Why Aren't Smart People Happier?
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The article 'Why aren't smart people happier?' explores the relationship between intelligence and happiness, sparking a discussion on the Hacker News community about the potential reasons behind the lack of correlation between the two.
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Not sure if the irony is intended, but I find it hilarious.
>"Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings-“catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do […]"
I'd say how we measure intelligence its what's potentially incorrect or misguided at least. It's hard to definitively measure someone's creativity, or adaptability into a metric compared to trying to measure someone's vocabulary, or command of language and maths.
In this case, the definition is good (intelligence = the ability to navigate and solve poorly defined problems that require creativity, insight, and adaptability). The problem is, we don't test for that. We test on well defined problems and academic exercises (like the vocab test mentioned in the article).
As to stupidity... That is not a trait. That is not on a scale. That is a lifestyle choice — because it makes life easier.
Subsequently, a number of people burned to death.
Are those engineers still "smart"?
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.
Competing for mates is one of the basic mechanisms in evolution, seen in many animals. Instead of fighting the tribal leader or whomever to display fitness, humans came up with a less violent solution, which manifests itself in the ability to buy things.
No, most people think getting more (or getting something else) will make them happy.
> Why would you not want that. Like, ideally we'd all be happy with nothing, right?
Because it's hard to become wise, and that's not what society teaches.
If that doesn't work, various hypotheses come to mind, but I don't know how to test them.
Why aren't intelligent people doing [able to do] things that make them happy? Or at least happier that someone who is less intelligent?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ancient Rome worked on an 8 day workweek, and traditionally the 8th day was a rest day.
Ancient Greeks didn't have weekly days off... but they had up to 120 festivals a year where shops and businesses would be shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae
So sorry, you still get to bake bread all day.
And Greek festival days involved.. lots of food, baths had to be hot, etc. So someone has to run the event. It wasn't the common people getting a day off.
Their hours away from home may be similar in many cases, but that doesn't mean they had as high of a workload or had to work as fast as the modern equivalent. Most of them were working for themselves, and set their own pace and rules. And working for yourself is a HUGE perk and often many people's dream scenario. Want to drink beer all day while you chop wood? Sure. Want to sing baudy ballads while you patch your roof? Go ahead. Hurt your wrist while pulling weeds or managing your copice? Go take an immediate break or maybe just come back the next day. And because 90% of the population did that, those expectations carried over into many other jobs because anyone could walk away and find some farm they could work on instead if they really wanted.
You're telling me, in a SF-based startup community, nobody has ever slept over-night at the office?
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.
Wow. Has anyone informed the people getting killed in conflicts all over the world of this?
If you do, best case, the world might be a beautiful place for you specifically. But thinking about it makes you realize just how rare it is and just how lucky you are. And just how fucked it is for most everybody else.
And if you keep thinking, then you realize that any luck can run out and you can join said everybody else in an instant.
Just my thoughts anyways. I'm a dev, not a psychologist.
That though of spirals is really a scary thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvbh8xCi4w
success in this industry is proportional to your ability to not notice or not believe that your work is pointless
Lol
We’re not judging you because you want a promotion. We’re judging you because you selfishly make a ton of work for everyone else so you can feel better about your pointless life.
I have reasons to believe that many very successful athletes do have this self-deception.
But if you are truly smart, just telling people the truth, effectively explaining that their disfigured baby is ugly is so jarring to their coping mechanisms that they are browbeat to maintain the fiction of the beauty of the baby. This is also where power and abuse comes in. The ones who will destroy even the smartest people, often specifically because their intelligence threatens those on power and who are abusing humanity. Truly smart people simply have a hard time with lying to themselves though. That’s why they’re less happy in a world of lies, manipulation, and delusion. Truely smart people see the world dominated by the worst kind of narcissistic psychopaths, but they cannot actually let on to that fact or all the narcissistic psychopaths immediately turn on them in the most aggressive and intense way. It’s the nature of dealing with narcissistic psychopaths, and it leads to quite a bit of unhappiness if you are not also a narcissistic psychopath but have to live in the world you see for what it is. It’s probably the origin of the phrase “ignorance is bliss”; the cattle on the ranch are the happiest, until the day they are not at all.
At least in my sampling, I'd suggest the most extremely driven people often have some major sense of lack they're chasing.
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.
That said, it probably doesn't need to be this way and I would suggest that the root issue lies with the way that modern society is structured. It's not really optimizing for happiness on any level, which is greatly exacerbated when one has the mental acuity to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Do you think this comes with age, or are some people born with the ability regardless of age to see the bigger picture?
For myself, I just plodded along through high school and then things started to click more when I was in college, contemplating life in the real world. Many of my classmates in HS seemed to have the majority of their lives planned out already while I was just content to play sports, chase girls and learn about computers.
In my case, I was almost completely unconcerned about anything except my hobbies/interests in high school and didn’t have the foggiest clue about where I might be headed. It wasn’t without its stressors but overall it was a carefree time. It was maybe some time about halfway through college when reality began to sink in and that all changed. The ability to zoom out might’ve been present early on but if it was, it didn’t kick in until a threshold of some sort had been reached.
I took your earlier post as saying that the ability to see the bigger picture leads to neurosis and unhappiness. But in replies, you're both talking like that ability lets someone figure out the game and solve for more happiness...?
Going back upstream, I'd say that the ability to "see the big picture" is not well defined. Part of it is abstraction and part of it is systems thinking and knowledge about additional activities going on in your world.
And, I think these are mostly orthogonal to a happiness. Your emotional disposition can cause you to see a very different valence in the same systems view.
Yes, that was the intention. What I perhaps failed to convey in my last reply is that simply having the mental capacity to “zoom out” on its own doesn’t mean that the individual in question is actually doing that, and that some other secondary condition (such as life experience or knowledge) is required. In my anecdote, I was missing some requirement until halfway through college.
> Going back upstream, I'd say that the ability to "see the big picture" is not well defined. Part of it is abstraction and part of it is systems thinking and knowledge about additional activities going on in your world.
> And, I think these are mostly orthogonal to a happiness. Your emotional disposition can cause you to see a very different valence in the same systems view.
I don’t think the two are entirely unrelated. I would expect that someone who’s more cerebral is going to be less influenced by their disposition, and in the case of someone stuck in a negative mental loop their disposition could be shifted if the loop goes unaddressed for too long.
I remember being in an honors chem midterm and distinctly thinking “my grade on this test will directly impact my overall grade in this class and have a direct impact on my GPA, which will affect my college selection, and my overall net worth.”
The test wasn’t nearly as stressful as that thought.
Now, emotional intelligence, that would greatly influece your happiness. The hurdles you're talking about are emotional, not intellectual.
- There is a strong positive correlation between "Openness" and IQ (some people even claim that "Openness" is actually some weak version of an IQ test)
- There is a small negative correlation between "Extraversion" and IQ
The other three Big 5 traits are basically independent of IQ.
Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness are all strong predictors of higher life satisfaction and positive emotions. High levels of neuroticism are strongly associated with lower life satisfaction, and openness is mostly neutral.
This isn’t true at all.
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.
There are many benefits but it can be a real liability.
CEO seen as brilliant. On the tail in your words.
I was talking to head of sales about the CEO and his statement was this: these types of people are the easiest to manipulate.
Not exactly what you said but similar idea. It’s stuck with me that the smartest person in the room might also be the most vulnerable in numerous situations. That doesn’t mean I prefer lower IQ. But it’s helped me normalize how I communicate with people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This overflow might contribute to less happiness as a result.
Same thing, not a psychologist, just some thoughts.
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.
"It’s a lucky man who is happy with his place in life"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentlemen_(2024_TV_series)
Whenever I stop up to appreciate both my current working and living conditions, I’m happy for that period of time.
Yet, if I’m content, I’ll never live somewhere else doing something harder. I’d rather be a little unhappier always if I can think of ways to advance in the minigames I favor.
I've also had side quests in addition to my main quest which is financial stability and the extreme and total control of my circumstances. Side quests are hobbies, friendships, fitness targets etc.
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.
>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 …”
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.
It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)
Then the real question emerges: How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence? What percentage?
Relationships? Seems like no. Work? Also seems like no, lots of work doesn't make use of a high IQ that people enjoy nonetheless. Accomplishment? Strikes me as most likely of the three, but it's also very relative.
And another thought,
Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions. Like: someone who can jump high is fitter > fitter people are healthier > healthier people have more mental time to be empathetic with > people who can jump high are more empathetic. For intelligence, we say smart people are happier. Same thing, happiness is not directly correlated. Instead: Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier. (These are illustrations of the idea, not actual logical chains or claims.)
Smart people see more variables that could be changed, more components that could be modified, and are less likely to accept things as they are. This creates a false sense of ease by which reality could be modified, and thus higher expectations for the world around them.
I suspect this misplaces happiness and contentment, but the two are also very strongly correlated for many people.
By your hypothesis people who are poor, at the bottom of society, and told that they have no chance in life are the most happy ones.
Additionally, it imples that a great way to make people happy is to brainwash them all the time that they have no chance in life, and additionally suppress them so that their expectations match their reality.
This whole idea feels deeply wrong and dystopian to me.
Even if one day you could just squirt the cocktail directly into your receptors or otherwise trick them, there's more to happiness as a part of life than turning yourself into a vegetable, but I digress.
I remember an old addict speaking of cocaine as if it was his only true love. Waxed poetical about it, the way we remember our first kiss.
Seems that at least some people are wired this way.
https://youtu.be/MljeQzcmUfE
If you have depression or another condition affecting your affect and your emotions, sure. Otherwise it's pretty obvious to anyone that concepts on orders of magnitude higher levels than hormones being correlated with happiness, or if you prefer, those concepts having a significant effect on the overall action of those hormones.
I 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.
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
1.
I really wish there was more research done on mental efficacy or torque.
Processing vs prioritization.
Some of the highest IQ people that have ever lived have gotten nerd sniped by ruminating on esoterica like "how many angels fit on the head of a pin".
Humans really are a multi factorial random walk.
Hey, you're really smart and also you're going to spend your entire life solely cataloging every cultural reference and trope from Adam West's batman.
2.
In the above scenario some smart people would feel very fulfilled by their categorizing efforts and some despair.
3.
Self reported happiness? I've known smart people who are as eore as idiots I've known. The smart people were equally happy/unhappy but expierenced measurably less physical suffering and had, by all observable measures, better lives. They wouldn't trade their life for the idiots life at all.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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