5 ms·

I will speak from my experience. When I was younger, I considered myself very smart, and I was pretty unhappy. As I grew, I met people much smarter than me; I s

• xivzgrev 1mo ago
  how did you make this transition? i still, deep down, identify as being "smart". i don't like being wrong, and it's my go-to ego lick at work, "well bad thing x may have happened, but at least I'm still valued for being smart". it was my label in high school that i've never quite shed. obviously now i have so many more facets - father, husband, leader, writer/reader. Smartness is just raw horsepower, it's what you do with it that matters. And there's lots of kinds of "smarts". As an example, my wife wasn't the traditional "book smart" but she's emotionally & street smart - knows how to get things done, how to think on her feet, etc. but still despite that increased richness from life experience, I'm still "smart" and hold on to it
  • christophilus 1mo ago
    For me, I realized how insufferable my smart friends were, and I looked at people who I admired and whose company I enjoyed, and I realized humility was a key trait among the people I liked best. I’m still insufferable, though, but hopefully less than before!
    • ColdStream 1mo ago
      Like the whole meme of "Well actually...". Sometimes you just need to let it go, choose peace over proving something. Occasionally I still get caught up in something but it is very rare nowadays.
  • dnlosx 1mo ago
    My process was a multi-year process of recognizing my vulnerabilities. A couple of things that come to mind. Meeting and liking people who were really different from me, with mindsets completely different. The kind of people I would previously judge as "dumb" were suddenly teaching things that improved my life. For example, my beliefs are science-oriented, and I am very skeptical, but now I have close friends who are esotericists, and I really enjoy passing time with them. The book "The Courage To Be Disliked" by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Help me a lot to understand myself and my insecurities.
  • stasomatic 1mo ago
    i still, deep down, identify as being "smart". Is it that you think you are smart, or smarter than the others? Is it about your deeper knowledge about a few specific subjects that interest you but not others? I've been and am in this trap. I think I am not dim. I doubt it's genetic, because I have living relatives, so :) I am smart about USB-C accessories, nobody else cares. They are smart about living their lives to the fullest.
    • bharatsuthar 1mo ago
      Good points. I often think about this and I've come to the conclusion that just because other people don't have deep or niche interests doesn't make them any less smart than me. I lived in a city during my "social learning" phase and then moved back to my village. I realized that people I might have mistakenly categorized as less smart than me are absolutely amazing at things I constantly struggle with. They're street-smart, practical and genuinely content. It blows my mind to see how resilient they are when dealing with personal suffering and natural calamities. They're the perfect example of what Marcus Aurelius calls "living according to nature" in his Meditations.
  • ok_dad 1mo ago
    In what way are you smart? I started to think about the things I was good and bad at, and I realized I'm only good at certain types of problems and work due to practice and study. Try to be confident in your interests and pursuits where you know you have experience or you want to gain experience, but don't be overconfident and begin think you know about things that you barely scratched the surface of. A good start is to never assume you know how to solve a problem that has been unsolved for ages, in general. Often, the people who hang out here don't know that line because they think they're "smart".
  • AtHeartEngineer 1mo ago
    For me it was a combination of being around people much smarter than me (I got lucky and worked at some crazy places) and realizing how disfunctional they are. There is some happy medium where you can be pretty smart and realize you are a normal person. I've met people that are about my intelligence, who have been better educated than me, and they think they are fucking brilliant and it's just tiring as shit. They are insufferable to be around. Honestly I think a lot of silicon valely/tech bro people are a fucking chore to deal with because they have this "I'm so smart" attitude. If you want to check your ego, try to prove yourself wrong, test theories, talk to people to get their perspective and actually try to understand them. At some point you realize how much you don't understand about the world, about other fields, and about other people's experience.
• annzabelle 1mo ago
  I got labeled "smart but lazy" at a pretty young age (high test scores, didn't do any homework), and I let that label stick with me for far too long. I took some pride in how I could get the top score in a class without studying, and didn't realize that studying itself was a useful skill. I let this whole mindset drag me down through undergrad (especially once I hit the point where I really ought to have studied), and I think it made me miserable.
  • nico 1mo ago
    Sometimes accountability is not enough. Medication and therapy might help, as it can be the case with ADHD. Many people with it fit the pattern of “smart but lazy”
    • throwaway173738 1mo ago
      In education these kids are termed “twice-exceptional” because they test as gifted but have some kind of disability that makes some things challenging.
      • annzabelle 1mo ago
        Yeah, I was labeled twice-exceptional and medicated for it, but there was also this general thing where I felt like I was special for not needing to study and that it was something to take pride in, which I don't think is inherent to ADHD. I have some friends who also have ADHD and are decently smart, but they have always taken pride in being hard workers, and have come out much more academically successful than I did.
      • frickinLasers 1mo ago
        I think you might be misreading this person. If the point of homework is to learn the subject, while tests assess your understanding of the subject, why do the homework if you already have a strong grasp on it as soon as the teacher explains it? If the point of doing homework is to keep you busy, there are better things to do with one's childhood. Unless the disability you're referring to is that they never learned how to struggle (because no struggle was offered)...
• aaron695 1mo ago
  [dead]
• PaulRobinson 1mo ago
  My dad once told me that being smart was a curse in some ways, but he framed it as having a World view that few others had. I think however your take on it is closer: when you're smart, you're told you're smart (both as a positive and as a negative - I was bullied for it), it just becomes part of your self dialogue and identity and it gets in the way. It's taken years of therapy for me to get to the point where I realised none of that really mattered as much as having great relationships with people I liked, and going for long walks in green spaces and not thinking about anything.
  • mboerwink 1mo ago
    RE self dialogue: I think it is also self-reinforcing in a positive way. "I am competent and capable of this" is certainly less distracting internal dialogue than "maybe I'm not smart enough" to children. I believe most adults eventually get better at ignoring this type of thing altogether, since it isn't really useful or productive.
    • mikepurvis 1mo ago
      Parenting philosophy rooted in growth mindset advocates less for "I am smart and therefore I can do this" but rather "the hard work that it will take to do this is worth investing, and failures along the way are opportunities to learn rather than judgments of whether I'm good enough or should continue."
  • MajorTakeaway 1mo ago
    Having great conversations with Uber drivers, coworkers, and online folks (nothing can compare with real life interactions due to a few concussions), and walking a nature trail every so often has done many wonders for my mental health where I thought I was unrecoverable.
    • imp0cat 1mo ago
      May I suggest crawlers? The RC kind. These things are so much fun!
  • 1mo ago
• ColdStream 1mo ago
  It was Buddhism Monk Ajhan Brahm, before he started down that path he was going down the university path studying theoretical physics. The one thing that stood out to him was just how miserable so many of the smarter people where, and just how much they clung to their ego's and status. There was a moment when it dawned on him "I don't want to be anything like these people!". Another great one was this by Gen Kelsang Sherab. In his final interview for his music studies they asked something like "How will you pursue this in future?", his response was "I will not, I choose to pursue happiness." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS_swacFLNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS_swacFLNU
  • physicles 1mo ago
    > There was a moment when it dawned on him "I don't want to be anything like these people!". Thanks for this great reminder that we can choose the kind of person we want to be.
• IshKebab 1mo ago
  I think it's pretty frustrating being an outlier in any dimension. Your specific needs are always ignored. Being smart is no different. At least when I was in school they were always like "eh he'll do fine, let's concentrate on the borderline dunces". When you leave school you can find your level a lot easier - go to a university and get a job where other people are at the same skill level. At least that's what made me happier after leaving school - I didn't have to mix with stupid arseholes. It wasn't until I had kids and was suddenly thrown into a roughly random selection of 30 people that I remembered just how few of the general population I have anything remotely in common with. School sucks.
  • SamPatt 1mo ago
    That's one of the only real downsides of apparent intelligence that I've seen: people in positions which exist to be supportive tend to assume you don't actually need their help. Which, comparatively, might be true. But just because someone else needs more help doesn't mean it wouldn't be welcome. Parents, teachers, advisors, supervisors, they just let you figure it out because they know you can, and they need to focus on those who can't. I had a career coach once tell me I didn't need to worry about finding a job, smart people always find work. If you've never needed to ask for help before, this can really cause problems when you finally do.
    • dosisking 1mo ago
      > I didn't need to worry about finding a job, smart people always find work. People don't like to hire people who are smarter than them. They want to hire people who are obedient and competent. If you are too smart, the government will probably put you in prison, if you challenge the status quo and are not obedient.
      • Itanu 1mo ago
        Sure, McDonald's probably doesn't want a hyper-intelligent fry cook. But in almost any intellectual line of work, there is a high-impact, high-ceiling place for truly intelligent people - as long as they also have sufficient work ethic and social skills to back it up. (social skills optional if the other two are high enough). And they will never struggle to find a job.
• nelox 1mo ago
  Ah yes, I’m not young enough to know everything.
• tipsytoad 1mo ago
  I’m quite happy that my friends have labelled me as “an absolute idiot with anything but computers.” It’s much easier to relate to people at that level, adopt a happy-go-lucky attitude, and being wrong about 99% of things. being the smart one isn’t such a great label, and is (mostly) all in your head
• heresie-dabord 1mo ago
  > mental health and healthy relationships One cannot think oneself into these states. These things grow like good things in a garden. The world is full of unhappiness that only caring, compassion, and actual effort can fix.
• tsss 1mo ago
  Easy to say for you. Relationships are largely based on status and being useful is one of the few ways to get it.
• saidnooneever 1mo ago
  thanks for sharin dnlosx thats very insightful actually.
• quijoteuniv 1mo ago
  Love seing all the introspection in the comments. There is a general awareness on personal struggles much higher than before. I almost never heard my parents talking about this subjects.
• benj111 1mo ago
  I'd say it's more "ignorance is bliss". I spend far too much time thinking about various tradeoffs etc, whereas others just seem happy to stick a 'live, love, laugh' picture on the wall and get on without thinking about stuff. Yes, I'm aware this is a gross oversimplification.
• HexPhantom 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• boogieknite 1mo ago
  i was humbled by peers smarter than me fairly early so i havent seen myself as the smart one since i was 13 now ive discovered i have a social issue where i assume everyone is on the same page and assume that if i spell out a logical conclusion than i would be patronizing a person who i assume would find my remark obvious and pedantic. its only in the past few months my therapist pointed out im still in the 9xth percentile or whatever based on standardized testing and education and most people are nonplussed by my expectations in very simple, rude terms, im now treating others much more helpfully. but internally i feel like im treating adults like theyre children which feels gross and bad. people receive me MUCH better now so it seems to have solved my social issue, but now im noticeably a bit more depressed at the state of the world