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The smarter people see the truth of the world and the universe. If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe

• solumunus 4y ago
  Heard this so much as a teenager.
• throwaway6734 4y ago
  Sounds more like midwits than smart people
  • Bolkan 4y ago
    Let the poor guy cope.
• toyg 4y ago
  This is why acceptance is such a key value. Acceptance is both an obstacle to progress and a prerequisite for continued existence. It's the line between Yin and Yang, where the duality of wrong and right is forced to blur.
• klik99 4y ago
  Serious question - how old are you? Anecdotally I’ve noticed smart people tend to have this attitude until their late 20s when it starts mellowing out. Now I’m a bit older I see my smarter friends happier than anyone and the less smart just about the same as always
  • pixl97 4y ago
    Could it be that 'smart' people have accomplishment or material gain later in life they are satisfied with?
    • ARandomerDude 4y ago
      Unsolicited advice from some random guy on the internet: Don't start down that road. Material success will always be just over the next hill, regardless of how much you already have. Happiness and satisfaction can't come from accomplishment or material gain.
      • valeness 4y ago
        Compared to what it was like when I was working at Walmart...? Yeah, material gain has certainly made me a thousand times happier. I haven't had to worry about an Electric bill in years. I used to have to navigate and memorize the electric company shutoff routine so I could pay as late as possible while selectively mitigating late fees and disconnect fees in relation to payday. I can afford to go on vacations now. Take PTO when I want to. When my AC dies I don't have to just suffer until my landlord decides to do something; I can just pay the repair guy $700 to fix it and have AC in a couple hours. Eating healthier is easier; I don't have to stress in social situations about how run down or holey my clothes are. I have the luxury of being able to eat and survive if I am fired allowing me to be more confident in how I carry myself at work. (Meaning I don't have to kiss-ass when I am being mistreated). I have the money to travel if god-forbid my wife needs an abortion, or I can move away from bad neighborhoods very quickly. The pursuit of wealth in and of itself as a measure of personal worth will not bring happiness, but let's not all pretend that money doesn't bring happiness insofar as it provides individual autonomy over their lives. I agree with the OPs point that some older people may have just reached a level of material success that grants them the luxury of 1. Processing their existential dread through things like therapy; and 2. Live a less stressful life that comes with a certain level of wealth
        • svnt 4y ago
• SnowHill9902 4y ago
  If you are even smarter you can reprogram yourself.
• 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  It sounds like you're confusing intelligence with depressive realism and cynicism. :) Sure, the universe itself is indifferent at best, but that doesn't mean you can't find meaning in life, or that you can't experience happiness. On the contrary, admitting that most things are completely outside one's control seems to be a key to being happy with life.
  • sumtechguy 4y ago
    Realism is seeing an issue and recognizing that it is a problem. Intelligence is seeing an issue and recognizing that it is a problem and recognizing the root issues to how it became a problem. Proper action is seeing both of the above and addressing the immediate issues and the longer term ones so the problem does not happen again. Cynicism comes from when you are not allowed any sort of action and actively denied the ability to fix cause root issues. Then gaslighted into thinking you are wrong for wanting the change or forced into fixing the wrong things.
    • 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      Indeed! And accepting that some things are outside one's control is when you move on instead of believing people who say you are wrong.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  I was expecting the OP to say that smarter people were less likely to be happy, because that is the sense a lot of us who believe ourselves to be "smart" have. But that's not what OP is about, and it suggests that's not really what the research says either, there's maybe a bit of hint of a small negative correlation like that, but mostly it says: no correlation. Rather than making the argument you are making, which I have heard before, I found the OP argument to be novel to me, and find really thought-provoking: The model of "well-defined" vs "poorly-defined" problems, and that what we call "smart" is skill at solving "well-defined" problems, but that happiness actually depends on skill at solving "poorly-defined" problems. Which is probably not correlated to skill at solving well-defined problems at all, that being "smart" at solving well-defined problems doesn't help or hurt happiness, it just doesn't matter. This rings really true to me, and isn't quite as depressing as the oft-heard theory that you're saying here, that smart people are more likely to be miserable because they see the awful. Not what OP is saying, OP is even disagreeing, really.
  • AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Sometimes people call it wisdom. A concept which has largely fallen out of fashion.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      OP suggests: > Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they're also everyday questions like “how do you host a good party” and “how do you figure out what to do today."
      • ssivark 4y ago
        Part of the problem IMHO is that we make out wisdom to be this grand thing, rather than simple and effective thinking (that cannot be put into a short list of rules). “How do you host a good party” might be ill-defined to OP, but I’m sure this is a well defined question with a good answer for a lot of people. (Let’s call that “social quotient”)
• Bolkan 4y ago
  This artwork captures it really well https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1767679-tfw-too-intelligent-2smart https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1767679-tfw-too-intelligent-...
• marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I'm not sure if they're actually better at seeing the truth, than building a more complex mental model of the world and its processes. If anything such ad-hoc modeling tends to be an obstacle that obscures the truth, rather something that reveals it. A lot of very smart people call themselves skeptics and are very keen at questioning what other people believe when it is not what they believe, but are incredibly blind to the fact that they make assumptions on their own that they have very little basis for.
• mrjin 4y ago
  Exactly. The more you know, the more you realize that you can't do anything about, and thus less happy of course.
• blagie 4y ago
  > If the truth was good, that we lived in a wonderful society with wonderful people in a universe that cares about us, smart people would be so happy. Relative to 200 years ago, we do. People aren't any happier. That's not how happiness works. See: Hedonistic adaptation.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• Sebb767 4y ago
  > But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. You don't need to be very smart to get existential dread from "climate change will kill us all and I can't influence much", "the upper class can still fully rule our lives" or "at some point, someone will create an AI that might kill us and there's not much anyone can do about it". Even someone hardly qualified to work at McDonalds can think that, usually in addition to "I can never handle a job to get a living wage", which I'd actually consider to be more serious downers on ones happiness.
  • helloworld11 4y ago
    If someone is convinced that climate change will kill us all then I'd say they're not exceptionally smart to begin with, and are misattributing to cynial high intelligence that which is the much more common phenomenon of media-induced blind hysteria.
• achenet 4y ago
  You also see beauty where others do not. "I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom." - John Carmack Which I think balances it out.
  • Eupraxias 4y ago
    "Without going out of your door, you can know the ways of the world." - tao te ching #47
• synu 4y ago
  But surely even not "smart" people get to experience the awful reality of things, and realize that there isn't much you can do about it?
• wonderwonder 4y ago
  I very much disagree with this, just look at politics; everyone sees / imagines the "awful reality of things". Whenever the other side is in power the out of power side thinks everything is terrible and the world is ending. Even though objectively everything is pretty much the same. Objectively the world is only getting better over time. Generally the loudest people on each side screaming that its the end of all things are not the pinnacle of intelligence. I like the authors theory that happiness involves "skill at solving poorly defined problems". Think about how many smart people on this board complain about being lonely and unable to find friends. The ability to feel satisfied with one's lot in life is probably much more of a driver for happiness than being able to get a 1600 on the SAT. I consider myself relatively intelligent but was heavily involved in politics when I was younger and worrying about things. As I got older I realized I was wasting my time. I cant change anything and my life is slipping past. It really clicked for me when I went to the parkland anti gun rally in DC because my wife wanted to go. There were hundreds of thousands of people there and at the end of the day, nothing changed and politicians just closed their blinds or left work early to avoid the gridlock. The only way to affect change on a large scale is with very large amounts of money. Short of that, I just focus on my family and myself and things are much better. Took my kid to baseball tryouts the other day after practicing with him all week and it was awesome. Still cant figure out how to get IRL friends though :)
  • em-bee 4y ago
    i am not sure if this makes sense, but when i read your comment i wondered if part of the difficulty of finding friends is that smart people find it difficult to associate with people who are not as smart as them or do not have the same interests as them, and thus the problem becomes one of selection.
    • wonderwonder 4y ago
      Maybe, and I could see this for top 1% people but I'm not that smart :) For me its a time management thing, I am unable to figure out how to manage time for my own activities between looking after kids, working remote and just sitting around wasting time.
• rags2riches 4y ago
  Spoken as if you were somehow owed something else than what is.
• CTDOCodebases 4y ago
  I would argue the opposite. Smart people are unhappy because they have a whole identity constructed around being smart and in order to be happy they would have to shatter this construction.
• boredumb 4y ago
  The article says that incredibly stupid people and people who scored high on a vocab test were slightly less happy. Being intelligent also doesn't mean you are a cynic who laments over history, I would generally attribute that to pseudo-intellectualism and people with shallow understandings of how reality works when the tires touch the road.
• meremortals 4y ago
  Naval Ravikant asks, "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIht5-FwZUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIht5-FwZUI
• BobbyJo 4y ago
  Smart enough to see the bad, but not smart enough to look away. The world is in roughly the same spot as it was when I was 20, and my body is certainly worse off, but I'm much happier now simply because I don't steep myself in the shittier parts of the universe.
• marcodiego 4y ago
  > But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Ignorance is bliss.
• runjake 4y ago
  I think the truly smart, or perhaps wise people accept their understanding of reality as it is and don't attribute subjective human concepts like "injustice" to it. Call it "optimistic nihilism", if you will.
  • conventionalcat 4y ago
    Note that there is no such thing as 'optimistic nihilism', though. People at Kurzgesagt probably thought of it as a novel thing, yet it is not. There is already a name for it, that is, existentialism.
• sangnoir 4y ago
  Smart people are very often terrible people. Being smart exists ok a different axis to being wonderful/awful, well-adjusted, fulfilled or even being successful.
  • danjoredd 4y ago
    I agree. Intelligence and wisdom are two very different things. Many intelligent people I know are unwise, and act terrible to those they disagree with. It is best to have a healthy dose of intelligence with the wisdom to be able to handle it.
• mapcars 4y ago
  How people see is just a reflection of their minds. If one sees world as awful - that only tells about that person mind. It has nothing to do with the world. And talking about seeing truth is just inflated ego, nothing more. Some of the wisest and most impactful people in history talked about truth being the ultimate ecstasy. That is a smart way to live, I would say.
  • Jensson 4y ago
    Ecstasy doesn't make people happy though, the void between highs just gets worse and worse.
• celim307 4y ago
  Seems a big egotistical to me I used to have this worldview then I realized “smarter” people self select lives that tend to be more neurotic and tend to overthink things to the point of anxiety Do you really need to worry over all the things you do? Or have all the years of being schooled and trained and under pressure to constantly juggle multiple things made your brain’s default state anxiety?
• Jemm 4y ago
  Even worse is that smart people see the patterns and can predict the outcome with a reasonable degree of accuracy, however, they can not do anything about it because speaking up usual results in being labelled negative and being shunned. This is very much like knowing the train is going to fall off the bridge but not being able to stop people from boarding.
  • NotTameAntelope 4y ago
    Eh no, "speaking up" has varying outcomes in varying environments, this is not a universal constant. I've chosen the job I have now specifically because I wanted to be able to do something about things I see that could be going wrong. Anyone can do this, but especially smart people.
• danjoredd 4y ago
  >low intelligence Happy because unaware of world situation >mid intelligence Unhappy because aware of world situation >high intelligence Happy because they apply stoic philosophies to their life and making the lives of their immediate surroundings better instead Yeah, things look bleak. However you need to realize that there ARE things you can do. Maybe not on the world stage, but in your own community. Sign up for a soup kitchen, clean up a street that is full of garbage, etc. Anything is better than being terminally online and doomscrolling. You will be happier for doing so, I guarantee you.
• jlarocco 4y ago
  On the other hand, I don't think it's "smart" for a person to ruminate and dwell on problems they can't change, especially not to the point that it has negative effects on their life. The way I see it, we're all going to be dead in 100 years, and life will go on without us. It's not my place to solve every problem in the world, and in the grand scheme of things, my life is very unimportant, so I might as well relax and enjoy it.
  • anonporridge 4y ago
    Basically the conclusion of the Stoics, and why stoicism as a philosophy continues to be useful.
  • eastbound 4y ago
    There are problems that are due to others. And they wreck your life. Being known as a pedophile when you’re not, it’s a problem worth solving. Because you can’t really live your life. Those who dwell, think that people can change. Those who don’t dwell on it, just accept the various other accusations, he stole this and that you know because he’s a pedo etc. I wager that those who believe they don’t dwell on things, have never had real problems.
• fithisux 4y ago
  Best answer. Should have been on Stackoverflow!
• Razengan 4y ago
  Ignorance is bliss.
• golergka 4y ago
  On the contrary, the more you learn about history of humanity, the more you appreciate the modern world for being uniquely wonderful in historical perspective.
• Heston 4y ago
  The other side of this is that happiness is available to you as someone intelligent and aware of societies shortcomings when you use that intelligence at any opportunity to help the life around you. And that's an ongoing journey that requires maintenance not a one time event or goal.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• winternett 4y ago
  I honestly can't tell if I'm smart or stupid any more... It seems that the absolute dumbest schemes are paying their creators out in millions as I struggle to find success in the normally iron clad business methods... I tweet about things that matter to me and often things I think that are of solid comedic value, but it doesn't connect with many others due to it's lack of conformity with what others are posting online... Which constantly tells me there's something I don't know or may be missing. Success tips online are totally generated to make money, and it floods out what once used to mostly be useful and meaningful advice from smart and experienced (intelligent) people. I also have been working harder than ever on creative things, and they literally seem to only be valued online for 5 seconds until they go completely dead. I know I'm being manipulated and twisted, but my morality makes me not want to hack my way into public consciousness for money and popularity.... I might by citing that, and citing that many others are hacking their way in, be quite stupid. Are the people that make and hack manipulative schemes smart? Are the people that break the law and get away with it smart? I don't do those things, so maybe I'm stupid.. At least I can admit it I guess. I think we're living in a time where an entire generation of people born into inherited wealth are buying their way into popularity (which is painting a very weird and false picture of what success and intelligence really means), and when combined with all the smart people trying to climb life's ladders, the ability to succeed is under threat now more than ever. Intelligence to me has always been based more on overall life survival skills and growth success rather than human engineered IQ tests... I know actual critically acclaimed surgeons and engineers that literally couldn't tell you where a spare tire is on a car when they get a flat, and if no one else is there to help them. When one has the financial augmentation of being born into vast amounts of wealth, social status, and connection (which often the individuals most deemed as "smart" are) the very ideal of intelligence is turned upon it's head... The lucky ones can literally fail their way into success without anyone knowing the difference. To me, the most simplified definition of intelligence for an individual is living life fully and well, with ethics and reputation in balance, being free from the control and influence of others, accomplishing notable things, and skillfully overcoming obstacles as they present themselves... I can't really say I'm smart at this point because many of those things mentioned prior are under threat for everyone right now, and it seems like I'm pitted against others for a limited pool of success resources more and more every day. I'm not happy about that at all.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
• jyscao 4y ago
  >Congrats, you have learned the history of humanity and how our society functions, and your reward is you get to be angry at the vast amount of injustice. I think you're imbuing your own value judgements into this. Many of us don't share the same urge to fix everything that's "wrong" with the world or society, and simply learn to accept it and roll with punches. But that still doesn't mean we're happier in life.
• hinkley 4y ago
  I think it is harder to convince smart people that their illusion of control is just an illusion. When you’re a dope you get smacked in the face by your limitations and you give up, or at least you’re easier to manage by the people around you. I think there are also a lot of smart people that aren’t pegged as smart because they’ve let go of controlling everything, and we mistake lack of engagement for lack of capacity. We have a friend who has a very aw shucks personality. A mutual friend and I have twice had a conversation about how she might actually be the smartest person we know, and I say that as someone who has a fondness for thinking they are the smartest person in the room. She is scary intuitive, the person people talk to about problems, she is a terrible movie companion because she guesses the ending ten minutes before I do, which is usually ten minutes before anyone else does. But she never made a career out of being clever, which feels like such a waste. I worry that it was beaten out of her at a young age. Girls aren’t supposed to be smart. You should be pleasant instead. If not that then I get some subtle ADHD vibes and it’s a common pathology to desire anonymity, a coping mechanism for passing as normal.