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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

The smarter you are, the more unhappy and lonely you will be. Been known for millenia; doesn't have to stay this way.

edit/ sorry got shadow banned over this post. cant reply to anyone.

I disagree, they are just not necessarily associated. Less intelligent people have problems too. Children constantly throw tantrums, for instance.

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.

Interesting counterexample. I would argue that throwing tantrums when distressed — instead of bottling up anger, frustration, and disappointment — actually enables children to embrace happiness more easily than we do during the non-tantrum moments. We learn to suppress and not feel our difficult emotions, but unfortunately we can’t selectively numb just the hard feelings.

I’m not claiming our society should be filled with adult tantrum-throwers, just noting a mechanism I believe is present.

I totally agree with that. People would be well-served to deal with their inner emotional world directly instead of pushing it away.

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.

>I’m not claiming our society should be filled with adult tantrum-throwers

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 ?

Dwelling in one's own subjective experience is typically fruitless. However, paying attention to emotion ("attention is all you need") as a detector of mismatches between reality and expectations is quite useful. But, attending to ones emotional state is only useful if you are willing to update your internal state (beliefs, expectations) and actions to reflect reality more closely.

> I disagree, they are just not necessarily associated.

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.

Depression is also only one dimension of unhappiness. You might lose your wife and kids, but not be clinically depressed. Poor, uneducated people are also less likely to seek help, though that may be accounted for in the studies you are referencing.

I'd guess that the nature of unhappiness between educated high-achievers and uneducated people is quite different.

Been a couple hours, usually my shadowban ends by now. Lets see if I can reply.

>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.

I think intelligence and happiness are independent and both fall on a spectrum for people. Intelligent people are probably just more likely to see that as the root of their unhappiness - "it must be because I'm so smart and understand the world better than other people" where less intelligent people would blame something else. In reality I think it's more "I just don't have habits of viewing the world positively" for everyone

>I think intelligence and happiness are independent and both fall on a spectrum for people. Intelligent people are probably just more likely to see that as the root of their unhappiness - "it must be because I'm so smart and understand the world better than other people" where less intelligent people would blame something else. In reality I think it's more "I just don't have habits of viewing the world positively" for everyone

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.

It takes wisdom to be happy. Smart people are more likely to become wise over time.

Just my personal experience but to me it seems like intelligence is a handicap for wisdom - you're more likely to rationalize stuff in a way that doesn't fit the "common sense" answer to things

> It takes wisdom to be happy.

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.

> We're talking about terms that are very difficult to properly define, but wisdom is gained through experience, and has no relation to IQ.

The IQ allows you to better recognize the patterns in your experience and to faster convert them into wisdom.

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