Why aren't smart people happier?

https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier

by zdw • 9 months ago

530 620 9 months ago

malkocoglu• 9 months ago

Because there are lots of stupid people around them that make life miserable for everybody, not only themselves ! Note: I wrote this comment after reading just the title...

t-32• 9 months ago

You should definitely read the article, it's pretty good. That said, I'd say it's not the stupid that make life miserable for everyone else, it's the smart people that were born earlier. A smart person with power sets rules to benefit themselves. They may or may not care about what happens after they die. Those that care will almost certainly want to advantage their descendants and friends. Enough iterations on this same pattern and you get the kafkaesque and at times idiotic modern society.

blauditore• 9 months ago

Note: I wrote this comment after reading just the title...

Not sure if the irony is intended, but I find it hilarious.

koakuma-chan8• 9 months ago

If you want me to read your article it has to be at most 1024 characters and served as text/plain

ranger_danger5• 9 months ago

I disagree, I think it's more about a person's emotion intelligence. You can choose to be happy even if everyone else around you is not. It might not be easy, but I think it's possible.

veidelis2• 9 months ago

Totally agree. One might require to be "in their head" a lot of the time to not get swung down, and enjoy himself such as laughing at his own jokes. To make it possible, one has to be free enough to express oneself (also internally). But freedom of thought and action is on the decline as I've come to observe lately, but that's another topic.

mensetmanusman• 9 months ago

Because we are defining smart incorrectly.

thewebguyd3• 9 months ago

I don't think so, at least judging by the definition in the article

"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).

Findecanor• 9 months ago

If we compensate for physical factors such as blood sugar, hemoglobin, pollution etc. and stress factors that disrupt concentration, I believe that we have all the same potential to train ourselves to be good at things that are called "smart". But they are just that: what people recognise as being smart.

As to stupidity... That is not a trait. That is not on a scale. That is a lifestyle choice — because it makes life easier.

supportengineer3• 9 months ago

Some "smart" engineers designed an electric car with electrically powered door locks.

Subsequently, a number of people burned to death.

Are those engineers still "smart"?

blakesterz• 9 months ago

They do say "Maybe our tests are bad." and then talk about the intelligence side of the tests. I wonder if maybe the other tests are bad, or smart people tend to answer those tests different?

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?

ashtakeaway• 9 months ago

There are jealous people who actively go out of their way to make 'smart' people miserable.

mfer2• 9 months ago

Two thoughts....

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.

Slow_Hand2• 9 months ago

Everyone wants to be happy, but nobody wants to be happy with what they have.

conception• 9 months ago

I think this is a very American ideal (that has been exported with much success).

MangoToupe• 9 months ago

Doesn't everyone want to be happy with what they have? Why would you not want that. Like, ideally we'd all be happy with nothing, right?

alexalx666• 9 months ago

So maybe the right question to ask is - how to be content under capitalist regime if you are smart.

thewebguyd3• 9 months ago

Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them.

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.

jfengel• 9 months ago

One would like to think that intelligence leads to making choices that bring more happiness.

If that doesn't work, various hypotheses come to mind, but I don't know how to test them.

monkpit• 9 months ago

That’s a bold hypothesis!

jasperry• 9 months ago

Intelligence isn't the same thing as happiness, but it could be correlated, because if IQ does measure generalized problem-solving ability, as it seems to, then smart people could apply themselves to the problem of happiness and have more success than average in it. Then the question is "why don't they"? As you indicated, one reason may be that there's not much encouragement to, because as a society we're still in "rat race" mode.

dfxm12• 9 months ago

Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them.

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.

lanfeust62• 9 months ago

The upshot is that society also values that we create value. Doing things that others find valuable can foster a sense of meaning and belonging.

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.

bluGill• 9 months ago

There is nothing inherent about being intelligent that means happy.

Why aren't intelligent people doing [able to do] things that make them happy? Or at least happier that someone who is less intelligent?

t-32• 9 months ago

People are more often trying to avoid being unhappy than trying to be happy. People who prioritize doing things that make them happy are called drug addicts usually.

bee_rider• 9 months ago

Could it just be some sort of Peter principle thing? We’ll keep giving you problems until you get burned out and overwhelmed. Then we won’t advance you out of that position.

themafia• 9 months ago

Since happiness is something we are aware of, it can be measured using self-report.

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.

GolfPopper• 9 months ago

Because, whatever its merits, the world is a pretty grim and existentially terrifying place once you think about it?

supportengineer3• 9 months ago

Exactly. Ancient peoples were able to do all of their basic work in a few hours a day, the rest was leisure time.

vorpalhex2• 9 months ago

That's trivially false. Ancient people were always working, and we can see this in people who maintain primative lifestyles.

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.

AngryData3• 9 months ago

I don't know if I would go that far without qualifiers. They definitely didn't do the same work load as many modern humans from pretty much all accounts, but that doesn't mean they always did things faster because they didn't need to.

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.

653• 9 months ago

You can be smart and think the world is a beautiful place and life is a gift.

Aaargh203183• 9 months ago

You can think that but you’d be wrong.

int_19h7• 9 months ago

You can, but only if you avoid actually trying to reason about this and taking all available evidence into account.

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.

codyklimdev• 9 months ago

I think beyond a certain level surplus IQ begins to cause problems. While still useful, the amount of self-sabotage and thought spirals the brain can generate with the extra power can cause neuroses and unhappiness on a larger scale than those less intelligent are capable of. Combine it with higher societal expectations and it's no great mystery to me why smarter people seem unhappier.

Just my thoughts anyways. I'm a dev, not a psychologist.

SoftTalker• 9 months ago

I agree. I know a guy who is just brilliantly smart but he can get caught up in ruminating or "thought spirals" as you say and is constantly imagining all the ways things can go wrong and is therefore afraid to take any risks or start anything new.

burningChrome2• 9 months ago

Is this the classic "paralysis by analysis"?

Foobar85682• 9 months ago

That's the case of my 10yo.

That though of spirals is really a scary thing.

cultofmetatron• 9 months ago

I believe this was the overarching theme of forest gump

supportengineer3• 9 months ago

In the Bay Area, I feel surrounded by such people. They solve imaginary problems to get a promotion. But they are competing with thousands of other, equally smart people, to also get promotions. So it's non-stop change for no reason, and wasting resources.

knowitnone3• 9 months ago

No reason? You even stated the reason "for promotion". It's OK if you are not aiming for promotions but don't judge others when they do.

badpun• 9 months ago

Sportsmen compete in imaginary competitions with equally physially gifted people just to win a prize. And yet, many are fulfilled by it. For some people, competing is what drives them.

lanfeust62• 9 months ago

Anecdotally, expectations and identity (through narcissism) do a lot of the lifting. When we see ourselves as "smart" while still being emotionally immature, then falling short of certain signals and accomplishments we project on that is thought to be tantamount to being a failure.

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.

chermi11• 9 months ago

As I said in another comment, I think the expectations and probably parts of the narcissism are definitely on the "nurture" side. Smarter people are noticed in school and told how bright their future is. They're not as often told how hard they need to work for that bright future. This sets up expectations of success without developing all the tools needed besides raw intelligence.

cosmic_cheese3• 9 months ago

This has been a somewhat popular line of thought in internet circles for a while and I'm inclined to agree. I also believe the threshold past which these problems begin to crop up may be considerably lower than commonly thought… One doesn't need to be a chart topper to fall into these cognitive patterns.

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.

burningChrome2• 9 months ago

> 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.

ASalazarMX• 9 months ago

Or, you could just ask "Why aren't people happy?". I don't see how IQ could make you happier. Smart people are not as smart as they think, they usually perform better because they're overspecialized.

Now, emotional intelligence, that would greatly influece your happiness. The hurdles you're talking about are emotional, not intellectual.

dingnuts• 9 months ago

usually when people talk about emotional intelligence, they mean Big 5 Agreeableness plus Openness, which can be measured. If your hypothesis is correct there should be data on the potential correlation between those traits and self reported happiness

wahern3• 9 months ago

Emotional intelligence and IQ are positively correlated, albeit not strongly. But like IQ, emotional intelligence brings its own burdens.

lurk2• 9 months ago

Smart people are not as smart as they think, they usually perform better because they're overspecialized.

This isn’t true at all.

lo_zamoyski2• 9 months ago

It's a double-edged sword.

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.

never_inline• 9 months ago

Idk about the modern meaning of virtue but doesn't "virtus" in roman mean something like "bravery" and "manliness". (Probably cognate to sanskrit "vIryam"

energy123• 9 months ago

Does an inability to inhibit the default mode network correlate with IQ?

bell-cot• 9 months ago

I think beyond a certain level surplus IQ begins to cause problems.

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.

quentindanjou• 9 months ago

I feel like high intelligence is crippling itself, the more intelligent you are and the more issues to solve you find and the more conscious of your environment you become, awaking you to new sets of information and again, new sets of issues.

This overflow might contribute to less happiness as a result.

Same thing, not a psychologist, just some thoughts.

azan_2• 9 months ago

Not true at all: 1) more intelligent people are happier (author of the blogpost cherrypicked 2 studies, one of which in fact showed that iq is positively correlated with hapiness. 2) IQ negatively correlates with neuroticism. 3) In fact IQ correlates positively with almost every positive facet of human experience - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2212794120

jvanderbot• 9 months ago

One thing I really love about that is that since correlation goes both ways, a happy non neurotic person is more likely to solve puzzles, which seems stupidly obvious in hindsight.

erikerikson2• 9 months ago

Being on the tail can make you feel very alone. Especially as a child you can end up having only sparse, if any, access to anyone that can meet you in conversation. If you happen to be adopted then you can be alone in your family too. In some cases they are not only unmet but ostracized, vilified, or attacked for being "weird", able to see things that make people uncomfortable, or ask questions that break people's ways of thinking and unintentionally leaving them adrift. Teachers and other adults that are responsible for fostering your success commonly cheer your failures, root against you, and sabotage your efforts. Because everything must be so good for you, you don't need support and can be safely ignored. Over time you become a target for control and manipulation by people that believe your agency is their disadvantage and will use violence, subterfuge, and social arrangement to subdue you.

There are many benefits but it can be a real liability.

antegamisou2• 9 months ago

What makes the linked study not cherrypicked?

bongodongobob• 9 months ago

Perfect essay for ya:

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.

mattlondon• 9 months ago

You are confusing medium intelligence with high intelligence I fear.

Truly intelligent people won't be getting into doom spirals and self-sabotage. They will - obviously - use their superior intelligence to avoid that situation (or mitigate it before it becomes an issue), but the merely middling folks get trapped by it and cannot work their way out of it because they're just not intelligent enough to realise it is happening and/or work out how to stop it.

Good luck.

aclindsa• 9 months ago

My experience is that intelligence is not one-dimensional or a cure-all. It is possible for someone to be able to solve a difficult math problem much quicker than their peers, but still have a really hard time managing emotions or dealing with everyday life.

lordnacho4• 9 months ago

I don't think it's so much the IQ that causes self-sabotage. The thing that happens is that if you have a big brain, you tend to try to use it to solve every problem. Guy who has a hammer sees a nail everywhere. After all, IQ is seen as a kind of tool for everything, so why not?

So you get these smart people who think they can rationally work themselves out of emotional issues.

Well, if you lift with your back, you hurt your back.

huherto• 9 months ago

I don't disagree, but I have seen a few counter examples in my life.

Some of the smartest people that I have known are also the kindest. It is like they are so smart that are able to understand and empathize with other people thoughts and feelings. In any place I go, I look for the kindest people and frequently you also find they are also really smart and interesting.

canadiantim• 9 months ago

intellect is often in conflict with good health

gnarlouse• 9 months ago

I always preferred the definition of intelligence to be “the ability to select short term decisions that maximize the probability of obtaining the highest quality long term freedoms.”

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.

fainpul• 9 months ago

The assumption, that being good at making plans, learning from mistakes etc. leads to more happiness, is wrong. It leads to higher achievements. Happiness is a different dimension.

nullorempty• 9 months ago

Why should smarter people be happier? May be happiness lays in a dimension that does not correlate with smarts.

rsyring• 9 months ago

TL;DR: Greater insight → greater exposure to brokenness (maybe a harder time minimizing/ignoring it) → potential for greater sorrow.

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.

simonswords822• 9 months ago

I love this line from a 2024 TV show called "The Gentlemen" and I think about it a lot:

"It’s a lucky man who is happy with his place in life"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentlemen_(2024_TV_series)

sshine• 9 months ago

The only thing I think a lot about is advancing at work and saving up for a bigger home.

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.

simonswords822• 9 months ago

I think most of us are hard wired to progress - progression looks different for each of us but matters all the same.

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.

aleph_minus_one9• 9 months ago

"It’s a lucky man who is happy with his place in life"

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.

duskdozer2• 9 months ago

“… all wear green,” said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, “and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.”
There was a pause; then the voice began again.
“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfuly glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able …”

analog83742• 9 months ago

Being smart is like having a sensitive tongue. You can't eat trash like everybody else. In a trash-based society, you suffer. And all the trash-consumers wonder what your freaking problem is.

cheesecompiler• 9 months ago

Because thinking and reflection makes you realize the degree of power disparity, unfairness and suffering in the world.

DannyB2• 9 months ago

Ignorance is bliss?

yieldcrv• 9 months ago

This article was all over the place

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

fellowniusmonk• 9 months ago

There is so little difference overall it seems.

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.

In the above scenario some smart people would feel very fulfilled by their categorizing efforts and some despair.

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.

analog83742• 9 months ago

Being smart is like having the power to do brain surgery on yourself.

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.

Yossarrian22• 9 months ago

That chart showing happiness being flat over 70 years is astounding. I’m certainly happier not having to hand wash dishes or clothes; no king who ever lived before then had access to magic lights that made his bad eyesight perfect, yet for all that the average person is just as happy as they were in the late 40s

dogleash• 9 months ago

I’m certainly happier not having to hand wash dishes or clothes

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.

chermi11• 9 months ago

I think this fits perfectly with happiness being strongly driven by comparison and expectations. Those comparisons can be real comparisons to other people or imaginary comparisons to hypothetical outcomes. Comparisons are relative so you'd kind of expect them to remain even if the baseline improves. Same with expectations.

wat100004• 9 months ago

It's the hedonic treadmill. If you had to hand wash all of your clothes, getting a washing machine would make you very happy... for a little while. After a few weeks or months you'd be back at the baseline. Likewise, if your washing machine broke and you were prevented from replacing it, you'd be unhappy... for a while.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 9 months ago

If you're so smart then why can't you figure out how to be happy?

INTPenis• 9 months ago

Ignorance is bliss.

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.

thenoblesunfish2• 9 months ago

This seems like exactly the same as "why aren't rich people happier?". It's because unless you are very low on the scale (and in many countries few are), your situation isn't so bad as to obviously make you suffer, so the tendency of people to get used to any non-dire environment kicks in and they judge happiness relative to that reference.

thenoblesunfish2• 9 months ago

Also an issue of asking the wrong question. When the interviewer asks, "are you happy?", they mean relative to other people. The interviewee probably takes it as relative to their own baseline, even if explicitly told not to.

pier25• 9 months ago

Looks like there's no correlation between using the prefrontal cortex and happiness.

Ardon• 9 months ago

Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?

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.)

kaicianflone11• 9 months ago

Ignorance is bliss

tantalor• 9 months ago

'tis folly to be wise

interstice• 9 months ago

You could also say that the hedonic treadmill runs faster. Getting a result that takes a smart person a day instead of lets say a week means repeating that 7 times (successfully) to feel like the week was well spent.

y-curious• 9 months ago

This is an interesting take. Your expectations for yourself get higher the more you successfully do something hard. Hmm

fsckboy• 9 months ago

why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two

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

m463• 9 months ago

something to do, someone to love, something to look forward to

thinkingtoilet• 9 months ago

Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic.

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.

zdragnar• 9 months ago

As I heard someone say, happiness is your reality minus your expectations.

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.

BrokenCogs2• 9 months ago

That's a good quote, but it suggests that unhappy people are those who overthink and have unrealistic expectations, whereas truly happy people have expectations that match their reality. so in the end, maybe smart people are those who are better at setting their expectations compared to others (maybe more ambitious type A folk)

koakuma-chan8• 9 months ago

Happiness is just chemicals, it has nothing to do with that.

chermi11• 9 months ago

I think smart people are told much more often as kids how bright of a future they have. So they build up expectations of "succeeding" in some sense (becoming a doctor, getting rich, etc.). These are the sort of expectations you mention in your quote. Not only is there often pressure put on you if you're smart, you adopt those expectations yourself. Or at least hold yourself to that standard. Of course, being smart doesn't automatically equal success, there are so many other factors. So people often fall short of expectations and feel shitty about themselves and are unhappy. Then there's also the fact that high achievers often hold themselves to unrealistic standards even if they "succeed", so they also struggle to be happy.

cortesoft• 9 months ago

There was a movie a while back that talked about what makes people happy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_(2011_film)

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.

FloorEgg2• 9 months ago

Satisfaction is reality minus expectations.

"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.

hinkley2• 9 months ago

Polymaths in particular could be good or great at many things. It’s a matter of choice and opportunity. But they can’t be great at absolutely everything. So one choice closes another. And the grass is greener on the other side.

hamburglar• 9 months ago

There’s a great book by Arthur Brooks called From Strength to Strength which has a slightly different take on “reality minus expectations”: think of it as a fraction, where what you have is the numerator and what you want is the denominator. If you keep ratcheting up what you want (which is what the hedonic treadmill is all about —- you reach a goal and enjoy it for a nanosecond and then suddenly you need an even bigger achievement to satisfy you), you push happiness further away. And conversely, if you learn to want things that are actually in reach, you become happier as you achieve them.

stephen_g• 9 months ago

As I heard someone say, happiness is your reality minus your expectations.

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.

accrual• 9 months ago

As I heard someone say, happiness is your reality minus your expectations.

Similarly, stress is the difference between ones expected reality and ones actual reality.

Less expectation, less stress. More acceptance, more happiness.

jongjong3• 9 months ago

Yes, and also, being able to perceive the world in high resolution when everyone else is blind has its own challenges.

Less intelligent people may be asking you to step in front of a bus because they don't see the bus and you cannot convince them that the bus exists because they're looking in the same direction as you and they don't see anything there. They don't trust your judgement, especially when others who also have equally poor vision agree with them and side against you.

The majority of people have poor vision and so they see the same vague blurry shapes as each other. Because of this, they will often agree with one another and side against intelligent people; who are a minority.

Moreover, it's easier to form consensus over blurry/vague concepts. This is the principle behind fortune-telling. Intelligent people will tend to disagree about details. Because they can see much more detail, there are more contentious points to argue about. It's harder for intelligent people to form consensus.

Being intelligent is a source of unhappiness because it is isolating to not be able to discuss what you see with others. It's like living alone in a parallel universe. You can see lower dimensions but you can't communicate to anyone else about the extra dimensions that exist in your reality because they are incapable of comprehending them. Plato's Allegory of the Cave comes to mind.

DisruptiveDave• 9 months ago

Joy is whatever is happening right now minus your opinion of it. (personally, I'd revise that by swapping "joy" with "contentment" or "peace")

abhaynayar• 9 months ago

I'd heard "happiness is reality minus expectations" before but never thought much of it. I had high expectations of myself in certain areas of life and worked hard towards them and I thought that they were realistic, so despite not having achieved them I still had hope.

And now over time reality has caught up to me and I've become sadder because I've realized that my expectations were indeed higher than my circumstances. I was just a naive oblivious idiot and life has now shown me that. It's sad but I now have just let go. I still am working towards stuff just playing to my strengths and inclinations instead of my wants.

drdaeman• 9 months ago

What makes people happy?

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.

ranger_danger5• 9 months ago

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."

Ecclesiastes 1:18

borroka5• 9 months ago

"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"

- 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.

curmudgeon22• 9 months ago

I agree with this. I quibble with the wording "enjoy" thinking. It's probably also true, but it's not always the enjoyment of it, but a general propensity to overthink or dig into the weeds more, with the resulting less actual doing.

And if you dig into the weeds enough, you can find alternatives and counterarguments which can lead to analysis paralysis.

uberduper• 9 months ago

If I'm smart, I certainly don't feel like it.

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.

nashashmi• 9 months ago

You could also ask the same question to why dumb people are happier. What is it about intelligence that robs people of joy?

aleph_minus_one9• 9 months ago

What is it about intelligence that robs people of joy?

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.

jstummbillig• 9 months ago

How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence?

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.

B-Con2• 9 months ago

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.

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.

ozim2• 9 months ago

Most human aspect of life is dealing with other people.

That definitely is not min/max problem.

ge96• 9 months ago

For me it's simple: a big open field with a blue sky, green grass, sunny, rc plane flying around DLG specifically - learned this when I was younger

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

rawgabbit2• 9 months ago

Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?

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.

Induane• 9 months ago

It might be the case that the nuance is insufficient (false dichotomy).

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.

dvsfish2• 9 months ago

Reason and logic lead you to only two choices, where one choice immediately begs you to abandon reason and logic and just believe what feels right? I think reason and logic can take you further than that. We can explore a spectrum of ideas without committing immediately.

GoblinSlayer7• 9 months ago

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.

You say it as if it's something bad. It's not unprecedented: inquisitors believed spinning Earth was bad, but now it somehow isn't.

mapcars2• 9 months ago

It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)

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

ChrisMarshallNY• 9 months ago

I was watching the first couple of seasons of The Diplomat, on Netflix.

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.

saghm• 9 months ago

Yep, and the logical chain itself can often be pretty clear where the discrepancy lies. In order for it to have a noticeable effect, you'd need to be looking at people smart enough to correctly identify circumstances that will make them happy in advance and then be able to influence things in average more than factors outside their control influence them. I don't think most "smart" people are more smart than life is random, without even getting into how common the requisite level of self-awareness is.

somenameforme7• 9 months ago

I'd take a different answer to this question: philosophy. In times before Abrahamic religion developing or adopting a life philosophy was seen as a practical obligation for a man. This is where you saw the rise of everything from the Pythagorean to the Stoics. It seems that the rise of Abrahamic religions is what largely brought an end to this and mandated a sort of one-size-fits-all philosophy for everybody.

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.

verisimi• 9 months ago

I think happiness is an inevitable byproduct of honestly following your innate sense of self. Intelligent people can be dishonest with themselves, not know themselves and be (more) capable of lying to themselves and coming up with justifications to do what they mentally want (rather than following their innate sense), thereby trapping themselves in endless dishonest but justified loops.

margalabargala2• 9 months ago

The miniscule amount of written work that survives to the present really makes it difficult to do any more than speculate about the philosophies broadly held in the times before Abrahamic religion.

I-M-S• 9 months ago

Thank you for this perspective. It's not something I considered yet it deeply resonated with me.

foobarian2• 9 months ago

collapse of fertility in developed nations

My pet theory is that once societies stop enslaving women, enough choose not to bear children to skew the stats below replacement level.

GoblinSlayer7• 9 months ago

Now in modern times many people have moved away from religion, yet most aren't replacing that philosophical void with anything comparable.

They replace it with postmodernism. It's incomparable on the scale of propaganda, yeah.

nihilism which is even less satisfying

That's a myth. Nihilism is fine if you do it correctly.

GoblinSlayer7• 9 months ago

One could even argue this issue is directly related to the collapse of fertility in developed nations.

Or because information space was monopolized by oligarchs, then they decide what you think.

directevolve• 9 months ago

There are explanations for the equal happiness stats other than the validity of IQ tests. People’s top goal might be something other than happiness. Happiness and other goals might trade off. Happiness reports may be relative to an expected baseline that’s higher for smart people.

Scarblac• 9 months ago

Don't most people have their own base level of happiness? Some people are just always happier than others, regardless of circumstances. It's a personality trait.

auselen• 9 months ago

For me it is a state of mind.

petesergeant3• 9 months ago

What makes people happy?

Wellbutrin

hirvi744• 9 months ago

I have an opportunity to try this, and I am absolutely horrified at the prospects. I've just got a bad feeling about it. Plus, I am on a medication that is quite dangerous to mix with it, so that further complicated matters.

What's so good about Bupropion?

agumonkey• 9 months ago

It also varies during one's life. During my twenties, internal/intellectual stimulation was 90% of what I was seeking. After 35~ the need for family, social bonding, overshadowed that pretty much completely. I still need and like intellectual growth, but only after the other needs are taken care of. Being smart for its own sake kinda hurts now.

kakacik• 9 months ago

I think its much simpler. Look around at your country, at the world. Who is most celebrated, who is biggest achiever, who gets most ladies/men (stupid metric but works fine on our animal side and we are still animals deep down). People celebrate that piece of sh*t musk for ffs because he is a good manager/sales guy, while ignoring deeply flawed amoral person behind.

Its very rarely a smart decent person (and most smart folks are decent), those end up as quiet grey mouse in some lab or university position, seldom recognized for their added value. Extroverts, aggressive (to certain point at least), self-centered narcissistic egomaniacs seem to take the cake since ancient times. Those (and worse) are true decision makers, those people shape the world and its to their liking, which usually far off from what smart folks prefer seeing.

Another reason - once you are way above the crowd, you realize how stupid people often behave, how easily is to manipulate those via emotions like hate, envy, fear or inferiority complex(magas are a prime example but such folks are everywhere). If they destroy just their lives with their stupidity who cares, but since everything is connected in societies and we have ie elections, it permeates everybody's lives and you have little defense. You know the situation - clearly a stupid decision that shoots off one's foot, yet crowds cheers and yell for it, willing to fight for it. And smart decent folks are dragged along whether they like or approve it or not. It can be on a small scale but also national/global level. Who wouldn't be frustrated, continuously, during their whole lives?

Also warfare, almost always a supremely stupid move that is a loss for mankind as a whole while very few benefit. Yet look around. We should be reaching to the stars, fixing our environment properly so we can actually look in our children's and grandchildren's faces without a deep shame, yet look where world is heading steadily.

To be happy these days, you have to have lowish IQ or be an utter ignorant, or both. I can find some smaller pieces of joy like kids, hikes or other sports in mountains and so on, but I have to keep ignoring big picture continuously, how powerful do harm all of us.

wvh• 9 months ago

I think there is some value in being able to live in the moment, like say a cat: one moment you have a death scare, the next you're kind of hungry or sleepy. I feel that smart people see a lot more in the past, present and future, all the things themselves, and the things behind the things, and it's a whole lot harder to live in the moment and not ruminate and dwell on things.

Alternatively, maybe it's just that overthinking that is driving some aspect of what we call intelligence; the ability to plan and see things in complex layers.

Good amounts of happiness surely require some selective blindness.

boesboes• 9 months ago

Smarts can impact all thos heavily. Relationships get complicated after years of exclusion and jealousy, work might not be as satifying if you see all the problems and solutions and things that are accopmplishments might not feel like they are.

These are very common and well documented issues among gifted people.

TomMasz• 9 months ago

I think you've hit on something important with work and accomplishment. I've heard software developers say over and over again they don't feel like they've actually accomplished anything when they complete some coding task. It's not just bug fixes, but tasks in general. Some of them take up hobbies like woodworking, where the results of your work are something tangible you can see and touch. But it's not just software development, a lot of jobs involve work that seemingly produces nothing despite the time and effort spent. It's not hard to see why so many people find their work miserable.

throw_this_one• 9 months ago

Yeah I mean literally cleaning my house, watching dirt suck up, and reorganizing can be much more satisfying than fixing some stubborn backend systems bug that takes years of knowledge to have the mental tools to fix - lol

hearsathought2• 9 months ago

It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)

That's the point. Smarter people tend to have more stable relationships, satisfying work, accomplishments. ( and many, many more ).

How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence?

All of them. You get better jobs with intelligence. You achieve greater accomplishments via intelligence. And your relationships tend to be better because you are in a far better position intellectually, socially and financially.

There's no direct link between the two

You are contradicting yourself here. There is a direct link to the criteria you listed - relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment.

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.

No. The problem is that intelligent people eventually realize that all of it is fleeting and utlimately meaningless - relationships, work, accomplishments. (and many, many more).

rafaelero• 9 months ago

Yeah, I suspect the reason the author didn't find a relationship between IQ and happiness / life satisfaction is probably because those studies were overcontrolling for intermediate variables. If money makes us happier and people with high IQ make more money, you will underestimate the relationship if you control for income.

a123b456c• 9 months ago

You had me until you said that "all of it is fleeting and ultimately meaningless - relationships, work, accomplishments. (and many, many more)"

My dear friend. These are the only types of meaning that matters, and its fleeting nature is why we need to appreciate and savor them.

bm3719• 9 months ago

Because we're intersubjective beings. Difference in intelligence level alienates one from the other. Past two standard deviations, anything like a "meeting of minds" becomes impossible. The only mutual interactions past that delta are economic ones (money exchanged for goods/services).

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.

vixen99• 9 months ago

Where is the evidence for this assumption, either way? There isn't any unless you generalize from some selected group to millions of people across the world. Terman 2021 - gifted children had similar life satisfaction to norms. Li looked at 23 studies & 30,000 people- 0.10 correlation. Veenhoven 100,000 correlation for IQ and happiness was 0.05. Not a smart question.

kaicianflone11• 9 months ago

This answer might upset some people, but it’s really about balance. Spiritual healing is something many intelligent people quietly need. Too often, “intellectuals” dismiss the Bible outright. Relying on arguments they half-remember from TikTok or high-school debates instead of actually reading it and forming their own conclusion, like they would with any other subject. I’m just a developer, but I think intelligence can become its own trap. Pride in being clever can cloud judgment. We feel smart for rejecting faith. And in today’s culture, it’s often safer to follow intellectual trends than to walk an independent path.

kstrauser2• 9 months ago

I tend to agree, although I wouldn't limit it to one religious tradition, or even to religion at all. For example, mindfulness meditation doesn't require any spiritual believe whatsoever. (In before: "But isn't that Buddhist?" Reply: "Who invented it is irrelevant. The practice itself is areligious, unless you go out of your way to make it otherwise for yourself.")

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.

wahern3• 9 months ago

mindfulness meditation

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.

kaicianflone11• 9 months ago

I completely agree. Mindfulness and goodwill are good for the soul. They quiet the noise and help us see ourselves more clearly. I practiced meditation for years (and I still do but with my rosary this time), and it helped me observe my thoughts, but it never really healed them.

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.

chermi11• 9 months ago

Way to set up a false dichotomy. I agree with the "cleverness" and the pride people take in not being religious, it's silly. But there are many forms of religion/spirituality. At the end of the day, you're just pushing the Bible here, which isn't very admirable. Maybe instead you could encourage people to explore spirituality instead of a specific religion that you probably follow only because of where you were born. At least you didn't say we're going to hell if we don't, I guess.

kaicianflone11• 9 months ago

I hear you and I’m not trying to push a cultural version of Christianity. What I’m saying is that Jesus wasn’t just another spiritual teacher. He fulfilled hundreds of prophecies written centuries before His birth, and instead of conquering through power, He conquered through sacrifice. That’s what makes His message different and why His story has endured when so many philosophies fade.

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.

asah• 9 months ago

lol, the majority of the world isn't remotely Christian...

kaicianflone11• 9 months ago

Sure - How clever of you. It’s also the world’s largest religion by far. That alone says something about how deeply the message of Jesus resonates across cultures and centuries. Billions of people have found truth, hope, and transformation in Him. Not because they were born into it, but because the story holds up when you actually look into it.

int_19h7• 9 months ago

You know, I am jealous of religious people sometimes precisely because they can believe in things that give them something to pin their hopes on in situation where there really isn't any hope, and even more so, to give them some higher meaning in life that is universally applicable.

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.

kaicianflone11• 9 months ago

I actually appreciate how clearly you put that. The honesty in what you said is exactly where most people’s quiet struggle lives. You’re right that faith doesn’t begin with airtight logic. It begins when reason finally runs out of things that can satisfy the soul.

The point of Christianity isn’t to switch off rational scrutiny. It’s to realize that reason itself points beyond its own edges. The disciples didn’t follow Jesus because they stopped thinking. They followed because they met a Person who made sense of what their thinking never could.

As for “why this faith and not another,” for me it wasn’t about comparing systems. It was that every story in Scripture, from Genesis to the cross, keeps tracing one pattern: God coming toward humanity, not demanding that we climb up to Him. Every other belief I studied started with what we must do. This one begins with what He already did.

I don’t expect that to “prove” anything to you, but maybe it’s something to sit with and find Faith in. The story of Jesus resonates with billions of followers, more than other religions, not because it’s the best or default religion.

theultdev• 9 months ago

You can see farther ahead in life.

That makes you think about those things.

You get overwhelmed.

Others live day to day.

Ignorance is bliss.

qgin• 9 months ago

I don't think I have ever seen someone change their long-term average happiness more than a small amount with maybe two exceptions:

1. Someone trapped in a truly off-the-charts stressful environment and then removing themselves from it

2. Psychiatric drugs

DavidPiper• 9 months ago

I've also seen this happen for people who:

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

ranger_danger5• 9 months ago

Most of these just sound like #1 to me.

ranger_danger5• 9 months ago

Leaving my long-term relationship was the best decision I ever made. It has been 3 years and it still makes me smile every day just realizing how much happier I am now.

Mouvelie• 9 months ago

Are smart people even fulfilled ? How many smart people work on industries they can't wait to quit ? On problems they don't even care ?

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.

no_wizard• 9 months ago

It makes one wonder why we didn't and continue not to steer our systems to reward supporting life on the planet vs being a destructive force.

What drives us to this short term consumption model

amatecha• 9 months ago

What drives us to that model? Greedy rich people who want more and will exploit whoever they can to increase their material riches and power. Oh, and the rest of us allowing that.

fransje262• 9 months ago

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).

noir_lord• 9 months ago

Brain: "What you fail to understand, Pinky, is that intelligence is a most potent tool - though, I must admit, it has fewer applications than one might think."

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.

aleph_minus_one9• 9 months ago

Are you that not Pinky is the genius and The Brain is the insane one?

This is a very common fan theory on the internet; see for example

https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/11r512/pink_an...

mottey• 9 months ago

Well define "smart" and define "happy" and... oh wait, yeah that's probably it...

squidsoup2• 9 months ago

Smart people understand that the experience of being a conscious being aware of its own suffering and mortality, is fundamentally tragic.

veidelis2• 9 months ago

Yes, that's an OK take, no big deal. Also it can be added that life in itself really doesn't have a choice, on some level it just happens (thinking more about chemistry here).

chermi11• 9 months ago

Smarter people don't give a shit and try to live a fulfilling life anyway.

squidsoup2• 9 months ago

Not mutually exclusive, if anything, coming to terms with that is liberating (see Camus etc).

phoneafriend• 9 months ago

1. Happiness is an emotion governed by feedback loops in the body and brain. This is useful to keep us alive, and motivated by staying that way by planning, procreating, eating dense calories, etc... and has evolved to be tightly regulated. Why would this have evolved to be different for any defining features (bigger muscles, more stamina, faster mental logic)?

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?

gandreani• 9 months ago

To me, happiness is related more to gratitude than to intelligence. You could have very little and be happy and you can have a lot (money, friends, autonomy) and be miserable. The modern world has a lot of stressors but also a lot of things to be thankful for. It's the best time to be alive for humans so far.

Good example of gratitude: https://gwern.net/improvement

machomaster8• 9 months ago

This is exactly how it is, writing from Finland that has been selected The Happiest Country in the World for who knows how many years in the row now.

CrzyLngPwd• 9 months ago

We humans are never happy. We might be content for a while, but that is it.

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.

lordnacho4• 9 months ago

A few thoughts on the matter:

- 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.

wouldbecouldbe3• 9 months ago

It’s really not fixed; you can easily train your mind to be less neurotic and more joyful

AaronAPU2• 9 months ago

It really is wild the degree to which you can simply dictate your own mood.

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.

aleph_minus_one9• 9 months ago

It’s really not fixed; you can easily train your mind to be less neurotic and more joyful

How?

ruszki• 9 months ago

What do you mean on baseline? Generally speaking, I’m definitely less happy post COVID, than before 2020. I met the first utterly broken, toxic person in my life, whom I allowed to hurt me. This is on top of all the bat shit crazy things happened with me that year, and not just because of COVID. I’m a different person since then. My baseline definitely moved, as I mean.

graycat• 9 months ago

One reason for appearing smart is to be terrified of something and work every waking moment to defend against the "something". So such a person can be desperately unhappy, and at some random setback give up everything.

snowwrestler• 9 months ago

Seems like most of the comments are focusing on the happiness angle, but I am liking the framework that some people are good at solving poorly-defined problems.

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.

ugh123• 9 months ago

You're kidding that it's hard to attribute which skills made Donald Trump successful, right? Born rich, lies and steals in business dealings is all there is to it.

chermi11• 9 months ago

No. Those are not sufficient to become president. If you think that then you will not be able to understand politics and people at large and come to incorrect conclusions. Becoming president requires many factors and there's many trajectories to it, but all of them require a large combination of orthogonal factors and attributes.

AaronAPU2• 9 months ago

There is often a “middle of the bellcurve” effect where being exactly average means you have the highest possible number of people who think like you do.

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.

twoodfin• 9 months ago

“Musicians play their instruments, I play the orchestra.” – Seiji Ozawa by way of Steve Jobs by way of Aaron Sorkin

“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.

aleph_minus_one9• 9 months ago

Steve Jobs definitely did something that was important to the creation of that product.

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.

TheOtherHobbes• 9 months ago

Given the other content, the author appears unhappy that some people may be smarter than he is. Perhaps even smarter than his grandma.

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.

marginalia_nu2• 9 months ago

I think many smart people tend to be pretty good at building models of the world, and then sort of move into the models and fail to verify that they are accurate.

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.

dwa3592• 9 months ago

why should they be? ... also, what is happy? ...

boogieknite• 9 months ago

tfa makes a point about how 21yo self will answer the question differently than 30yo self based on different perspective alone

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

mac3n2• 9 months ago

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

< Werner Herzog

mac3n2• 9 months ago

also "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga", film by Werner Herzog

machomaster8• 9 months ago

It was shot and directed by a totally different person, a famous Rusdian documentary director. 4 x 1h parts. It is absolutely glorious.

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?..

observationist• 9 months ago

They can see the problems, and they get caught up in thinking about how to fix them. If you're not aware of the problems, you're happier.

aleph_minus_one9• 9 months ago

Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters.

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)).

imgabe• 9 months ago

"happy" seems like a temporary state. It's a reaction you have to an event. In base state without any input, you would be neither happy nor unhappy. Then something happens and if you like it you're happy about it for a while and if you don't like it you're unhappy about it for a while and then you go back to being neutral. It seems like the wrong question to ask to expect people to just walk around "happy" 24/7 for no reason.

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.

MarkLowenstein• 9 months ago

Enlightened take. For similar reasons I often say that going meta and fussing about your own happiness--literally basing your happiness on whether you are happy--is a doom spiral. If you're asking yourself "Am I happy?" I can give you the answer: No.

RealityVoid• 9 months ago

I only read the intro, and I don't think I can bare the rest of it. First, I think the premises is false. I think smarter people are happyer. Second, many people when they engage with pieces like this, expect that smarter people are unhappyer, which, yes, the article doesn't say this, but I feel it at least suggests it.

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.

machomaster8• 9 months ago

Smarter people get part of the unhappiness from being surrounded by stupidity.

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.

duskdozer2• 9 months ago

Curious what diversity/equity/inclusion commentary you took issue with?

motohagiography• 9 months ago

who was their control group i wonder.

Razengan• 9 months ago

Maybe because once you know enough you realize a lot of people + other lifeforms are suffering, so even if your own life is awesome this world kinda sucks and the universe seems indifferent. It's hard not to be vaguely depressed/pissed most of the time unless you minimize your care sphere.

B-Con2• 9 months ago

My own personal reflections, that I realize may not be true for everyone.

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.

dagaci• 9 months ago

Imagine your a super smart 'aztec' citizen and you watch your leading priests sacrificing 1000s of people in the name of a god which is probably imaginary ... you have the choice to dumb down (re-occupy your mind with work, duties, mundane, gish gash) and stop over thinking or ... continue to contemplate the true horror's that your world is indulging in or something else even...

voidmain• 9 months ago

The article [1] spends a lot of words questioning what the results of intelligence tests mean, and none questioning what the answer to "How happy are you?" survey questions mean.

[1] I would write "the author", but sadly these days you can't take the existence of an author for granted

Zoo3y• 9 months ago

Appreciate the author mentioning Thoreau. I would also include Bertrand Russell who wrote "The Conquest of Happiness". Highly recommended read. I made a blog post of my favorite excerpt: https://www.twinsandthecrab.com/2021/12/quote-from-conquest-...

riazrizvi• 9 months ago

Knowing the answer to this, personally, reading the article is like watching a blindfolded person grope around a room searching for a box lying out in the open.

Frannky• 9 months ago

Are you actually smart if you are not happy, or do you just assume you're smart because you are educated?

lwhi• 9 months ago

Ignorance is bliss.

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).

marcelr• 9 months ago

there’s no such thing as a smart person

northisup• 9 months ago

I mean, have you looked outside lately?

micromacrofoot• 9 months ago

Because you area always capable of seeing how things could be but are stuck with an endless series of reminders of how things are.

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.

efilife• 9 months ago

Everyone reading this probably think it's about them

chasd00• 9 months ago

Intelligent people are also pretty ambitious in my experience. More ambition raises the risk of failure and failing doesn’t generate the feeling of happiness. I know many smart people absolutely terrified of failure to the point they take meds for it and I know a handful who are emotionally crippled by failing at something 20 years ago. Smart people and failure do not mix.

hirvi744• 9 months ago

I do not know how intelligent I am. I've taken a real IQ test, but I do not truly accept the science behind them. For N=1, the correlations do not hold true within my own life, for example. Nevertheless, I was once very ambitious, but I feel like the world has zapped it out of me. I found myself in situation after situation in which conformity and obedience were valued above all else.

zkmon2• 9 months ago

If we define happiness as cognition of some reality being better than expected, smartness can affect both expectations and results (realities) and the difference is not correlated to smartness.

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.

perfmode• 9 months ago

Happiness arises from finding peace within oneself.

This concept can be expressed in various ways, such as through authenticity, flow, connection, contentment, gratitude, peace, and love.

brailsafe• 9 months ago

"Ya but... how does that make me money?" is the question I can imagine many superficially smart people literally or internally asking themselves when confronted with the possibility of that reality.

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.

Viliam1234• 9 months ago

Happiness in long term is mostly determined genetically. It's like asking why smart people aren't taller.

azan_2• 9 months ago

But smart people are happier! There are a lot more - and better - studies that show that, even one of the studies that author linked shows that.

mystraline• 9 months ago

Because we can see what's wrong, the fix, first and second derivatives, and weird edge cases.

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.

kderbyma• 9 months ago

It’s because everyone else is dumber than them…. So they constantly see avoidable mistakes and misunderstandings that could have been avoided…. Yet they cannot make the other people understand….because they think differently about it, and the people who don’t have that intelligence will not necessarily even be able to reorient their brains for the new information to be absorbed correctly.

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….

ryanmerket2• 9 months ago

my whole life in a nutshell. except for when i worked at fb and reddit in the early days. and to some extent AWS in the early days.

flaterkk• 9 months ago

make sure you're not the dumbest person in the room... no wait... make sure you're not the smartest person... somethin', somethin' right?

c4wrd• 9 months ago

Perhaps you are miserable because you are reinforcing your brain to only look for the flaws in 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?

emp17344• 9 months ago

You just sound like a misanthrope. If you’re so smart, why are you surrounding yourself with stupid people? Is it possible you’re not as smart as you think, and in fact, just as fallible as the rest of us?

ryanmerket2• 9 months ago

or maybe they have spent time with some really brilliant people and they know they are not brilliant, but they also know they are not as dumb as the person they are talking to? they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

JackSlateur• 9 months ago

I kidda feel like parent

But I am convinced that I am pretty stupid, which makes the whole situation even more painful ("ffs, I'm dumb and these people are even dumber!")

voidUpdate• 9 months ago

To be fair, if you are significantly smarter than the average, surrounding yourself with stupid(er) people is the default, as the majority will be less smart than you

wat100004• 9 months ago

I am definitely a misanthrope.

How can I not surround myself with stupid people, though? There are so many. No matter where I go, there will be huge numbers of them. I'm surrounded by smart people at work. I can try to only socialize with smart people, but it's hard when a lot of socialization is determined by family. And there's absolutely nothing to be done about the general public on the street, working retail, etc. And worst of all: working in, running, or leading governments.

rhubarbtree4• 9 months ago

I recently encountered someone who spoke like this and I researched what might be the issue.

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.

alphabettsy• 9 months ago

Are you sure you’re not conflating knowledge with intelligence?

LouisSayers• 9 months ago

Perhaps there are some people like you say that are grandiose narcissists and ALSO some people that are genuinely smarter than most others in the room and can see the obvious through the fog.

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).

dhqgekt• 9 months ago

Reminds me of Gell-Mann amnesia and nobelitis; cognitive biases in general.

Rayhem2• 9 months ago

I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance.

This may be the colloquial description of how narcissism manifests, but it isn't even close to (and possibly completely opposite) clinical narcissism. The grandiosity isn't so much a belief as it is a "false self" put on to garner caretaking from others. It's not "I got all the toys as a kid, so I deserve more stuff!" but a failure to individuate from caregivers. "Mom (as a tool, not a wholly independent person) came when I cried as a kid, so I need you to lavish attention on me and make me feel better now as an adult. I can't see myself without external input; I only see myself as a reflection through you."

wat100004• 9 months ago

I don't think a bunch of physicists is the best example if you're trying to make the point that most people are smart but just in different ways. Physics requires and attracts intelligence, of course a bunch of physicists were smarter than you in some ways.

Try it with, say, a parole officer's case list, a group of high school dropouts, or people who have not touched a book in the past ten years. You'll certainly find things they know that you don't, but that's mostly going to be a matter of experience, not them being smarter in that area. No doubt the average petty thief knows more about shoplifting than I do, but I'm pretty sure I could learn quickly and become a much better shoplifter than them if I put my mind to it. And those groups will certainly contain some really smart people who just happen to have ended up in those groups, but that's going to be a small number of them.

d-lisp• 9 months ago

I do know for sure that I am able to share my intelligence with anyone. Moreover I do enjoy it. I cannot conceive a lot of things more pleasant than making people smart. And to me that should be your responsibility to do so, as a gifted person.

You should cease to complain about other people being dumb, and just work on being understandable by anyone. That's a very complex job, as it may lead to what I'd call "extravagant analysis" (i.e. unfolding abstractions to the point you reach atoms or "implementations", [note, I do remember of a (joke) book titled "How to ride a bike" where the author explained literally everything you needed to know to be able to ride a bike, to the point it became absurd]).

Anyway, you should at least try it. Smart people often are terrible at explaining stuff because they don't need to do the work of diving into the atoms of abstractions, and because sometimes also language is not their primary tool to think about things.

Tldr; are you sure you are understandable ?

aiven• 9 months ago

Ironically, they are not happy because they are not smart enough to find happiness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hn_acc12• 9 months ago

I read a lot more sci-fi / fantasy compared to other people. Sometimes 5-10 books a week in high school when others wouldn't touch a book unless they had to (and this was before the internet was generally accessible!). Maybe that's a lot less than others here.

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).

stavros• 9 months ago

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.

Unfortunately, this is true. Lots of people make decisions just by gut feel.

oneshtein• 9 months ago

We cannot "test-drive" politics. We are testing in prod without rollback or backup.

HumblyTossed• 9 months ago

I’m happy thanks to my parents. I was very frustrated as a kid and that would lead to outbursts and such. They taught* me to just let shit go. You can’t control other people or what they are able to understand.

* that word is doing a LOT of lifting.

Barrin92• 9 months ago

I think the question only makes sense if you have already a completely diminished view of what a human person is to begin with. In any earlier century the answer would have been very obvious. Humans are oriented towards the infinite, beauty, truth, goodness and being smart doesn't get you there any more than being rich or tall.

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.

JumpinJack_Cash• 9 months ago

Happiness is lack of thought .

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

throwaway2037• 9 months ago

First: Happiness is fleeting. It is better to pursue personal purpose and satisfaction.

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.

tibbar• 9 months ago

People sometimes describe me as a "golden retriever." I.E., I present as quite upbeat. 50% of that is just nervous energy, but the rest might just lie in having a poor memory. I can experience something quite negative, even traumatic, and basically forget about it once it goes away.

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.

My_Name2• 9 months ago

I have found that partly, happiness is greatly helped along by just not remembering, or not thinking about, the things that make you miserable. On a Buddhist level, just living in the moment you are in, surrounded by the things and situations you are in, without dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, lets you be much less miserable than you could be. Often, the place you are in right now isn't that bad.

My_Name2• 9 months ago

I think firstly, we should figure out what exactly we mean by happier. If we eliminate things like being more content, satisfied, at peace and so on, happiness is a surprisingly ephemeral thing to try to define.

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.

sh4rks• 9 months ago

True happiness can be achieved. It's like being "high" all the time. Those who are truly intelligent will find a way to attain this true happiness.

int_19h7• 9 months ago

Achieving true happiness is quite easy; all it takes is a pair of electrodes in the brain. Or some drugs.

Achieving meaningful happiness, now that is the trick.

bigmattystyles• 9 months ago

Evolution doesn’t care about happiness. Not directly anyways. I guess it cares for it as much as it is advantageous for reproduction, like smarts…

tonymet• 9 months ago

it's a correlation not a causation. "smart people" (actually just over achievers like those who excel at aptitude tests or collect diplomas) tend to be overly contemplative. Dwelling on things rarely resolves them, and usually just leads to angst.

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.

FloorEgg2• 9 months ago

Satisfaction is reality minus expectations.

"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.

mapcars2• 9 months ago

The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable

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.

mkoubaa• 9 months ago

I resent how overused and underspecified the word "happy" is

djaouen• 9 months ago

Because most people are dumber than them lol..

xorvoid• 9 months ago

Because they struggle with how many problems they see. In order words, the opposite of "ignorance is bliss"

danielmarkbruce• 9 months ago

Because evolution doesn't select for happiness, but does select for intellect.

spawarotti• 9 months ago

Smartness and happiness are like test coverage.

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.

tintor• 9 months ago

happiness is your reality minus your expectations, and expectations tend to catch up quickly with reality

synapsomorphy• 9 months ago

Interesting essay. But it attributes something magical (ability to solve undefined problems) to humans and says that AI doesn't have it.

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.

lvl155• 9 months ago

9 out of 10, people around you will take advantage of you for most of your career. You will grow resentful and lose motivation. And basically the core driver of your happiness will slowly fade. I’ve seen it happen too many times.

tempestn• 9 months ago

This is an interesting hypothesis, but I don't buy it. I'm pretty confident that "smart" people are also good at solving poorly specified problems. One good example might be, "How do I start a successful company?" There's plenty of evidence that intelligence correlates to ability there.

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.

thisisauserid• 9 months ago

Because they're statistically more likely to be surrounded by people dumber than them.

Master_Quant• 9 months ago

They say the pursuit of happiness is a right, but for me it became a compass. Through storms and revelations, through invention and loss, that phrase always kept me aligned with something larger than ambition: the pursuit itself. Happiness was never a finish line. It was a movement — the quiet joy of asking why when others stop at how. It is curiosity that kept me alive long after reason told me to rest. There were times that same curiosity led me into darkness — sleepless nights, broken algorithms, questions too vast for a single mind. Yet every time I stood at the edge of doubt, I felt the same pull, the same whisper saying: CONTINUE They say curiosity killed the cat, but I believe it resurrects the soul. It gives meaning to repetition, light to struggle, and direction to uncertainty. Without it, life becomes a flat line. With it, even pain becomes part of the design. Today, as I look back — an old man, coffee in hand, an AI softly humming by my side — I see that all my discoveries were only reflections of one truth: To wonder is to live. The Black Box, the equations, the architecture of time — all of it was merely the expression of the same instinct that built civilizations and painted the stars: to understand, to create, to reach beyond the visible. If I have learned anything worth passing on, it is this: The pursuit of happiness is not joy without pain, nor success without failure. It is the courage to remain curious — to ask, to build, to imagine — even when the world insists it cannot be done. Because somewhere, between the question and the answer, we meet the divine spark that makes us human. And that, I believe, is happiness itself.

joshtbradley• 9 months ago

Thank you.

tjs8rj• 9 months ago

Is happiness the point of life? We just exist self referentially, to live, churn chemicals in our skull, and then stop living? The whole thing is just a self perpetuating chemical reaction?

reliablereason• 9 months ago

It might be that general happiness is influenced largely by genetic factors, and not as much by contextual ones.

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.

tmtvl• 9 months ago

We could probably argue all day about what 'smart' means and what 'happy' means and about how IQ only measures test taking ability and how happiness is usually self reported and all these things.

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.

ninjha01• 9 months ago

I really enjoyed this podcast of a comedian describing her interactions with mensa.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-my-year-in-mensa-5537994...

chrismsimpson• 9 months ago

Is this a haiku? Kind of answers itself

alvah2• 9 months ago

It's very difficult for most (not all) people to relate to others who are either significantly more or significantly less intelligent than them. So, for example (using IQ as a proxy), most people of average intelligence (~100IQ) would find it difficult to relate to those of ~65IQ, and equally difficult to find much in common with someone much more intelligent than them (140+IQ). Given power laws / bell-curve distribution, most people on the tails of intelligence distribution will spend most of their time surrounded by people they can't really relate to. This does not seem like a recipe for happiness.

robot-wrangler• 9 months ago

Yes. A useful analogy is to imagine being an adult in a world populated only by children. Aside from the social alienation of it being hard to relate to others, there would be practical matters. The entertainment would all be tedious and predictable, all the rationalizations for bad behavior would be transparently self-interested. Enhanced capabilities for observation, prediction, and planning would make you a super-hero at problem-solving, but really, what does that get you except repetitive unfulfilling effort? Don't sweat the small stuff is good advice, but you couldn't actually ignore the futility. Don't focus on the negative is good advice, but in a world like that pessimism and realism are the same thing. Anyone would be miserable. The good-aligned person would likely withdraw or self-lobotomize. More cynical characters would harden their heart, seize power, and become king of all the blind babies and try to yoke them together and build a pyramid or something. (Yes, I've recently reread Understand by Ted Chiang, No a pyramid is not a plot point per se ;)

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.

Nathanba• 9 months ago

yes and those children have money, power and jobs and you have to navigate that somehow without sparking their very irrational, very easily sparked ire.

wat100004• 9 months ago

"Imagine"?

It is indeed not that extreme, but sometimes it feels pretty close. It is hard to find entertainment that isn't tedious and predictable. The public seems to eat up rationalizations for bad behavior which are obvious nonsense.

I'm happy at work because I'm surrounded by people smarter, more motivated, and more conscientious than I am. Outside of work, well, some days I dream that Anderson's Brain Wave would come true, the Earth would move out of some magical interstellar intelligence-suppressing field, and everyone's IQ would quintuple overnight.

johnfn• 9 months ago

This doesn’t seem obviously true. There’s a bell curve of how knowledgeable people are with tech and somehow people I spend time with end up in the tail end. There’s a bell curve of how much they like board games and I end up spending a lot of time with people at the tail end as well. In general, the people you spend time with are not selected by a process which is even close to random.

alvah2• 9 months ago

"In general, the people you spend time with are not selected by a process which is even close to random"

That very much depends on where you are born & brought up, and how willing you are to leave all that behind.

sandspar• 9 months ago

I haven't found this to be true. For marriage, sure, pick someone close to you. But I've found that IQ is mostly irrelevant for friendship. Character and compatibility matter more than IQ.

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.

roncesvalles• 9 months ago

will spend most of their time surrounded by people they can't really relate to.

But society tends to bring together like-minded people e.g. in schooling, professional work, sports teams, art school, or whatever other community.

Also, I think social compatibility is less about matching IQs and more about matching senses of humor. If someone finds your jokes distasteful or downright bland, it's never going to work out. My friends are my friends because we laugh at the same things.

dismalpedigree• 9 months ago

Smart people are not happier because of all the stupid people.

abixb• 9 months ago

Applying Occam's Razor -- "smart" people generally are a lot more aware of the ways of our world and its operating mechanics, and a lot of it is not pretty. Therefore, they're able to see behind the veil/'maya' of blissful ignorance, leading to "unhappiness."

newsclues• 9 months ago

Having high intelligence stats can come at the cost of speech skills and the life path can lead not one that isn’t very conducive to social wellbeing

Waterluvian• 9 months ago

If I play Diablo 4, 10 mins in I’ll think, “what’s the point? Where does this treadmill go? Is there a better build that’s more fun? Is the game loop to shallow? What were the devs intending with this and that?”

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.

nextworddev• 9 months ago

If you are smart but not happy, then perhaps we should revisit the assume that you are smart…

arkis22• 9 months ago

If ignorance is bliss, then I am miserable.

bencornia• 9 months ago

I just started reading Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer, and the author has this to say about intelligence and happiness:

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.

lll-o-lll• 9 months ago

Wisdom is not intelligence. Have we forgotten the word? You don’t need intelligence to be wise, and it’s more important to be wise than to be smart. Seek wisdom and a good life will result.

martin-t3• 9 months ago

From personal experience, because we see a lot more of what's wrong but have no power to change it.

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.

9rx2• 9 months ago

I'm not sure that adds up. I've never met anyone, no matter how dumb, who doesn't have a long list of things they see wrong with the world. The difference with the smart people is that they use their smarts to figure how to enact the change they want to see, including figuring out how to gain power where necessary.

martin-t3• 9 months ago

OK, tell me which dumb people understand:

- The differences between voting systems and why FPTP is one of the worst options possible.

- That opinions are N-dimensional vectors and elections are describing your opinion by picking one point from a small predefined set.

- How much money a day a person in the top 0.01% makes vs the top 50% and for how much time/effort.

I am sure dumb people see problems and they probably also see them to be as severe as those I listed.

But I don't think they understand how hard it is to find solutions, especially when those solutions involve convincing dumb people.

dr_dshiv• 9 months ago

Happiness is overrated.

Meaningful, rich lives are filled with conflict, anxiety and regular disappointment. It’s not happiness, exactly, but I wouldn’t trade it.

sssilver• 9 months ago

I’ve met a tremendous amount of very smart but miserable software engineers.

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.

socalgal2• 9 months ago

anecdata but my experience on dating services is Christians, on average, look happy. No idea why. I'm atheist and not interested in dating a Christian because I could not support their beliefs. But, it's uncanny how often the pattern fits. I'm pretty confident, given 100 dating site profile photos, I can, far better than chance, guess which ones are Christian.

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.

bhawks• 9 months ago

In my journey to Christianity I have found that as my faith grew my anxiety and depression became much more manageable. This really wasn't intentional on my part but Ive transitioned from a decade+ of actively managing with medication and weekly therapy to no meds and monthly psychotherapy over a few years. Looking back I do credit that to my faith giving me a framework to manage my long list of worries, concerns and fears. The people in my Church community generally are happy even despite dealing with many difficulties. I can't say the same for all the people I know through work or other venues.

HKH26• 9 months ago

Christians find meaning in their suffering. Materialists find it challenging to do that and often want to erase suffering completely.

SCAQTony• 9 months ago

Ignorance is bliss. Q.E.D. IMO, the more brain cells one has, the more neurotic one can be because the added bandwidth, compounded with being highly educated, gives one's imagination the horsepower to predict plenty of negative consequences. YMMV (be kind to me)

lutusp• 9 months ago

The author of the article has a Ph.D. in psychology and the journal is named "Seeds of Science." To a seasoned traveler in life, these are both red flags (real science journals don't need to proclaim their relationship with science, and psychology isn't a science as the term is defined).

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."

nurettin• 9 months ago

In "smart people" that I've met, those who perform well in quickly understanding subjects, have some sort of strong long and short term memory (something most IQ tests fail to measure) and generally read the room well, I noticed one thing: most of them are very impatient.

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.

jameslk• 9 months ago

Surprising but unsurprising… nobody wants to “just” be happy. I’d go as far as to say most aren’t prioritizing being happy, even if they think they are.

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.

farhanhubble• 9 months ago

Because they always have an intellectual itch. They want to go down every rabbit hole, They think things can be done better. And, in general, because they think. Because they have little interest in mundane and repetitive things.

rramadass• 9 months ago

Simple; It is because they Think, Read, Reason and Experience too much. They cannot let well enough alone. We are the only species who can torture ourselves solely through our mental means.

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...

x86x87• 9 months ago

Pleasure and happiness aren't the same thing, but most people chase pleasure while calling it happiness. Pleasure is the quick hit—good food, sex, scrolling your phone—it feels great but fades fast. Happiness is something else entirely, and what it means changes drastically depending on how smart you are. Less intelligent people tend to equate happiness with basic pleasures and getting their needs met. Average intelligence ties it to status, money, keeping up with others. But higher intelligence complicates everything: some people find meaning in ideas, creativity, or purpose; others overthink themselves into misery, seeing through all the goals that used to motivate them. Intelligence gives you better tools to understand happiness but can also strip away the simple certainties that make it easier to actually feel happy. You gain clarity but lose the blissful ignorance that makes chasing straightforward goals satisfying.

dyauspitr3• 9 months ago

Pleasure is happiness. If you could afford it you can have great food, unlimited sex, free time to pursue passions and interests and most importantly endless, unrestricted power over people all the time. The above, combined with no stressors will pretty much guarantee life long happiness.

The only caveats are drugs (generally destructive) and clinical depression caused by hormonal imbalances.

HKH26• 9 months ago

Pleasure is immediate, whereas happiness (or joy) reflects something more long-lasting and is often ineffable.

You can get used to pleasure because you can predict it and control it. Joy and wisdom are not gained so easily, and it's that challenge that creates meaning.

jancsika• 9 months ago

When they encounter a problem, they should use their superior problem-solving ability to solve it.

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?"

gbjw• 9 months ago

“ Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.” - Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

strken• 9 months ago

You can remove intelligence from that hypothesis entirely, and it won't change the meaning. You can substitute almost anything else, too: "Owning a rubber duck without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis." Well, yeah, but why is the duck in that sentence?

Antibabelic• 9 months ago

It's in there because of the claim directly preceding it: "But all too often a search for a rubber duck drives out the search for love". It builds upon that first statement.

jama211• 9 months ago

The devil is in the details, e.g. people usually self report very different levels of happiness if you ask them more or less frequently, and if you ask them about general happiness or in the moment happiness.

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.

zkmon2• 9 months ago

To a large extent, thinking beyond what is needed for processing sensory inputs, is same as being unhappy. Smart people, by definition, think more and naturally be unhappy. Just like how smart devices with more work to do, tend to be warmer than non-smart devices with same computing power.

rubenvanwyk• 9 months ago

“With much knowledge, comes much sorrow.”

giardini• 9 months ago

Because Donald J. Trump is President of the USA.

benrutter• 9 months ago

There's a lot of good takes here about the link between happiness and intelligence.

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?

moonlet• 9 months ago

Why aren’t less intelligent people also happier? I dunno mate, could be the shape of society right now…

artrockalter• 9 months ago

Happy smart people are generally very focused and only care about a few things. Unhappy smart people are constantly getting "nerd-sniped" into focusing their intelligence on things that don't make them happy.

rf152• 9 months ago

That sounds strange, but please drill some holes into my argument.

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.

jesterson2• 9 months ago

unhappiness stems from the negative mismatch of one's expectation vs experienced reality

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.

rf152• 9 months ago

But that still means you are unable to emotionally accept this understanding, that the world is as it is for perfectly logical reasons if you go down deep enough.

And no attempt is futile, every act should matter to you.

hshdhdhehd2• 9 months ago

It is not smart to be happy all the time!

amai2• 9 months ago

Because they are surrounded by stupid people?

Izmaki• 9 months ago

Being pulled aside by management because your desire for correctness and high quality got you in trouble when you wanted to correct project management kind of sucks. Having your “ah, that’s probably easy” attitude makes you seem arrogant and as if you want to “show off” - even if the thing objectively speaking IS easy to you and even if you could do a better job in less time than your colleagues.

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%)

Skunkleton• 9 months ago

If you find yourself getting in trouble, maybe you are solving the wrong problems?

rand846633• 9 months ago

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.

Apparently you have not solved the problems of how to find the right group and company yet. Either you are in the wrong room or just delusional.

brazukadev• 9 months ago

Real smart people don't have this problem as social engineering is just one more tool

jtrn• 9 months ago

Why are unhappy people constantly trying to convince themself and the world, that it’s because they are smart.

vswaroop04• 9 months ago

The more you think, the more you can see how many things can go wrong

eptcyka• 9 months ago

I think a common misconception is that smart people are not happy. I think a lot of people who'd like to think of themselves as smart end up chasing this identity instead of being happy. This doesn't seem to be all to smart to me.

HKH26• 9 months ago

Yes, having a high IQ won't necessarily make you wise.

amai2• 9 months ago

"well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills."

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.

macleginn• 9 months ago

The way I see it, most, if not all, of well defined problems amount to search (maze, chess, proving Fermat's last theorem). You search carefully for a long time, and at some moment you are done. With a poorly-defined problem, you never know if you're done: you need to operationalise it in a way that "makes sense" to you and other people and then possibly reoperationalise it again based on new data or intermediate results. This kind of activity demands flexibility; search is more about rigour and exhaustivity.

onion92• 9 months ago

I think you are talking about consciousness, that is what drives our life.

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.

kepeko2• 9 months ago

Even if you are smart you have to work. And the work isn't necessarily funnier than the "stupid" work that almost anybody can do. I still think I liked my time at construction yard more than my time in front of computer screens. But I do this to be able to pay my bills. There are many counter arguments to the point that smart people are less happy because of what their jobs but I still wanted to say, "better" job is not always happier. Disclaimer, construction workers are smart but there are entry level jobs where smarts is not needed.

kepeko2• 9 months ago

Cont. I was always somebody who does well in school and thinks he is smart. But I had some situations that gave me a lesson. E.g. when I was younger I got to know some people who were kind of fun to spend time with but I thought they are a bit crazy, not smart. At some point I noticed, well, they seem to be doing better than I, in fact. They have a nice job, they have friends, they have a comfy apartment, they seem happy. I was a poor technical student in university who was struggling with studies and life, and not finding a great job. So I thought, "I think I'm smart but what use is my smarts if the dumb ones are doing better?" I developed this mindset of forgetting smarts and not categorizing people with that so much. And don't be proud of your smarts, instead show what valuable skills you have.

gethly• 9 months ago

Happiness is ephemeral. Seeking it in itself is a low IQ behavior, therefore it is an antithesis to "smart people".

What "smart people" actually seek is content, which can be had in abundance.

yuvalkarmi• 9 months ago

For anyone interested the tl;dr, here it is: smart people aren’t necessarily happier because intelligence mostly helps with well-defined problems (logic, puzzles, work tasks).

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

int_19h7• 9 months ago

It's even worse than that. If you try to apply pure reason to a problem like meaning or values - because you're conditioned to approach any problem this way - the results are often outright depressing.

iamcomment• 9 months ago

Every time I see posts like this I wait for all the 'this is me' narcasistic comments. If you think you are super smart, you should read Schopenhauer. He wrote about how most people vastly overestimate their intelligence and importance, calling vanity and self-delusion universal human flaws. He saw it as part of the reason why humanity fails to learn from history or act rationally—because everyone assumes they are the clever exception. Youare not unhappy because you are so smart.

int_19h7• 9 months ago

  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.

That's Hávamál, from ~thousand years ago, give or take.

jongjong3• 9 months ago

I think it's partly because smart people are hated by society. Consider the negative connotations of the words 'geek' and 'nerd'.

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 less intelligent people are jealous of more intelligent people because more intelligent people are more aware, more conscious. There is a deep jealousy. In the same way that someone can be jealous of someone's good looks, someone can be jealous of one's intelligence... And it goes deeper than just the kind of intelligence which is valued by the markets. People can be jealous of intangible forms of intelligence, even someone's 'emotional sensitivity' can the the subject of envy...

Though of course people's mental models of whether or not someone possesses certain intellectual capabilities are not always accurate, overall people do have a relatively good sense of other people's psychological profiles...

Some people are really good at sensing other people's psychological profiles and these people tend to be the most jealous. Like the bully who picks on the nerd at school. The bully has a strong sense of the nerd's intellectual capabilities and his jealousy fills him with resentment and anger which he cannot explain in words (as he lacks the intellectual capability of even processing his own feelings rationally). His heightened sense of others' psychology may be a bully's only intellectual asset. This can be very frustrating and some of them will make the most of their understanding of psychology to manipulate others because their success in controlling others helps to compensate for their shortcomings in other intellectual areas.

Being able to control others is a form of intelligence, but it's also a pathology once exercised.

__alexs• 9 months ago

Why are we so obsessed with being happy all the time? I'd rather be crying my eyes out than the nothingness society seems to accept as a default.

antegamisou2• 9 months ago

If one were to only go by the number of comments this thread has ended up amassing, you'd reckon they would consist of endless wandering mental gymnastics about semantics, iamverysmart suppositions that the statement in the title is just a coping mechanism of those not intellectually gifted and certainly some thinly veiled scientific racism.

IMO, "unhappy smart" people are more likely to be described as those belonging to privileged social classes and backgrounds that were able to afford premium tutoring and education, so they ended up at places that provide opportunities and connections to the most powerful of the economic elite. The latter's influence on societal perceptions have of course helped the aforementioned category become a role model for those that do not possess the same privileges, on the deceitful pretense that this all is a result of superior raw mental capacity.

The unhappy part could be multifaceted; apart from being able to essentially buy elite institutional credentials, they're being indoctrinated at an early age about the importance of maintaining the status quo and being penalized if they deviate to any degree. Hence they may be suffering from some sort of transgenerational trauma that has shaped them to tie their worth to a narrow set of things, most usually occupational prestige and amount of wealth. When their environment consists of people of similar backgrounds but varying levels of social achievement, it's expected that they'd feel inferiority if they come across someone more accomplished (whose "accomplishment" almost always ends up meaning choosing the even-more-right parents), even if they already belong to the top ladder on the social hierarchy.

CraigJPerry• 9 months ago

I don't know but given that you can't define happiness for someone else, it's a very personal thing, surely it's more insightful to flip the question on its head and figure out how to minimise suffering instead?

Don't ask "what stops you being happy?", instead ask if they're suffering - hopefully most of them are not, but if they are, what can be done about it?

I just have an aversion to someone trying to inflict their version of happiness on others i think.

GuB-42• 9 months ago

Often, measures of happiness really means content. It doesn't mean a lack of suffering, but how well you accept it.

Nordic countries for instance are often ranked as the "happiest" even though their winters are terrible, no one is smiling in the streets and they have severe issues with alcoholism resulting in some of the strictest regulations regarding alcohol sales. But because they are accepting of their situation and support each other, they are considered happy.

bronlund• 9 months ago

This is an easy one. The smarter you are, the more you understand all the shit that is going on. Would you rather be dumb and happy instead of seeing all the shit? Nope.

The smartest of us are not having a good time.

nimei23• 9 months ago

Unhappiness increases with higher ability to recognise sets of problems and possible solutions to them, and still no practical way to solve them on your own.

Many of those problems are even unrecognizable for others, many of those problems even created by others.

If I am unwilling to live isolated in the woods, society is creating and simultaneously not recognizing a whole set of problems that increase my personal unhappiness.

wopwops• 9 months ago

Once I moved to the middle of nowhere and limited my contact with people---besides my wife and children---I became very happy.

sizzle• 9 months ago

Curse of knowledge?

thunderbong• 9 months ago

Neither the article, nor any of the comments here, define happiness.

So I'm not quite sure what we're trying to measure here.

If it is subjective then comparing it with something which is considered measurable, like intelligence (however vaguely) is unrelated and irrelevant.

PaulRobinson• 9 months ago

My Dad once told me being smart was a curse.

When he was stationed abroad with a load of meatheads, they would be happy spending their down time drinking beer and getting a tan. He would miss libraries of home. When people around him didn't care about the problems of the World, he saw the intractable nuance of the World's problems and felt a deep helplessness.

Some of this was clearly depression, but I have to admit, 30 years after he shared those stories with me, there have been times I've been jealous of people who did not think through the detail and nuance and see the risks and lack of mitigations in so many circumstances. I'm not exceptionally smart, but I do seem to be a step or two ahead of ~30% of my colleagues and friends, and that seems to be enough to make life feel quite sad, quite a lot of the time.

soared• 9 months ago

A further level of intelligence may recognize the futility in worrying, accept the situation and your inability to impact it, and purposefully take the approach of a meathead.

A man’s search for meaning is an incredible book you may enjoy based on your comment. My strongest takeaway was that in situations where I cannot make an impact or control something, I still control how I react.

neuralkoi• 9 months ago

I think Michael Jackson put it well: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and make a change".

pixel_popping• 9 months ago

The author is overthinking this because smart people aren't "happier" because happiness isn't a problem to be solved per say, it's mostly genetics + whether your basic needs are met or not.

This phrase "ignorance is bliss" is a cliche for a reason. When you understand how broken our systems and society is but lack the power to fix it, that knowledge is just burden.

I'd rather be able to turn off the part of my brain that notices when people are making obviously preventable mistakes, I can't personally and I would argue that anyone that has traveled to developing countries has probably noticed this, people with less formal education often seem GENUINELY happier despite having fewer material resources. They're not burdened by awareness of all the ways things could theoretically be better. Our happiness can degrade instantly just by checking the news.

figassis• 9 months ago

They are aware, they have learned to not waste their limited lifespan fighting a losing battle, often, they've already given enough, lost enough loved ones that they'd rather enjoy what little life gives them. They're not less intelligent.

pettertb• 9 months ago

The Swedish band "The Ark" has a wonderfully named song: "It takes a fool to remain sane".

shevy-java• 9 months ago

Because they have an easier time knowing and assessing how fudged up everything is.

Jemm• 9 months ago

In my opinion the reason that intelligent people aren't happier is because we live in a world that caters to lower intelligence crowds. Think being above above average height and living in a world where everything is designed for people who are below average height.

The second reason is that society not only does not value intelligence; society values sub average intelligence. Most intelligent or even diligent people learned quickly that they will be harassed and bullied.

The last refuge of intelligence was academia, but academia does not want intelligent people. Academia wants people who will comply and play the funding game without rocking the money boat. Just ask Sabine Hossenfelder.

rbanffy• 9 months ago

I know this is not the definition of smart the article goes for, but even if you are truly smart and have life figured out completely, can someone who’s aware of the current state of our world be actually happy?

pizzafeelsright4• 9 months ago

Yes, I am quite happy. Sadly it took 20 years of pain but I got there.

bilsbie4• 9 months ago

I’d do anything for a single high IQ , but open minded friend.

I find every smart person I’ve met thinks the best strategy in life is to parrot other smart people.

Don’t get me wrong it can be a successful strategy but I want someone to do first principles thinking with.

HKH26• 9 months ago

That's one reason why LLMs are so popular.

pizzafeelsright4• 9 months ago

Hi. Want to schedule a call?

bilsbie4• 9 months ago

Sure thing. Email is in my profile.

vachina• 9 months ago

Smart people knows too much, knows what they’re missing out.

lordgrenville• 9 months ago

RTFM: "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow"

pfisherman• 9 months ago

The word “smart” is doing a lot of work here. And I think both the author and a lot of commenters in this thread are equating it with IQ.

What about EQ? I would also consider people with high EQ to be smart. It is a different kind of smart, and provably one more correlated with happiness.

d4rkn0d3z• 9 months ago

"Here’s one last advantage of dividing intelligence into well-defined problem-solving and poorly defined problem-solving: it reminds us to give some respect where respect is due."

There is another way of looking at this. A problem seems "well-defined" when it is presented in terms of your current paradigm. This means that it uses the thought apparatus with which you and everyone around you is familiar. So what appears to be a property of the problem is actually a state of affairs, a property of the whole problem/problem-solver/paradigm system. On the other side of the coin, an ill-posed or "poorly-defined" problem may actually be well-defined in an alternate paradigm. In the alternate paradigm one has new thought apparatus that suddenly make the ill-posed problem tractable.

On this view, what you call "stupid" may be identical to what you don't yet understand and what you call intelligent is that with which you are most familiar. So intelligence is not a property a human can possess but a network effect that is quite intellectually bereft.

Wisdom then is the experience of watching many paradigm shifts over time and realizing that what is stupid today may be smart tomorrow and vice versa.

sameesh• 9 months ago

Well you just said they are smart, so...

iNic• 9 months ago

This might be pedantic, but I think "happy" is not the right metric. I would love to run a survey which instead asks "are you unhappy" or "are you content"

Astro-Domine2• 9 months ago

I know a couple of intimidatingly intelligent people who are burdened with serious depression.

The one who talks about it thinks it’s because of their intellect, that they can see more than most people; that they have some special insight.

I’ve asked them to explain this special insight that other people “don’t get” and my thoughts on it are:

It’s not the insight that causes the problem. It’s accepting what they see. The kind of intellect they are using is great for discovering things but to accept what you discover is a different skill, which doesn’t seem to come along with a high IQ.

I don’t believe being intelligent makes you less happy. I believe a very well developed IQ-type intelligence coupled with an underdeveloped EQ-type intelligence is a recipe for unhappiness.

Bjartr2• 9 months ago

Or, to put it another way

Have the grace to accept things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

An intelligent person usually knows a lot about a lot. The more things you know about, the more chances you have to make a mistake and think changing something is in your court, when it's really not.

Astro-Domine2• 9 months ago

I agree with that.

Another type of problem with this particular person was the insight that there is no meaning to be discovered, distilled or coaxed out of analysis.

That we must create meaning is an example of something which is entirely in their court but which they somehow can’t accept and proceed with.

padjo• 9 months ago

You can know something is not within your power to change and still find the fact of its existence deeply upsetting.

crapapelata• 9 months ago

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

― Gustave Flaubert

1dom3• 9 months ago

I thought this article wasn't great, really. It was interesting, but I expected some more takeaways. Like this was the main consistent point I could find:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mortsnort• 9 months ago

Happiness isn't a good survival trait.

atzmzt• 9 months ago

Couldn't have said it better - it's just a carrot at the end of a stick to make us always want something better.

Life, Liberty and the PURSUIT of Happiness!

wraptile• 9 months ago

I'm not a scientist but seeing "IQ" and "happiness" be considered in any scientific manner and together is an instant pass for me.

What is more interesting that this pseudo science is so highly upvoted here which seems like white collar workers on HN are curious about their own mental health or just high on their own farts. This is not the way to find any meaningful answers.

throw7• 9 months ago

Happiness is relational. The meta-study (i only read the small abstract) concludes that being around happy people correlates to your happiness. Anecdotally, really "smart" people can be about the least fun people to be around.

_-_-__-_-_-• 9 months ago

I’m not intelligent. I’m average. But, I’m considered successful and live comfortably for a North American. I have a few university degrees, with secure long term work in my field, an affordable home, a dependable car and all the trappings of middle class life.

Am I happy? I spent my young adult years hoping that happiness would arrive after finishing university, buying a new car, supporting myself financially, starting a career, getting married… it’s less of a “moving goal-post problem” and more a existential “what’s the larger point to life” and “what impact do I actually want to make”.

Having happiness as this ever elusive goal was more an errant wish than something measurably achievable.

uvaursi• 9 months ago

This is why people get divorced. It’s not because their partners are terrible (they can be), but because they are on train tracks of a life that isn’t theirs.

Fight Club had the answer to this, by taking a no-name Joe Schmoe (reflected as us), and putting a gun to his head: The Question, Raymond, is what did you want to be?

torginus• 9 months ago

I think the answer to this question is that the most consistent way to make people happy is to have them partake in social group activities - going out drinking, playing/watching team sports etc, watching movies - there's something hardwired into people's consciousness that when in groups, people tend to forget their own troubles and kind of adopt a common jolly mood,

In contrast, almost all 'smart people' activities are solo activities or stuff with infrequent socialization - reading/writing, programming, playing/practicing instruments etc.

Many of these activities are quite challenning as opposed to the former ones, so more likely to bring negative emotions to the forefront.

'Smart' people also tend to have elevated expectations of themselves, and they expect to either do better in general, or succeed in some niche that most people don't really concern themselves with - that leads to perpetual feelings of inadequacy.

I'm not saying smart people are required to engage in these activities, I'm saying people should be more amenable to socializing and just chilling out together.

hufdr• 9 months ago

I don’t think being smart necessarily makes people unhappy. What’s tiring is seeing everything too clearly. When you understand too much, it becomes harder to care, to connect, or to feel joy and sometimes that clarity just feels lonely. Maybe happiness really needs a little bit of ignorance.

b3ing• 9 months ago

Probably because they think to much rather than just doing things

throw4847285• 9 months ago

This framing leads to a major problem: people who are smart and unhappy will believe that unhappiness is necessary.

This is a common coping mechanism for anxiety: you believe that the reason you are anxious is because you have access to some kind of special knowledge about the world that sets you apart from your peers. They are happy because they just don't know what you know.

ozgrakkurt• 9 months ago

In my experience, happiness takes explicit effort. No one is entitled to happiness because they are “X”.

Everyone has their own unique situation. That situation is constantly changing and complex. So it needs constant explicit attention and effort to stay close to the desired state.

xvilka• 9 months ago

It's a common knowledge. Russian poet Alexander Griboyedov[1] wrote a poem about this paradox - Woe from Wit[2]. Note, that in this poem it's a satire, but it was still tongue-in-cheek title that reflects the real phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Griboyedov

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woe_from_Wit

dcchuck• 9 months ago

There's a Bertrand Russell book on this very topic, The Conquest of Happiness - https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Happiness-Bertrand-Russell/d... (not an affiliate link)

I enjoyed the read. Felt like Russell just thought about this question for a while, and shared his thoughts. It was very practical and enjoyable.

Disclaimer: I recall some "wow, we don't talk like that anymore" moments. And I didn't enjoy the hyperbole of the cover quotes. But the content of the book debunks those.

zh3• 9 months ago

Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

That's actually from "The triumph of stupdity" [0] rather than Conquest of Happiness but perhaps more appropriate to this particular discussion.

* [0] https://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM

KerryJones• 9 months ago

This is from 2022

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409811 - https://www.experimental-history.com/p/why-arent-smart-peopl...

jasonlotito• 9 months ago

"Ignorance is bliss."

The answer to the question posed: dumb people.

plopilop• 9 months ago

A long time ago I read "the good Brahmin" from Voltaire: https://www.online-literature.com/voltaire/4411/

Basically, the story goes that the good brahmin, for all his wealth and intelligence, is miserable, whereas the stupid beggar down the street is very happy. While the brahmin accepts that the beggar is objectively happier than him, he would never swap places with her.

It made me realise that the quest for intelligence is fundamentally different from the quest for happiness, and even to this day I still take the story in consideration when making life choices. I do not believe that intelligence forbids happiness, simply that if you spend too much time trying to be right, you don't spend enough trying to be happy. Of course trying to be right can make you happy, but in the general case you always need to remember to take a step back.

scotty79• 9 months ago

High intelligence is an anomaly. And anomalous brains are often anomalous in more than one way at the same time. More intelligent brains aren't better. They are just more unusual in many aspects but both in positive and negative direction. So if you average out intelligent people across other axes they pretty much sum up to the same mean despite some of them being surprisingly strange.

For every super-intelligent Holocaust denier you'd find one other equally intelligent person with superbly strong bullshit filter that won't fall for any fake narrative.

tsoukase• 9 months ago

Happiness = Achievements - Goals

Smart people have big achievements but set bigger goals. In less smart ones the remainder is positive.

estimator7292• 9 months ago

Loneliness. If you're smarter than the average person, your cohort of intellectual peers becomes vanishingly small. Without the support and community of people like you, or who can understand you, most humans get pretty depressed.

When you're a smart person, you see the world in a fundamentally different way. You can see both the grand beauty in the universe and our place within it, but at the same time it's impossible to escape seeing the whole world for the cruel and unjust place we've made it. It's profoundly sad to think about the richness with which you experience the world and knowing that most people don't get to see the universe this way.

When you're smart, you're capital-D Different. Fewer people relate to you. There are endless expectations placed on you. You're Other from most social groups.

There's also the deep dissatisfaction and despair of seeing with perfect clarity what the world could be if everyone would just get along.

It's all about being different and the loneliness it brings. It's about knowing that humanity can be so much more than what we are. The world is bad and small and lonely. There's only so much you can do despite having perfect clarity on how we can get to where we should be.

Something most everyone here can relate to is being a programmer or engineer in a room full of laypeople. You can try to explain what you're working on, but no matter how simply you put it, they won't ever "get" why you're excited or mad about some problem. It's hard to communicate our highly technical experiences to someone who just doesn't understand.

Think of how frustrating that is. Now imagine that every conversation is like this from the time you're ten years old to the day you die. Here and there you'll run into a group of peers and have a real conversation at your own intellectual level. But it's still an isolated group, the rest of your life is still explaining compiler optimizations or finite element analysis to your great aunt. It sucks.

JennyWeston• 9 months ago

I am sticking with Socrates: "The only thing I know is that I know nothing"

Happiness? That's an experiment. I need to keep learning, keep trying stuff, keep failing.

Intelligence? Intelligence is great for many things, but not everything. I wouldn't use a GPS system to perform a heart transplant. Recognizing the limitations of thinking allows us to appreciate the value of perseverance, creativity, and expertise. Some things are a matter of doing the work. Some things are a matter of experience and time. I cannot think my way through the unknown unknown.

realaaa• 9 months ago

ha ha I guess that's one way to write an essay - have an assumption which we all know is incorrect, and then successfully dismount it to pieces !

martin82• 9 months ago

I don't know if I am all that smart, but I can attest that the one thing that made me happier beyond my wildest expectations is seeing my daughter see the light of the world and then spending every single day of her life, so far, giving my very best to raise her into an exceptional being. Seeing the milestones and progress that she makes is utterly incredible.

Our society will never get fixed if we don't raise children. It completely changes the game and your worldview.

nachox999• 9 months ago

they think too much

runamuck• 9 months ago

Every religion (to my knowledge) agrees that true happiness only comes from helping others (and not then not boasting about your help).

kaon_2• 9 months ago

I once read a fascinating booklet that made the argument that "intelligence" as we call it evolved out of the ability to track better. Early hominids had many different skills, but improved reasoning capability paid for itself evolutionary speaking by making you a much better tracker. You spot measure the temperature of droppings, and reason that a gazelle was here only 2 hours ago. You see the tracks and notice that the gazelle was probably in the shade to avoid the midday sun. Now it must be thirsty and is therefore likely to go visit the stream nearby.

In that context, "Intelligence" is just one part of a collection of useful skills for a band of early hominids. You only need a few great trackers, but those trackers would be grateful if they also had some "meatheads" in the crew that are phenomenally atletic. And who knows; early hominids would mock each other for not being good at tracking, but would they call each other dumb? I somehow doubt it.

rekabis• 9 months ago

I have long since come to the conclusion that happiness is a bullshit goal. It’s like trying to capture Fae - are you sure it even exists? I’m not so sure.

Buddhism, in particular, teaches that wants will only ever cause pain and suffering, and when happiness is not something you can directly control - it arises out of conditions and situations you find yourself in - seeking and pursuing happiness is a fool’s errand. You will always suffer in those periods between bouts of happiness.

For me, I have focused on a much more concrete goal: *satisfaction.*

Particularly, satisfaction from having achieved the goals and targets I have set for myself, and in general, even the random shit that life throws at me. To tackle them and process/overcome/complete them to a quality or level or degree that I can be satisfied with.

And as someone with a nasty Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s, that threshold for satisfaction can often be disturbingly high.

Satisfaction does bring a certain degree of pleasure and happiness in of itself, but far more importantly it brings a degree of encouragement to keep moving forward in this capitalistic hellhole that is hurtling the human race (and potentially even the planet) towards full extinction within our lifetimes.

And as a coping mechanism, it works. Quite well, actually.

daemon_9009• 9 months ago

Intelligent people see and understand the world deeper, more than an average person can, They see the world in all its forms, good and bad, understanding too much does not bring happiness but gloom. existence seems to be absurd, the more we understand existence the more one believes that it shouldn't have existed at the first place.

"happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know" is a quote by Hemingway.

Also intelligent people overthink about a particular situation, while its better for survival but it can reduce happniess.

Why aren't smart people happier?

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