If you’re so smart, how come you’re not happy?
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klint.bearblog.dev
Most people desire to be happy. I don't believe I need to prove this.
The point was that we should be able to use our intelligence to identify and resolve issues that decrease our happiness. I think this is true to a certain extent, but there is an upper limit where solvable problems are not the limiting factor to our happiness.
It's a nice thought, and maybe it works that way at some higher level of intelligence than what I've got... but for me, what intelligence I've got gets me into a lot of the situations that decrease happiness.
Right. Of course.
Evolution has designed us to desire to be happy, but to be unhappy (to some degree, at some times). Otherwise we'd have no drive to do anything ever.
Some degree of unhappiness coupled with the desire to increase happiness is a state we should often expect in a healthy, intelligent individual. A state of unassailable optimal happiness should probably be pathologized (if it isn't already so).
Yes, but it is not all people want. Humans have a long list of values which can conflict with happiness.
Hedonism is a very popular philosophy at the moment, but it is not the only one, and other objectives often influence our daily lives.
It is possible that the optimal solution to these other values are in conflict.
Happy isn't a long term state of being. It's a short term emotion like anger or sadness.
If you expect to feel that way all the time, and think you can achieve that through some kind of changes to your life you are setting yourself up for failure.
You should aim to build a life that is in line with your values, and accept that you're going to have down days. If you were to rate each day on a 1-10 scale, you're going to have 2s and 3s and probably some 8s and 9s. But if you've done the work, most days will be a solid 6 or 7.
And therapy. Therapy really helps. I think everybody should go to therapy.
"Happy" is a vague overused term that means different things to different people at different times.
While elation or euphoria are fleeting emotions, one can be content or satisfied for prolonged periods of time. It's a bit like confusing sadness and depression.
This is suspect. I couldn't imagine that any contentment or satisfaction that I experience now would last without additional activity to maintain it. The passage of time while doing nothing (or having no affect) is a clear way I can imagine leading to dissatisfaction.
Counter point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
Friends. I think everyone should have good friends they can talk to. If not, then go to therapy.
I guess that's what I meant, some problems simply need good friends.
Greater intelligence plus years of study and hundreds of job applications might fix someone's material situation, but just being smart doesn't guarantee it will happen.
Enhanced ability to perform repeatable actions and responses is probably correlated with happiness though.
As a sidebar: I rarely understand the purpose of these types of blog posts. Perhaps they’re a manifestation of the SV/VC/PG culture to push out content and “get your voice heard,” which has merit but the amount of work required to provided a well rounded, incisive and pithy blog (eg, old PG blogs) is rarely done.
Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!
https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Fyodor_Dostoevsky/Notes_from...
But being smart is merely a conviction of your enlightenment to the awful reality of things. Bravo, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is to languish in existential dread. Congratulations, you have learned the history of humanity and how our society functions, and your reward is sullen remorse in the unending cacophony of injustice.
More importantly some of the premises are suspect at best. Intelligence doesn't reliably cause one to see the truth of the world, and it's not obvious how to evaluate whether the world is good in the first place. It's further unclear that said goodness would make smart people happy, or that its absence would make smart people unhappy.
I was not familiar with that term. Still, I think I disagree that a firm conviction based on perceived and/or veririfiable facts and/or experience will get subdued because "it's rational to not have this philosophy".
In case of a conflict between rational cost/benefit estimate and perceived truth I would think that truth should win at least as often as cost/benefit.
Once you're past wallowing in self pity because of the burdens of the great intellect you have been given, then it's time for you to develop some wisdom.
Wisdom is accepting the limits of your being and mortality AND THEN DOING YOUR BEST ANYWAY. Wisdom and intellect is acknowledging the fact that you cannot fix everything but using your gifts of intellect to generate multipliers (processes, automations, repeatable IP, free software, open papers, sharing knowledge).
** Use your intellect to magnify your intellect and maximise the amount of good you do. **
Intellect and courage is carrying forward the light, speaking up against injustice, patiently educating and inspiring the young and reducing tyranny.
The weak intellects have undeserved lazy entitlement (they think simply because they are smart everything should be given to them, not true) or wallow in self pity because taking action brings about the possibility they might fail which would demonstrate their inadequacy and therefore hurt their self identity. These people have a disease and should be helped overcome their limits
True happiness (imho, and I am no expert here) is about resonating with a moral philosophy you truly believe in, and then acting in a way that you believe truly aligns with it. I think the more people around you who validate your philosophy and actions the more happy you will be.
The consequence here is that smart people are less likely to resonate with the existing philosophies around them and end up having to make sacrifices (either social or moral) leaving them less happy than they would have been otherwise.
But people just ignore it anyway. Which is precisely the problem. Why address things when you can either ignore them or you can fight against yourself, but in both scenarios you always go round and round in the same loop.
In the current global consciousness, happiness is attributed to material possessions, which ironically is also what makes you unhappy.
Except, eschewing desire altogether which, as I understand it is the goal of Buddhism, isn’t finding happiness it’s merely swapping overt suffering due to unrequited desire for absolute numbness.
In vajrayana buddhism, you work with the knowledge that you have everything to be happy already inside you, and all you need to do is to stop limiting yourself and experience the inherent bliss of all experience. You take everything as an expression of the limitless potential of space to manifest, and you enjoy everything just because it can happen. Your happiness does not depend on anything external so you enjoy things as they come, but don't attach yourself and your wellbeing to an ever changing external world. Enlightenment is an absolute bliss filled experience, not a state of numbness.
I cannot enjoy the suffering of my children or the torture and murder of the innocent because "they can happen" which I'd be required to do in this so called "enlightenment." What you're describing is pure selfishness and taking pleasure in evil. That's horrific.
> Your happiness does not depend on anything external so you enjoy things as they come, but don't attach yourself and your wellbeing to an ever changing external world.
Which is total detachment from other people too and their needs and for making the external world better since any attempt to do so would be admitting that things in the external world can really be bad. That's not a recipe for happiness, it's a recipe for total loneliness and, if seriously adopted by enough people, societal collapse. We're a social species, demonstrably. Buddhism as you describe it appears to be a rejection of the real evils in the world, passions, charity, and society.
> Enlightenment is an absolute bliss filled experience, not a state of numbness.
"Bliss" built on the enjoyment of evil is infinitely worse than mere numbness.
Right. You won't enjoy those things. You just won't add additional unnecessary suffering. Buddhism doesn't teach to enjoy the terrible things about the world, nor to ignore them by some kind of numbness. The whole point is that there is an additional layer of suffering that is entirely optional. This is what they refer to as Dukkha in the "Four Noble Truths".
> Which is total detachment from other people too and their needs and for making the external world better since any attempt to do so would be admitting that things in the external world can really be bad. That's not a recipe for happiness, it's a recipe for total loneliness and, if seriously adopted by enough people, societal collapse. We're a social species, demonstrably. Buddhism as you describe it appears to be a rejection of the real evils in the world, passions, charity, and society. >"Bliss" built on the enjoyment of evil is infinitely worse than mere numbness.
I think your parents' comments admit of more charitable readings.
> "Bliss" built on the enjoyment of evil is infinitely worse than mere numbness.
It's a common misconception that you would be happy BECAUSE people are suffering around you. The goal is to separate the content of your experience from your ability to experience. Therefore you are in a natural state of bliss REGARDLESS of any external circumstance.
You can absolutely notice the suffering of others and it comes with a deep sense of compassion when you do. Since you understand that everyone shares in the same potential and that the suffering is caused by them not being able to see that, you are more effective at helping because you don't get caught up in the trip. The best way to help others is to show them the way out of that suffering, to give people the tools to also realize their potential.
The maxim in this kind of buddhism is to better yourself to be of most benefit to ALL sentient beings.
But yeah, if you are actually interested, it is best done through practice. Meditation has incredibly improved my experience of the world and made me more effective at dealing with difficult situations because I can have the distance to observe emotions as they appear and decide whether to use the energy they inherently express or let them fade back to where they came from without acting clumsily.
Is it?
I see far more people saying that material possessions don't make one happy than that they do. How many movies, novels, etc, are about living for oneself rather than possessions? How many say the opposite?
IMO everyone knows that material possessions are nice to have, in the sense that we all want what we want, but also that they do not produce happiness. Does anyone say otherwise?
Yeah, I agree with you in that it is "common knowledge" that material possessions != happiness. However, I do question that we actually believe this on a level deeper than just an intellectual exercise. I think that it would be better to be a bit more precise about what we mean by "material possession". For example: would the fulfillment of the desire to be in a love relationship count as "material possession"? I would say it does, in the sense that the expectation is that an external element will fulfill us, because there is something that we currently lack to feel 'complete'. So we might think: "if only I had this relationship with this beautiful person" or "if only I could buy a bigger house", the abstract form being "if only I could have X or Y experience", etc. In this sense I would say that this paradigm is very much the rule in our attempt for happiness, and even if people acknowledge intellectually that it isn't so, it is actually implicit in their worldview and behavior.
This is a rather extreme position since beyond a certain level material possessions to not contribute to happiness but won't necessarily make you unhappy. Likewise, a complete lack of material possessions will probably make you unhappy.
Only if you take a rather extreme interpretation of that position.
For the sake of argument, assume that material possessions increase happiness (or decrease unhappiness) up to a certain point, then level out, then decrease happiness as you enter a zone of "can never be satisfied" or "always comparing to ever-shifting goalposts". The irony is there, even though your statement may still be true:
> beyond a certain level material possessions [do] not contribute to happiness but won't necessarily make you unhappy. Likewise, a complete lack of material possessions will probably make you unhappy.
But that starts to feel pedantic. Perhaps a more real-world example would be smartphones. We all want to have them, but it really seems to me at least that many people would be happier if they did not have them.
Then there's always the case where once you have too much stuff, you spend more time worrying about losing it, and you find it difficult to benefit from contact with your former friends who have much less.
The best part about this approach is that no scary monsters are going to come and get you. The only monster you'll encounter is that voice in your mind that never ceases to blabber on about things.
And it's not easy. Nothing is when it comes to being quiet. If you struggle with behavior or have emotional tendencies - learning to be quiet is a humbling experience.
What to expect? A lot more breathing room, not only in your mind but also in your life. Doing this process is the same as installing a window in a room that has been windowless for a hundred years. Fresh air, natural light, and a much broader view on life.
Do you have any references like books, lectures, blogs or any information sources on these practices and the buddhist principles behind it?
You can have a rewarding job and still be unhappy, you can have no job at all and be the happiest person out there. Happiness is not one-dimensional...
I still think it's a fascinating topic, anyone got any better recommendations for reading up on this?
I've just learnt to get happiness and fulfillment in clubs, friends and family, so that some abusive managers don't have the power to make me happy or not. And I've become more minimalist. I should be able to survive, if I change of job.
It’s the biggest lie out there that self-fulfillment comes from working.
But work (or at least the money it produces) can deliver types of freedom not otherwise available. Like just deciding to spend a weekend in Paris, or buying a boat, or whatever. Not that everyone can/should want those kinds of freedoms, but money really is a proxy for freedom in this world.
but having money can take away some other kinds of freedom.
If you decide to invest instead of spending (mostly in real estate), get successful and well paid on a job, and see money as the only proxy for freedom, you might kill your chances to actually move to Paris, to fulfill yourself in NGOs and clubs, and to build what you want. You will be bound to a city, and to the GDP-making economy. You will only build the legacy that your manager needs, not yourself, and then drive back to your anonymous house.
Also, the wildest stories I've ever heard where from lowkey and remote agricultural villages, or from suburbs, as they go under all the radars. If you have money, you most likely live in a city where you have to keep images.
Having money is double edged, IMO. It's nice to have it, but you still need to feel free, and to be ready to be free to actually be free.
Elon Musk is the happiest person alive.
QED.
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\_/___________________/Another thing I've been thinking lately is that there seems to be a large group of people who don't seem to want to be happy, as if they don't even like happiness.
As a “smart” person in high school, that led to various “rewards” such as respect, adulation, advancement, affirmation, etc. These things feel good and so my naive self equates being smart with being happy.
When less naive self perseveres, he realizes that the connection between smart and those feel good rewards is more arbitrary than I’d like, and I have experiences more like my current situation where I’m the “smart guy that holds this product together and understands this domain best” but that has led to others being suspicious and trying to take control and to being sidelined.
So in the end, it just so turns out that smart can go with happy situations or unhappy situations. Our selection bias confirms the happy ones as causal and is offended/confused when it’s not.
They forgot the biggest one. Adjust your expectations.
This is so true, life is all about expectations. If you hope for the best, but plan for, and expect the worst, you'll be pleasantly surprised along the way.
There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not to exist.
Only the absolute of Hegel managed to be two things at once, but in writing. Being and non-being do not mix and meld in the sensations and laws of life; they exclude one another, by a kind of reverse synthesis.
What to do? Isolate the moment like a thing, and be happy now, in the moment we’re feeling happiness, thinking of nothing but what we’re feeling and completely excluding everything else. Trap all thought in our sensation..”
Excerpt from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
It's too heavy to translate entirely but a succinct summary is that to not have intelligence is the only path towards happiness.
Intelligence is worthless without a heart to use it lovingly, and even then, it has no direct correlation to wisdom. It is wise to use intelligence lovingly, but it is also wise to use money lovingly. Intelligence is simply a resource while wisdom is a quality.
Furthermore, you must define "happiness." Happiness is simply a feeling, while joy is a quality, like wisdom. Intelligence and happiness are circumstantial and transient while wisdom and joy are qualities that can be nurtured and cultivated in one's character.
Ignorance is bliss ;)
There is a default assumption here that being smart should eventually end in some sort of success. Whereas being smart has only mild correlation with being successful. Lots of other things(health, luck etc) matter in success, and eventually people kind of look at optimising one single variable and hope it leads to significant gains in all aspects of life. Which is impossible.
Even if we keep things like luck outside the discussion. Things like good health and fitness play a huge role in happiness, this follows from definition. Unhealthy people can't be happy and lack of fitness effects people's perception of their own-self. Most smart people tend to look at exercise oriented habits as something dumb people do.
Other thing is taking risks. Taking risks, demands being either risk averse or at least being slightly dumb enough to take risks, which smart people wouldn't.
I don't really know how to define "smart" or "happy" and I'm not really anxious to label myself with either of those terms either, but I have noticed that for whatever definition of the terms that I seem to observe at various points of my life I also recurrently observe people who I believe to have significantly less of the "s" term combined with significantly more of the "h" term - so much so that I have accepted it as a trend. The world according to me seems to work like that: more brains = more problems.
Add money to the mix and it seems to blur the picture as independent of (definition of) "s" and "h" more money seems to also equal more problems.
It's 2022 and at least for those who are living in the West there is no sudden anything anymore.
Einstein theory is more than 100 years old and we still don't know what to do with it except for GPS which isn't really a big deal and could be re-created with mapping + sensors on the side of the road.
We fuck around less and less, hence we discover less and less. And when we do it takes centuries to turn theoretical discoveries into practical quality of life improvements.
We will never be as happy as the tribes who first discovered fire or the wheel. Not because there aren't discoveries just as consequential to be made but because of lack of urgency and too much smarts.
Nature only reveals its secrets to humans when we decide to throw our bodies at it.
Our personal world is full of rediscovery. Recently I discovered Carl Jung because he said:
> Make the unconscious conscious, else you will be guided by it and call it fate.
I came to the same conclusion but before I read that. I discovered something that Jung also did.
It made me happy because I now know I am on the right path (for me). And I am not alone on that path.
ps - 4DWW (Four Day Work Week) would be an amazing improvement to happiness to anyone who gets it. Let's all work on making it the norm!
I work my own stuff, do whatever happens to be important for me in the now, and trust in myself that I will reach my goals.
This redefines "work" as being something that isn't financially beneficial immediately rather mental and personally enlightening.
But I have worked for the (wo)man and can appreciate the difference.
Fulfilling and meaningful life > „positive“ life. Although it may bring less „happiness“ in short term.
„Dopamine Nation“ is a good easy read.
A great read for you may be The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being by Michael Bishop.
Although I'm not sure about „Eudaimonia„“ part itself too. IMO many people in that field focuses on „positivity“ too much. While I prefer more balanced approach. IMO there's no happiness if you don't feel pain. Otherwise it's too easy to get sucked into looking for more and more bigger and bigger happiness triggers.
It takes ignorant to be happy.
How smart people become boring ? Because they have no enough interesting resources/knowledge to discover ?
How to pursuit knowledge ?
To be happy or not to be happy? That's the choice.
edit/ sorry got shadow banned over this post. cant reply to anyone.
I do agree that overthinking and the high neuroticism that usually comes with intelligence will lead to an unhappy life usually.
Contentment imo requires understanding your insignificance in the universe and having strong values to drive your behavior. Usually that means not being a workaholic, though I'm sure that isn't true of everyone.
I’m not claiming our society should be filled with adult tantrum-throwers, just noting a mechanism I believe is present.
why not ?
you can do that with friends and family. Cry, be happy, get angry,... You're allowed to do everything at home. There are also online places where you can do that with strangers (like Discord)
You should be able to do all of that, go directly to the bottom of the problems, get a confirmation that it's not normal, and show others that your world isn't perfect either.
Internalizing and learning to cope, despite your expectations, is actually the worst. That's how you neglect yourself (get alienated, according to some ppl), and give a false image that your life is great.
Have you seen Kleo, on Netflix ?
At the same time, they do have a lot of inner tormoil even though they have next to no responsibilities or knowledge. They face the same thing everyone else does, the world changing in the face of their expectations or just not meeting them.
There are better examples of the problems uneducated people face and a lot of data to back up their issues with money, relationships, and so on.
It's not a matter of agreement. There have been numerous studies that show a higher incidence of depression in conventionally "smart" people.
This doesn't downplay in any way the problems of "less intelligent" people, and we all percieve problems differently, but there are certain traits of "smarter" people that make them more prone to being unhappy.
So the article's question is based on a misleading premise.
I'd guess that the nature of unhappiness between educated high-achievers and uneducated people is quite different.
>I disagree, they are just not necessarily associated. Less intelligent people have problems too. Children constantly throw tantrums, for instance.
It's not me necessarily saying the above. I will defend it.
The thing with 'becoming intelligent' is you often have to make sacrifices to do so. Those sacrifices like friends or family will result in unhappiness.
Once you realize this issue, you can work toward fixing this issue. You dont have to be unhappy.
You kind of touch on an idea. The more intelligent someone is, the more likely they understand the world better and become more cynical or upset.
But I think it has more to do with more personal reality. For someone to become sheldon cooper, they have to sacrifice their friends and family. Therefore end up being unhappy because at the end of the day we are all social beings.
But as I said, this isn't a permanent thing.
Umm, no? The world is full of happy and unwise people. "Ignorance is bliss", etc.
> Smart people are more likely to become wise over time.
I'm not sure if this is true either. We're talking about terms that are very difficult to properly define, but wisdom is gained through experience, and has no relation to IQ. There are many wise people we wouldn't consider intelligent, and intelligent people that are not wise.
The IQ allows you to better recognize the patterns in your experience and to faster convert them into wisdom.
"If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht."
somehow this makes me naturally gauge if I'm enjoying the present as a question "am I enjoying this coffee / new fountain pen / crunchy leaves?" and I actually feel the happiness bubble up in sensory focus.
Doesn't last long yet works for me.
Nothing is impossible. Many philosophers/psychologists found ways to find meaning & happiness:
Perhaps “insane” is too strong but “lacking sufficient sanity” is too long.
Don’t identify as smart. Identify as someone who can figure things out.
2) You learn something new every day
∴ Every day you have less bliss