Smart People Can Stop Being Miserable
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Ignorance_is_Bliss
> But at the top of the episode is the relationship between Sidas and his wife Dara. Years before, Sidas realizes that he derives only anxiety from his work as the pressure on him to come up with even more brilliant ideas becomes unbearable. This parallels House's recent breakdown when House realizes the satisfaction he derives from his work is at risk, and then finds that it's the only thing that makes his life bearable. Both Sidas and House try to find solace in relationships, but they both have severe deficits when trying to bond with people – their intellect gets in the way. Sidas seems to have found the answer – a way to turn his intellect down to normal without damaging it permanently. He does it because he truly cares for Dara and realizes that in his "clear" state, he will punish her for her limited intellect.
by virtue of being dumb one protects itself from much of the fuck ups of the world by staying oblivious to their existance in the first place
knowledge is both the cure and the curse, venom is in the dosage and every patient has different tresholds
Especially the suggestions addressed to self-identifying smart people:
> 1. Give your ideas away.
> It amazes me how many pious philanthropists give generously to charity but are loath to share the secrets of their success.
Maybe I'm naive but I don't think there are a lot of "million dollar ideas" that are just being hoarded and all people have to do is share them
> 2. Don’t use your intelligence to tear others down.
> Deploying cleverness for one-upmanship, sarcasm, and snark is easy.
This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with negativity (and self-esteem, if someone is tearing others down to feel better about themselves).
The one thing I found interesting was
> the researchers also found a strongly negative association between happiness and vocabulary. To explain this, they offered a hypothesis: People with a large vocabulary “self-select more challenging environments, and as a result may encounter more daily stressors and reduced positive affect.” ... (They talk themselves into misery.)
That logic doesn't track for me, I feel like simpler explanations could be be that people fall into a lower level of vocabulary (a more common set of words) as they socialize with a variety of people. Or just office workers and academics broadly seem to be more frequently depressed (my theory is partially the sedentary lifestyle and lack of sun) and they have a larger vocabulary from communicating more through writing than orally.
Often, the important things are the ones that we have already heard many times. ("Don't take drugs", for example.) Following these ideas consistently could already dramatically improve many people's lives.
Even if you learn something that most people don't know, such as software development, again there are relatively simple ideas, such as "write unit tests" or "prefer immutable values and functions without side effects". I am saying this as an example of an idea that may sound mysterious to someone outside the profession, but inside the profession it is just the boring advice that all of us have heard many times... but still many of us don't follow.
I imagine that there are things like this in other professions, too, and I would be happy to see their list. The important aspect is that those should be things that sound boring and obvious to people in that profession.
> This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with negativity (and self-esteem, if someone is tearing others down to feel better about themselves).
Kinda yes, but negativity can become a cultural thing, if you see other people around you do that all the time.
Also, most people have a status instinct; it is too cheap to dismiss it as not having self-esteem. Probably the solution for them is to create a culture where being nice to others is the high-status thing, but that is easier said than done.
But, I generally think most psychological issues revolve around self-esteem, and the individual's desire to protect it and boost it, often by denial and self-deception.
Then you'll be happy like them.
(joking... please don't.)