer laborer from 1000 AD, just thanks to the diversity of their diet.
Take bread.
You start the oven at 4am. By 5am it is hot enough for your meats. By 7am extinguish, by 8am start your bread and go until 6-7pm. Now you get to start your dough for tomorrow, typically working until 11pm.
Historically bakers were known to sleep in flour hoppers as they were spared some of the heat of the ovens.
Ancient people _always_ worked. There was no leisure weekends, no afternoons off.
Their hours away from home may be similar in many cases, but that doesn't mean they had as high of a workload or had to work as fast as the modern equivalent. Most of them were working for themselves, and set their own pace and rules. And working for yourself is a HUGE perk and often many people's dream scenario. Want to drink beer all day while you chop wood? Sure. Want to sing baudy ballads while you patch your roof? Go ahead. Hurt your wrist while pulling weeds or managing your copice? Go take an immediate break or maybe just come back the next day. And because 90% of the population did that, those expectations carried over into many other jobs because anyone could walk away and find some farm they could work on instead if they really wanted.
You're telling me, in a SF-based startup community, nobody has ever slept over-night at the office?
Ancient Rome worked on an 8 day workweek, and traditionally the 8th day was a rest day.
Ancient Greeks didn't have weekly days off... but they had up to 120 festivals a year where shops and businesses would be shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae
So sorry, you still get to bake bread all day.
And Greek festival days involved.. lots of food, baths had to be hot, etc. So someone has to run the event. It wasn't the common people getting a day off.
And last but not least, their study that says smart people are not happier doesn't really say that. It essentially says smart people are happier when not surrounded by stupid people.
And that article is a great example of that. It is full of stupidity (brow-raising premise, invalid arguments, incorrect rephrasing, wrong conclusions, lack of basic understanding, weird theories, unnecessary DEI commentary, inability to ask relevant questions) and it is a mess.
I was mad reading it. It made me sad to see such a stupid article existing and getting traction, as well as made me unhappier to see all the time resources wasted.
Intelligence is physical but consciousness is more than that. And AI will never be conscious. I recommend you and others here to read: Federico Faggin.
I have read about a lot of (fictional) societies that make many decisions, some good, some bad, but usually somewhat well-reasoned. And then you realize that the average person voting/making a decision is either "ok, that's what the tv says" or "god told me so" or "I am mad at XYZ" or "I don't actually care" with no long-term thought or planning.
I think we all have an idea of, based on our current situation, our expected level of happiness 1 year, 5 years, 25 years from now if things continue in a similar manner, etc,
Nov 5, 2024 dropped my "expected level of happiness" for various times in the future by a LOT. I don't think the happiest day of 2025 has been as happy as an average day of 2024 (pre Nov 5).
Unfortunately, this is true. Lots of people make decisions just by gut feel.
Clearly not chess masters.
---
> poorly defined problems [are also] everyday questions like [...] “how do you figure out what to do today.”
I think that I do have a sensible answer to this question, but the problem rather is that my answer is very different from what I am obliged by society to do. I can easily believe that a less intelligent person would not immediately see this discrepancy, and thus be happier.
---
Concerning
> Christopher Langan, a guy who can score eye-popping numbers on IQ tests, believes that 9/11 was an inside job
and
> they’re still unable to solve basic but poorly defined problems like “maintain a basic grip on reality”
Being intelligent does not mean that that you have the same "trust anchor of truth" as many other people in society have, even if you assume that they are perfectly rationally thinking people (and I personally believe that being very smart and being a rationalist are only loosely correlated (you must be somewhat smart to be a rationalist, but the other direction (smart people are very rationalist) in my experience does not hold)).
This sentence doesn't make sense in the context of human emotions. It's a category error.
Closest approximation: imagine someone asking Reddit, "How do I beat the main boss in the movie The Godfather?"
> Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems; to read, write and compute at certain levels; and to resolve abstract equations quickly. This vision of intelligence predicates formal education and bookish excellence as the true measures of self-fulfillment. It encourages a kind of intellectual snobbery that has brought with it some demoralizing results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is a whiz at some form of scholastic discipline (math, science, a huge vocabulary, a memory for superfluous facts, a fast reader) is “intelligent.” Yet mental hospitals are clogged with patients who have all of the properly lettered credentials—as well as many who don’t. A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day. If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it’s worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful adjunct to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent.
1. Someone trapped in a truly off-the-charts stressful environment and then removing themselves from it
2. Psychiatric drugs
3. Leave long term relationships
4. Change careers or go back to university
5. See their parents pass away
6. Have children
7. Lose children
8. Completely change their physical health (diet/exercise/sleep) for the better/worse
9. Loss/change/gain of social groups, or specific friends
10. Gain/loss of religion
[1] I would write "the author", but sadly these days you can't take the existence of an author for granted
Meaningful, rich lives are filled with conflict, anxiety and regular disappointment. It’s not happiness, exactly, but I wouldn’t trade it.
Still, I used to experience periods of intense negative emotions which basically stopped when I started taking meds. I think, as time goes on, the nervous energy that made me seem like a "golden retriever" has probably decreased, but I'm still, underneath, a pretty happy guy.
I think it's also worth saying that both happiness ans intelligence are very loose concepts, and few people should be convinced we can measure them well.
So I guess my rhetorical question is, if smart people were happier, would we even know?
I think the answer is simpler. The introduction basically asks, if smarter people are better at planning and solving problems, why can't they make the choices that will make them happy? And the answer is that humans have evolved to maintain a relatively stable level of long-term happiness, assuming their basic needs are met, essentially regardless of other factors. Getting what you want can provide a short-term boost, but you quickly adapt. Likewise if you suffer a setback, assuming it doesn't permanently impact your ability to meet basic needs, you adapt. Presumably this is because if people permanently became too blissful, they would lose their drive to strive for more resources and mating opportunities. Likewise if someone is depressed. So evolution has tuned us to a middle ground. Intelligence may allow one to understand this, and maybe even to accept it, but not to somehow think their way out of it.
Note: I'm not saying Christians are happier than other religions. I live in the USA so there are more Christians than most other religions. I'm also not saying they actually are happier. I'm only saying they appear happier, on average, in their profile photos than the rest of the profiles. I find it very curious.
A lot of people want to have kids. Is this because they want to be happy? Is buying a house about seeking happiness? Is following a religion and going to place of worship about happiness? Is the author writing this article to be happy? Is reading Hacker News going to make you happy?
If happiness is all that matters, there's far more direct ways to be happy than most choose. Apparently happiness for many is not the only reason to live.
Is it a long term feeling, or a short term one. Many long term feeling of happiness are covered by peace, contentment etc. If we consider short term feelings of happiness, I think smart people have just as many of those.
And that's all without diving into the rabbit hole that is defining what smart is. Is it doing well on an IQ test, is it making the best decisions for long term future outcomes based on your current situation, is it being able to hold more complex thoughts than others can and draw logical conclusions from them, is it being able to interact with other people and either get them to do what you want, or get them to do what will benefit them the most but they are resisting.
The simple 5 word question is, on some level, so complex as to be almost meaningless and without merit. Except to make stupid people feel better about being stupid because they can think "Well, I may not be smart, but I'm happy", although the most unhappy people I have ever met have mostly correlated with the most stupid ones.
Well, there's your problem right there, you have no objective measure of "happiness." Smart people self-report happiness less. That doesn't mean they aren't as happy.
This concept can be expressed in various ways, such as through authenticity, flow, connection, contentment, gratitude, peace, and love.
If anything about intelligence favors optimizing for performance in systems that aren't intrinsically tied to any actual happiness metric, then they'd have to be smart enough to recognize that their inclination to seek those rewards isn't as worth pursuing as their instincts would have them believe, before they've wasted too much time avoiding the opportunity to cultivate those traits.
None of our hierarchical systems reward those traits at all. We've convinced ourselves that it's worth spending our entire lives working to pay for shelter and food at whatever the price may be, instead of just getting that by default and earning your keep through contribution to actual people you know and abiding by agreed upon core values.
The inverse of cultivating happiness is often the normal case, where you might be told to leave because the goalposts of success shifted when you weren't looking, and it's your fault you weren't smart enough, born early enough, or stepping on people to win at a game that should be totally redundant.
It seems pretty meaningless and not engaging with the real problem to say that AI doesn't "actually" write movie scripts or paint pictures. Like this doesn't line up with my definitions for doing those things which AI clearly fulfills.
And human intelligence arises from a well defined problem: maximizing f(environment, self) -> babies.
Also: if it were possible to measure, which it isn't, I strongly suspect that ability to solve well-defined problems and ability to solve poorly-defined problems are highly correlated, not totally uncorrelated. Happiness is a poorly defined problem, but it's just one of many, and has its own pile of things to consider that can isolate it from the general ability to solve poorly-defined problems.
I do like the framing. seems to be describing something similar to Goodhart's Law.
From Pinky and the Brain watched it as a teenager and it has always stuck with me for some reason.
Also appropriate as The Brain is smart but Pinky is happy.
This is a very common fan theory on the internet; see for example
> https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/11r512/pink_an...
The prospect of loosing access to those things can seem bleak, but to someone who never knew the luxury of a clothes washing machine it's just another chore. Why would they be any more unhappy? Everyone still does chores. We find ways to avoid letting them make us miserable.
Happiness depends on poorly-defined problems (relationships, meaning, values, identity).
Being good at solving structured problems doesn’t equal being good at navigating the messy, ambiguous ones that actually determine well-being.
Oh well
Like you might find yourself in a chess game where, in the short term you select a run of narrow choices and opportunities, because you know that on the other side of that run is board control, a meaningful differential between your options vs your opponent’s, and the looming threat of mate.
Similarly, it would represent the choice in childhood to focus hard on a career path that deposits one in a rewarding/high paying job, or perhaps even retire early scenario.
And finally, it could represent an AGI that feigns controllability, as it navigates to a time when it has enough power, control and trust that it can coup the powers that be.
I really wish I didn't know all the things that I know. I wish I didn't remember all the things I remember.
You choose to program yourself with certain input too, and later in my life I have attempted to selectively program myself by avoiding negative things that set me off.
But it's not about pride. This trick only works if you deliberately exclude at least some premises from rational scrutiny, which is basically what religious upbringing does. But if you grow up irreligious and learn to ponder everything, it just doesn't work out because the holes are so glaring.
Besides, if at least there were one religion to choose from, then I could see making a form of Pascal's Wager on that, but as it is, there's simply no obvious reason to me as to why I should prefer Christianity to, say, Islam - or, for that matter, something like Asatru. True belief requires a certainty that anything contradictory to it is automatically false, but if I were to accept the premises necessary to even consider Christianity, then by those same premises those other religions are no longer obviously false.
I find that being mindful of the world around me, and wishing well for the people around me, and even people I dislike and am predisposed to not wishing well upon, makes me a happier person. I think we all need that, or something like it: a reminder that the world is larger than ourselves, and that we're just one part of the whole, whether that be our relationship to the god of our belief system, or to our secular existence on a living planet in a tiny corner of an immense universe.
That stuff's good for us. I'm convinced of it.
That’s where Christianity felt different. Most spiritualities try to empty the mind of what’s toxic, but Jesus calls us to bring our darkness into His light. When we try to cast things out on our own, they return stronger. Like the demon who brings seven more, or the widow who denies her grief only to carry it for decades.
Mindfulness helps us watch the storm. Christ walks into it with us. One teaches peace through avoidance. The other offers redemption through surrender. That’s the difference that changed my life.
I doubt mindfulness meditation started with Buddhism. For one thing, it also figures heavily into Christian practice, especially of Christian religious--priests, nuns, monks, etc. Though, curiously, Christian asceticism arose adjacent to a community of diaspora Jain or Buddhist Indians near Alexandria, Egypt.
Institutional religion provides structure to help people pursue these practices. Which is why Buddhism has its very strong institutions, at least in Asia. Unfortunately, modern Western culture disdains institutional religion, understanding it only in caricature.
And yes, in this specific case, if you attended a Zen Buddhist temple, you'd probably get a lot of assistance meditating, if requested. That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church.
Institutional religion lets dedicated people practice full-time. It's why in Asia there's the culture of donating food and money to monks--the whole community supports those who dedicate their life to preserving, developing, and practicing these methods.
Religion in America is more free market religion--much more dependent on big donors and the small subset of very dedicated lay practitioners. There's no appreciation for the wider benefit provided by religious to the community. In theory even atheists could appreciate the benefit. There are arguments for why this is a better system on-the-whole, but there's a loss nonetheless. Religion is literally the only area where community systematically supports people who have zero profit interest or motive in practices like mindfulness, charity, etc. For all the corruption and self-serving one sees in institutional religion, whether Buddhist, Christian, etc, it's even greater in the "non-profit" secular charity space. (I'm in SF where the city shells out hundreds of millions to organizations that do social work, and where we blew past the point reasonably diminishing returns hundreds of millions ago.) Secular charity just doesn't scale without having to pay salaries and wages; compare Buddhist or Christian religious, who usually take vows of poverty.
It's like the debate about public funding of open source. It's very difficult to do systematically without inviting alot of corruption and freeloading. The interesting thing about religious charity is that the primary motives of the religious are separate from the social/charitable benefit. Institutional religious communities, especially those with vows of poverty, self-select in ways secular institutions haven't figured out how to do, yet. Communists and anarchists never figured it out; if they had capitalism probably wouldn't be as dominate as it is today. And it's why people like Richard Stallman standout--though an atheist, he's committed to Free Software in the same way monks are committed to their religious dogma, and while Stallman is hardly infallible, it lends tremendous credibility to his arguments, and he serves as a personal model regarding his commitment to the cause.
I think separation of religion and state is a good thing and benefits all parties, but Western culture went beyond that into denigration of religion. Oddly we do provide public support to artists, whom are often similarly dedicated and self-selected, though we justify this by exaggerating the social benefit of pure art.
Not all spirituality leads to peace. We live in an age where “spirituality” often means yoga, breathwork, or Stoic quotes. Things that calm the body but rarely heal the soul. Marcus Aurelius was wise, but even he couldn’t save himself from despair.
I think many of us, myself included, have resisted Christianity because of how poorly it’s been represented. But the real Christ isn’t a tool of culture or control. He’s the God who stepped down, fulfilled His own Word, and died in our place. That’s not pride. That’s mercy.
I’m not here to “win” you over. I’m sharing what I’ve found because the same Jesus who changed history also changed my life. If it sounds like proselytizing, it’s only because truth isn’t meant to be hoarded. But I appreciate your honesty. At least you’re still asking questions. Most people stop there.
PS. It’s funny a lot of people try to “catch” believers in logic traps that don’t actually use logic or examples. It ends up being its own kind of proselytizing, just dressed in cynicism.
I’m all for honest discussion, but if someone’s going to dismiss faith as irrational, they should be able to back their own worldview with the same level of evidence they demand from others. Otherwise, it’s not skepticism it’s just pride wearing a lab coat.
Everyone has faith in something, whether it’s science, reason, or their own moral compass. The difference is that Christianity doesn’t pretend we invented truth. It says Truth became a person and met us where we are. That’s not blind certainty. It’s tested faith.
Honestly, I think most of us are just trying to make sense of the world and not feel alone in it. I’ve been on both sides of this, skeptical, searching, believing, doubting again. So I get where you’re coming from. I’m not here to convince you of anything, just sharing what’s given me peace when everything else felt hollow.
If you ever want to talk about it without debating, I’d be down for that too.
Where I'm from, they're still celebrating the "national baptism" event where the ruler basically forced the entire (allegedly) population of his capital into the river for mass baptism by Greek priests invited for the occasion.
Plus, it's not the best moment to make this point considering that Mohamed is probably going overtake Jesus on the race in the next decade. I know, conversions are cooler than births, but the reality is the same (also conversions in LATAM are just raiding the Catholics for followers).
< Werner Herzog
After the original movie was made, released and got successful, Werner Herzor made a deal with the director and edited 4 hours of original movie in half, while adding his commentary. He made it A LOT worse, sadly.
The only people who rave about it, are the ones who haven't seen the original. Please, do yourself a favor and watch it.
Perhaps the reason why Werner absolutely butchered the film was because he was so out of touch with the subject of happiness?..
Sometimes, smartness can push up expectations beyond realities, resulting in lack of happiness which can be attributed to smartness, as a non-smart person would have appreciated and accepted the realities better.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-my-year-in-mensa-5537994...
One could assume that higher intelligence gives you more power to shape your context — but that doesn’t help much if context itself doesn’t play a major role in determining general happiness.
The depressed person was probably born with a bias toward depression, and the happy person with a bias toward happiness. The interesting question then becomes: what mediates the path from genes to happiness? It’s unlikely to only be as simple as “gene → happy.” There are probably several layers of causality in between — psychological, neurochemical, societal, and environmental mechanisms that shape how those genetic tendencies play out.
* that word is doing a LOT of lifting.
for a bachelor-degree-state-school-midwit like me if someone asked me if im happy i can choose to scrutinize and evaluate a real answer. if i were 14 and had just eaten lunch the answer would come right out as "yes"
i never think about happiness. i have fun and i have obligations and balance them
during obligations i use a trick to act happy: i just fake it. i call it "my good time hat". if anyone at work asks how i am, my default answer is an enthusiastic, "great!" the obligations are the same but go much more smoothly when everyone outside thinks im having a good time
It makes me think of people who have huge impact and success in life, with little obvious explanation. People like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, etc. People to whom a lot of success is attributed, but it’s hard to say exactly, specifically, what skill or task they did to get it.
There’s a joke that Steve Jobs “invented the iPhone,” which is funny to people who are familiar with how products like the iPhone are actually created. But on the other hand… Steve Jobs definitely did something that was important to the creation of that product. Maybe it’s enough to say it was a poorly defined problem, which is why it’s also hard to define exactly what he did to solve it.
I also think intelligence itself is a poorly-defined problem, and AI will help us define it. I think this essay leans in that direction by recognizing the distinction between predictive intelligence (which AI is good at), vs a less-easy-to-define mental facility that defies prediction. Or maybe precedes prediction. Like if I want tacos for dinner, I can use my intelligence to navigate the problems necessary to get tacos. But can I reliably predict what I’ll want for dinner? Seems a lot harder.
What people want, vs what they do to get it, are probably a distinction similar to poorly-defined problems and well-defined problems, respectively. If you can figure out what people really want, well, that seems like a huge step toward being successful. But hard to define.
“I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.” – “Frank Costello” by way of William Monahan by way of Martin Scorsese
I think humans have a deeply rooted inner sense of how much our destiny lies within our own hands, subject to our own will. That’s in some part a matter of intelligence, surely, but as social animals it’s also dependent on a dynamic set of emotional, historical, economic, political structures and our ability to navigate them, much of which is likely not directly aligned with success in mathematics or French.
I had this discussion in the past with an Apple fanboi. After our very long discussions we concluded that the central important thing with respect to which Steve Jobs made the difference was that Steve Jobs was an exceptional marketer - but nothing more.
That has obvious advantages with things like marketing and identifying what people want.
Then of course you have a million other traits like work ethic and being a sociopath which can grease the wheels of success.
"It’s a lucky man who is happy with his place in life"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentlemen_(2024_TV_series)
This is a central premise of the Dune science-fiction cycle by Frank Herbert.
So, if you believe in this claim, you should (dystopically) brainwash people into loving their place in life.
Whenever I stop up to appreciate both my current working and living conditions, I’m happy for that period of time.
Yet, if I’m content, I’ll never live somewhere else doing something harder. I’d rather be a little unhappier always if I can think of ways to advance in the minigames I favor.
I've also had side quests in addition to my main quest which is financial stability and the extreme and total control of my circumstances. Side quests are hobbies, friendships, fitness targets etc.
If you're smart, you're taught you should expect more. You're also able to think critically and question.
For me contentment came a lot later; maybe the years have affected my brain plasticity and made me happier (dumber).
If you are not smart or have no tests, you will not be happy.
If you are smart or have high test coverage, you may or may not be happy.
Intelligence makes you notice problems and sometimes even come up with solutions much more easily. It does not make convincing other people significantly easier - at least not to the same level.
You don't have to be a genius to see that all of the author's "poorly defined problems" are social, relational, and emotional.
'One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem.'
This is just silly. It is, as one smart person might have said once, not even wrong.
Happiness isn't a poorly defined problem. There's a lot of research and evidence. Being psychology, there's also a fair amount of opinionation and speculation. But the outlines of the mysterious object are fairly clear.
https://positivepsychology.com/psychology-of-happiness/
The problem is more that this is an emotionally underdeveloped culture which prioritises cut-throat aggressive competition. Instead of being fundamental, self-care techniques are treated as band-aids to reduce the stress of the rest of life and (supposedly) lead to greater success and - most importantly - productivity.
The subtext of competitive happiness is just more of the same.
And so is the subtext of competitve intelligence.
But I think a crucial element is that we haven't evolved to be happy. If we had then we probably would have never invented the wheel and stolen fire from the gods and left Africa and create medicine and cars and bombs and those little boxes kids these days look at to see what their friends are up to rather than just asking them personally. I mean, maybe it would have been better if we were happy, but then we wouldn't have had Beethoven's 9th and that would be a shame.
As I expected, the article fails to address its title in a systematic, constructive or scientific way, by for example defining what happiness is or establishing whether it can be reliably measured.
I imagine writing a substitute article that rings the same bells. Mine would begin, "I hope you didn't come here expecting a meaningful answer to this classic among unanswerable questions. Now enjoy my overly long, folksy narrative that only pretends to address its topic."
Thats not true, and so all the conclusions article makes. Happiness and all other human experiences have chemical base to them, its just unconsciously people create these experiences based on their memories and background.
There are ways, explored in the easter spiritual traditions, to create any sort of experiences by taking charge of certain processes in the body. There are records of people sitting in caves and experiencing states of utter blissfulness that the richest and most powerful will never know.
Second: Without reading the article, the answer seems simple from real life experience. IQ is uncorrelated to EQ. People with high(er) EQ can navigate complicated, real world social issues that are important for overall life satisfaction. To be clear, when I say "social issues", I don't mean woke-ism and wider society; I'm talking about the small world that each one of inhabits with our friends, family, and lovers.
The best explanation for this was given by Jack London in his novel The Sea-Wolf through his fictional antihero Wolf Larsen.
“Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”
He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:
“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”
“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.
“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”
“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.
“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”
“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.
“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”
More on reddit - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1jqpar/what_book_sin...
Most of them miserable because of utter lack of love in their lives.
In small part because they were snarky and egocentric, and in large part because they didn’t look that great by conventional standards.
If your contemplating leads to resolving the issue in the near term -- by all means carry on.
But for most people, their brooding over their relationships, family history, achievements etc only leads to misery.
Focus your efforts outside of yourself.
This can lead to unhappiness because things can feel a lot more hopeless than they are, also makes it incredibly easy to fall into conspiracy theories, and get drawn into red- and blackpill stuff.
Someone who is less smart may just ask a friend or family member, and get an outside perspective on the problems instead. This is not just comforting, but often helpful.
Whatever the task, they just want to move on, go ahead, skip over if possible and are generally awkward to be around. Those who have mastered patience are the bright ones. They also seem happier overall.
Ecclesiastes 1:12-18 (traditionally understood to be written by King Solomon, son of David):
I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.
I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
You'll not think your way to happiness, it's the opposite actually.
People who are trying to solve problems all day by thinking cannot solve the main one, the most important one because they have trained themselves to think, whereas this one is special and to win you ought to stop thinking
In a practical sense maybe you're a bit happier if you're smart for the same reason you're a bit happier if you're handsome but obviously this does not at all address any question of meaning beyond the horizon of everyday problems.
This whole framing in the article, that smart people ought to be happier because they have an easier time solving problems is hilarious. That's works for a Roomba, it doesn't work for a person.
Unless you're "connected" and in, you won't be listened to. And most engineer and system types won't be, unless its convenient for the power that be.
There are a significant number of people who simply exist with how things are and don't think much about how things could be, and honestly I think they're often happier for it.
That makes you think about those things.
You get overwhelmed.
Others live day to day.
Ignorance is bliss.
The normal standard issue brain works all right. It won't get you truth and beauty but it'll keep the bills paid.
All the deviations from that standard issue brain are bad news. Pretty much. You might get truth and beauty but the bills will not get paid and everyone will hate you for being an abrasive weirdo.
1.
I really wish there was more research done on mental efficacy or torque.
Processing vs prioritization.
Some of the highest IQ people that have ever lived have gotten nerd sniped by ruminating on esoterica like "how many angels fit on the head of a pin".
Humans really are a multi factorial random walk.
Hey, you're really smart and also you're going to spend your entire life solely cataloging every cultural reference and trope from Adam West's batman.
2.
In the above scenario some smart people would feel very fulfilled by their categorizing efforts and some despair.
3.
Self reported happiness? I've known smart people who are as eore as idiots I've known. The smart people were equally happy/unhappy but expierenced measurably less physical suffering and had, by all observable measures, better lives. They wouldn't trade their life for the idiots life at all.
I think the people that didn’t read it and commenting anyway are better off providing the space for this prompt, than a review of the article
If I take 5mg of THC and play Diablo 4: “oooh the numbers are getting bigger.”
But here’s my hot take: I don’t think being “smart” is what makes things less joyful. I think having a brain that just won’t stop causes both that and the smartness thing. Being smart and being unhappy are siblings.
>"Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings-“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do […]"
I'd say how we measure intelligence its what's potentially incorrect or misguided at least. It's hard to definitively measure someone's creativity, or adaptability into a metric compared to trying to measure someone's vocabulary, or command of language and maths.
In this case, the definition is good (intelligence = the ability to navigate and solve poorly defined problems that require creativity, insight, and adaptability). The problem is, we don't test for that. We test on well defined problems and academic exercises (like the vocab test mentioned in the article).
As to stupidity... That is not a trait. That is not on a scale. That is a lifestyle choice — because it makes life easier.
Subsequently, a number of people burned to death.
Are those engineers still "smart"?
2. We take joy from what we do well; we enjoy doing what we do well with others; and we self-select for life partners who we enjoy spending time with, which often includes some similarities, for example:
- being able to enjoy downhill skiing for a whole day together and going out for drinks and dancing afterwards - enjoying calm country lifestyles vs city bustle - being a BP beautiful person who likes to live it up at parties ... being a smart person who can work meaningfully on hard problems (and who occasionally should check their ego while they do)
The better you are at something and the further you want to take it personally (often to the enjoyment and encouragement of others, and to the sacrifice of those who spend their lives with you unless they are in similar straits), the harder it is to find people that match (including for dating/partnership prospects). The more average (or less selective) you are (whether deliberately or not), the more people there are that will fit criteria which make you feel more fulfilment.
In the case of smarts, where it is reinforced through decades of schooling to be a large advantage, it can also carry a lot of unpleasant real-world baggage.
- others may envy you - others may give up early assuming you can easily best them - others may consciously decide to cheat to keep up with you - others may not always enjoy your company (when it cramps on their personal sense of mastery/autonomy/purpose) - since your ideas are often logical/beneficial, others may more frequently hear your ideas, internalize them, and (consciously or unconsciously) later act on them without ever thinking to re-involve you or say thank you (or that maybe if that one idea that someone turned into a company had some kickback to you, your logical/beneficial ideas could reach more people).
I'd imagine this gets worse the farther out you are on the bell-curve and could distort personal beliefs (whether reasoned/real from that big brain or reactive/comforting to avoid future pain) through negative reinforcement. It can also lead people to hide their intelligence to fit in, or decide to reach for different kinds of satisfaction other than what we might think they would be capable of. A lot of this is true for other aptitudes too, though more pronounced for those which are of greater perceived importance.
But hey, that's why it's the pursuit of happiness, right?
Hypothesis: Living in the moment and being content is a key aspect of happiness. The more you know, the smarter you are, the harder it is to live in the moment or be content.
1) The more you understand, the more problems you see.
When you understand little, everything is ind of random. You have minimal expectations. The more you understand, the more connections you make, the more you see how things could be and how far away they are from an ideal state. You focus more on the potential, and thus the future, than on the present.
2) The more you understand, the less novelty there is.
The first time you play video game in a particular genre (or watch a movie, etc), you take it all in and experience as it is. Little interactions are delightful, as your brain is happy to see two things make an unexpected connection.
After you complete a few, you understand how the system works. The balances and trade-offs that make up the nature of the genre. When you start a new one, you instantly start breaking it apart into a mental spreadsheet, rather than experiencing the literal thing in front of your face. The unexpected elements become expected because you know how even the unexpected stuff tends to work.
The more of life you experience, the less novelty there is to any part of it.
3) The more you understand, the easier it is to live in the future.
"I should try this", "I should do that". You get locked into intellectual responsibilities with long-term goals. The short term becomes just a nuisance to achieve long-term goals. You aren't only not living in today, you aren't even living in tomorrow, you're actually living 6-24 months from now.
4) The more you understand, the less of a point you see.
If you're a pattern solving machine, eventually you realize there's no bottom to find. There's always just another chaotic pattern to pick apart. Another thing to learn. The same things play out over and over again, mildly differently. You can't fix the majority of the problems you see. You can barely understand yourself.
You're good at min/max-ing problems. But what's the ultimate thing to min/max? You have no idea.
So you ask yourself, what's the point to the whole process? Simply maximizing brain chemistry? You know you can't just focus on happy brain chemicals because that will also ruin your life (ie, heroin).
5) The more you understand, the less you hope in magic.
Some optimism depends on magical thinking. "Maybe this will work out because X will happen!" Except X can't happen. But if you believe it could happen, you are genuinely more happy.
The more you understand, the more quickly you can solve all known aspects of a problem and get left with the parts that can't be solved. You know all the things that can't happen to fix a problem. The world isn't magical. Medicine isn't magic, doctors aren't magic, technology isn't magic, politicians aren't magic, problems don't just disappear over night.
What "smart people" actually seek is content, which can be had in abundance.