Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

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 stopped seeing myself as "the smart" one, and now I am pretty happy.

It's not that I became happier because I became less smart; I became happier when I stopped thinking my value was based on my intelligence, so I stopped trying to be recognized by my intellect and started working on my mental health and building healthy relationships.

I think being smart universally trumps being less smart - but the definition of smart needs to be more encompassing.

For example take the stereotype of a brilliant man or woman who neglected family for career, and are forever single and childless forever -- while someone less brilliant just "ends up" with a family and ultimately more fulfilled in life.

Superficially this is an example of an average person being happier than the really smart one but I don't agree with this. I look at this as the non-brilliant person being smarter in the areas that matter. Or vice versa the "brilliant" person neglected a really important area of life - which isn't that smart.

With this expanded definition - where smart isn't just a measurement of raw processing power or a spike in one area, but rather the product of "smart about what's important" * "smart about how to go about it" - that kind of person I think is consistently happier than anyone else.

One dimension of this is the (in)ability to stick with tradition and culture rather than "smartly" invent everything yourself. In the scenario above, the average person maybe ended up with a family because they were more able to follow family patterns and advice while the "brilliant" person tries to figure out everything from scratch, not able to benefit from the "well troden paths" that are available.

Im not smart (maybe average), but a lot of my unhappiness starts from just having access to information. And then more I process the information, the more unhappy I become. Smarter people than me probably have more information and are able to process it faster, uncovering effects that are not readily perceived by normal folks like myself.

There is an excellent blog post from [0] a guy who, due to a circulatory issue, ended up temporarily dropping down in IQ.

In summary, he felt much happier b/c he wasn't constantly seeing broken systems everywhere and feeling frustrated that they needed to be fixed.

Great read and highly recommend.

0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20120508004058/http://garrysub.p...

Ugh. This analysis starts off a little interesting with its observation that "intelligence", as analyzed historically, tends to be about solving bounded-context problems (with a known right answer) rather than open-ended problems (D&D called this "wisdom", right?)

But it is lacking so, so, so much in explaining why smart people aren't happier or evaluating the premises of the question.

If my teenager gave me this analysis and question, I'd give them 8 more avenues to explore, none of which the article addresses:

1) Is intelligence Kahneman's "type 1 thinking" or "type 2"? Do people (including you) act on their thinking or their emotions? (Can/do you think smart + act dumb and end up happy?)

2) What does being happy have to do with having autonomy and control and purpose? (Existentialism)

3) What does happiness have to do with contentment and the scope of what one wants to control, ie ambition? Attachment? (Buddhism)

4) What does happiness have to do with one's overall outlook of being pessimistic or optimistic?

5) Is there some deeper insight why a widespread religious tradition such as the Judeo-Christian one has a creation story where where "knowledge of good and evil" is inherently problematic?

6) What does happiness have to do with dopamine and the timing or frequency of solving problems of small vs large size? What degree of problems need to be present for an intelligent problem-solver to be happy vs, say, bored, (example: Marvin the "brain the size of a planet" android in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, bored and depressed?)

7) What is the connection between happiness and benevolence, giving vs receiving? Relationships? Why?

8) Why does a socio-economic system based on money-maxxing intended to obtain happiness lead to oversupply which leads to demand-generation/creation/marketing which leads to unhappiness? And similarly leads to conflict and resulting unhappiness? Is there an inherent ying/yang dynamic to intelligence and happiness on a personal or socioeconomic systems level?

I do agree with the author that it's a question worth re-evaluating in an age of "Artificial Intelligence" promises.

Horrors beyond your comprehension are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix.

I do think an important part that we leave out when we analyze datapoints like "people who test well in one subject tend to test well in other subjects" is that "test taking" is itself a skill that people can be good or bad at.

I was always an expert test taker from a very young age. I loved standardized tests, and excelled every time.

I remember thinking many times how I was pretty sure I could do pretty well on a test on any subject, even if I didn't know the subject itself.

I had a chance to test (hah) that theory when I took a summer job at a college testing center when I was a college student myself. I would give out these tests in a number of different subjects, but I had time to kill while the students were taking the tests. I decided to try taking some for subjects I had never studied.

I scored well above the average scores on these subjects I knew nothing about, I just knew how tests were written. I could pick up context clues in the wording of questions, use my experience on how test questions usually go, and use clues from other parts of the test to figure out how to answer a different question.

That doesn't mean I was any good at those subjects, I just was good at that form of test.

Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity.

Or at least I am; I won't speak for everyone else.

I've learned that the more intelligent you are the more models you know and the more trust you place in them being actual reality vs just being models. This leads to overconfidence in things being a certain way so when life calls for flexibility, your rigidity will make you suffer. Cynicism develops from this rigidity.

Additionally, the more intelligent you are the more skilled you become at thinking about things logically. An intelligent person can convince themselves of anything using logic without realizing that all logic depends on unproven axioms and assumptions. Combined with cynicism, logic leads to a negative outlook on life that is hard to shake off.

I find it interesting that there's an expectation that smart people would be happier.

Being smart is essentially "having a strong brain". Would we expect people with a strong back or legs to be happier? I wouldn't expect someone good a maths or puzzles to be any happier than someone good at carrying heavy things.

There's a difference between smart and wise. Some smart people become wise people, and I find them to be happy.

Can the reasoning not be:

1) Our brains are evolved prediction engines

2) It is more beneficial and urgent to predict danger (e.g. approaching predator) than benefit (e.g. approaching prey)

3) There are always more negative outcomes than positive ones (entropy)

4) (1), (2), (3) => the more powerful the prediction engine, the more negative scenarios it will consider

Related. Others?

Why aren't smart people happier? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824864 - Nov 2025 (622 comments)

Why aren't smart people happier? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409811 - Aug 2022 (494 comments)

(I left out some small threads that were neither smart nor happy)

My partner describes me as a professional problem solver. Since I was a child, I have fixed things that most people throw away, taught myself many skills because I'd rather know how to do things before handing things to others to do for me, read many books on a huge variety of subjects, and everyone thinks I am extremely lucky.

I don't see problems, I see opportunities.

I work hard every day, whether it's writing code, digging ditches, clearing scrub, making firewood, planting trees, tending a large growing space, running my business, preparing and canning food for the the next year...and on it goes.

Lots of setbacks along the way, such as the leak I fixed isn't fixed, almost all of my tomatoes failed, 100% of my winter onions failed, the stator on my ATV needs to be replaced, I need to deer proof a field, scrub clearance is a massive and backbreaking job that sucks energy...and on it goes.

I am deleriously happy.

No idea if I am "smart", but life takes work, and mostly it's what you make of it.

Perception is the biggest enemy, and it can be changed.

It is possible for many people to learn how to be happier, but this skill doesn't automatically emerge just because one is smart. Being smart doesn't automatically give you the skill of riding a bike, either. It doesn't automatically give you the skill of being charming in social situations. It doesn't automatically give you the skill of knowing how to box. You can learn all those skills, but they have to be learned. Same with being happier.

There are all kinds of effective approaches for becoming happier, ranging from things like changing one's circumstances, to cognitive-behavioral therapy, to Eckhart Tolle style present-moment awareness beyond mental narratives, to what some pick-up artists call "getting in state", and many other approaches as well.

Being smart does potentially make it easier to learn, because it makes it easier to understand the concepts that other people use to describe skills and to apply them to one's own situation. Being smart also makes it easier to originate one's own ideas for how to become happier. And on the other hand, being smart can also cause problems if it makes one hyper-aware of problems, and so on. Emotional intelligence does not automatically increase just because verbal or mathematical types of intelligence increase. It's its own kind of intelligence. I have no idea whether it is correlated positively with the other kinds of intelligence, but certainly there are many people who have high emotional intelligence and low intellectual intelligence, and people who have low emotional intelligence and high intellectual intelligence.

This gets posted here often even though its a complete fantasy. The actual relationship between happiness and intelligence is well known to be the opposite. IQ correlates significantly with happiness.

https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/b...

As the old adage goes

Ignorance is bliss.

Drawing from my own life experiences, the more I learn the more things I worry about that could go wrong. This worry creeps into all aspects of life and becomes the norm. This creates a sense of dissatisfaction which can be a form of unhappiness.

Smart folks get aware of environment/challenges etc much sooner than others and maybe that creates the pathway to erosion of happiness.

I like this but find the dismissal of multiple intelligences pretty unconvincing. I'm amenable to the idea that IQ (and associated tests) measures some underlying `well-defined` problem solving ability (with each problem having other factors), but the 'poorly-defined' problems sure seem like multiple intelligences by another name.

In my experience, different poorly-defined problems have different shapes and how much skill a person can make progress on them depends on a lot of things. For example, it seems like problem of finding ways to make poorly-defined problems fit into a well-defined space ("engineering") and the poorly-defined problems of organizing groups of people into coalitions ("politics") draw on different sorts of intelligence. The author claims that this is often not tested (which is probably true) but the basic observation that unstructured problems are related to each other and different people solve different areas with consistent skill seems true to me.

Ambition is antithetical to contentment, not intelligence.

This is the drunkard's search principle [0]. If you go looking for intelligence, it is easiest to find among perpetual strivers, either because they will sit for any test and take it seriously or because they have already distinguished themselves as an elite competitor in chess, physics, whatever.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

Because we see how things fail, and why. And it's usually intentional incompetence and/or greed.

Both are fixable, but both require the person or system wants to fix it. So, it's usually not fixed.

Things like death "fixes" things. So does leaving the position in simpler ways. Technology can force the issue and force removing incompetence, or equalizing greed.

But yeah, it's seeing "intentional incompetence and/or greed" causes stagnation or worse is very disheartening and sorrowful. We could do so much better.

IME a lot of smart people aim at optimizing for whatever system they find themselves in, rather than questioning that system and asking themselves if it’s actually the life they want.

And so you get an army of very bright people all jumping through the same hoops to achieve the same goals, and half of them are miserable.

As others have noted being smart will enable you to comprehend more of the World around you. This will in turn increase the amount of negativity you can be exposed to. But in my opinion this ultimately comes down to your thinking patterns. Those must be practiced and learned. If you do not make an effort to adopt positive thinking patterns about the information you perceive you will become unhappy, as the negative patterns appear to be the default. What you become aware of, how you process it and form a conclusion, is your subjective experience.

Most people agree that exercise is healthy for your body. But if your form is lacking you can injure yourself quite severely.

In my experience, low self esteem and harboring negative emotions can be the cause of a "bad thinking form".

  "For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
     the more knowledge, the more grief."

Ecclesiastes 1:18

I think the essay has the implicit assumption that if you're 'better' at doing things, you'll end up happier. Since intelligent people aren't happier, the conclusion becomes that intelligence is mostly only relevant to a subset of well-defined abstract problems that don't represent the real messy problems of life.

I think the reality of human happiness is that being in better material circumstances, or being better at solving problems practical or not, doesn't necessarily improve long term happiness.

Adaption to circumstances, the 'hedonic treadmill', means most people aren't going to obtain some very high level of happiness and sustain it indefinitely, regardless of station.

Because we are depressed by the realization of how stupid we are.

We aren't optimized for smart, for happy, or for truth - we are optimized for getting our genes into the next generation.

Obviously a lot of depression is genetic or due to some unfortunate life circumstance. It's got nothing to do with intelligence.

But what I've also noticed is that a lot of people with unbalanced lifestyles end up becoming depressed.

For example, they might have a habit of going to bed at weird inconsistent times, wake up late, eat junk food, not regularly exercise or go to the gym, etc.

Someone with that lifestyle is much more likely to become depressed compared to someone who sleeps 8 hours a night, wakes up at a reasonable time every morning (i.e. 5am - 8am), has a stable job, and exercises regularly.

Humans are built for routine. Drifting away from that is unnatural.

> This large, nationally-representative study from the UK finds that people who score the lowest on an intelligence test are a little less happy than everyone else, but that’s pretty much it

There’s a rational explanation here: IQ is not an absolute or proportional scale, and the happiness data actually is reflecting the true absolute difference in intelligence, which is smaller than the authors and many people assume.

IQ is a ranking measure, not a proportional measure of intelligence. A high IQ does not imply high intelligence on an absolute scale. The IQ scale is just standard deviations. If we measured height in standard deviations, this becomes clear, but somehow people don’t understand what IQ is, and it has become essentially a popular misconception.

Let’s measure height using HQ, where the mean is 100 and 1 stddev is 15 HQ. Then a 30 year old male who’s 5’9” has an HQ of 100. A 30 year old male who’s 6 feet tall has an HQ of over 115. That’s a 15% increase in HQ score for a 4% increase in height. Someone who’s 7 feet tall would have an HQ of 175 - a score some people label as supergenius, or in the “profoundly gifted range” on the IQ scale - yet they’re only 20% taller than the average male. (IQ doesn’t even work reliably above 160 anyway). And the HQ distribution stops at 8’11” (HQ of ~195, tallest person to ever live, ~50% taller than average), humans don’t ever grow taller than that.

There are good reasons to assume IQ works the same way - score ratios exaggerate intelligence differences, and the highest IQs are only moderately more intelligent than the median. This fully explains the result above - higher IQ does make someone happier, but only in proportion to actual intelligence, not in proportion to IQ.

Speaking only for myself: you can't be tortured by thoughts you're not having, and I, sadly, am having thoughts.

Smarter to realize how the world actually works. Smart enough to reason through the “why,” solve problems, and stick with them instead of just letting them go. But thinking too much can also make it easy to overthink.

I am considered smart and yes I am unhappy from very young age. Mostly due to my family situation too but still: I don't see many kids realized unfair the world is at 6.

i’m sure everyone replying to this thread has a level headed and unbiased assessment of themselves

I think being smart and attentive means noticing a lot of poor craftsmanship (broadest sense, in a lot of areas from politics to whatever) and understanding why that can be sort of a stable situation with little chance of changing, so need to control attention which is not so easy.

When people talk about being happy (or not), I always wonder -- why does it matter? I don't expect to be happy, and I don't strive towards it. I DO strive towards making my life better in terms of engaging in enriching and rewarding experiences, spending time around people I care about, perhaps trying to ensure future stability to the degree I can, and generally growing as a person. Never do I consider the pursuit of "happiness". Interestingly this seems to kind of correlate with the premise of the post, where a lot of commonly-accepted definitions of "intelligence" often recognize only narrowly-defined scopes of intelligence, but not broad/overall multi-tiered general intelligence that translates to "having a good life".

All these studies suggest loneliness makes you unhappy, however I feel happiest most when lonely and doing my thing and not with people. With people I just feel frustrated or weird, because I think so different than the others.

Maybe happy smart people know better than to spend all their time taking IQ tests and participating in psychological studies?

You understand that everything which you value about yourself is not what other people value you for. Also, what you value in others also probably isn't an accurate reflection of who they are either. Everything feels hollow, performative, lacking in substance.

Worst of all, your understanding of reality works against you because it's demotivating. It's harder to perform your role when you don't carry any illusions about its true purpose.

It's difficult to be happy when you believe that everything good which happens to you is at someone else's expense and can see a lot of the tricks.

My observation is that people who are smart (or think they are) tend to express themselves via trying to be overly correct - on everything. And that gets exhausting.

People who try to be too precise and accurate, pay it with their happiness and peace. There is no better therapy than bullshitting with friends, just rolling with it instead of trying to make it all 100% perfectly accurate.

Technically, the article isn't about the title. It's about the limits of LLMs/AI.

It posits that smart people aren't happier because "living a good life" is a poorly defined problem and smart people aren't any better at figuring out poorly defined problems than anyone else.

And that may be fair. And I guess my conjecture is a bit in line with that.

Just because you know how the system works, does not mean you would be good at working the system. For instance, let's pretend that the easiest way to live a good life, it required you to do things that you felt were morally repugnant. Well, I'd have an unhappy life, because I won't do those things.

Or, let's say that you found out that in order to live a good life, you had to meet some physical requirement. Like, if you wanted to live a good life as a man, you had to be at least 6'0". I'd be fucked. And nothing I could do could fix it.

And in all honesty, there are a lot of factors that go into things like success and leading a good life. And while intelligence does help, it's not a guarantee. And I would think that intelligent people would also figure that out. And it's frustrating knowing that even if you do everything right, you could still fail through no fault of your own.

Interesting article. But here's my situation: I'm not smart, and I'm also not happy. So where does that leave me?

> Over the last generation, we have solved tons of well-defined problems. We eradicated smallpox and polio. We landed on the moon. We built better cars, refrigerators, and televisions. We even got ~15 IQ points smarter! And how did our incredible success make us feel?

One big outcome of this is being alive more, that doesn't really make you any happier. Also consider stuff like a growing global economy that helps with things like, well, not starting as many global-scale wars that decimate whole cities.

I also think there is a word for someone who is good at poorly defined problems. "Artist." If you define that very broadly and maybe throw in some religious type roles, community leaders, etc in there too, you have a whole group of people who are dedicating their whole life to this problem. But these are super ancient professions and it's not really surprising that we haven't got amazingly better at them recently. I mean, art from centuries ago is still incredible!

Likely related, what psychologists call "counterfactual thinking", and why a silver medal stings more than bronze for many Olympic medalists.

https://theconversation.com/for-many-olympic-medalists-silve...

Depression is a beast that demands to be fed and the Internet is a buffet. The smarter you are, the more you can put away.

This article is so mid. The author clearly feels how mid he is and is desperate to justify that mid people are also smart, maybe even smarter in that superior nebulous way on ambiguous, ill-defined problems than those squares that can only solve those boring textbook well-defined problems.

Intelligence is a slippery term, as plenty of smart folks have made dumb decisions. That said, I’ve noticed that many people who don’t understand why their choices are subpar tend to blame others, i.e. life happens to them. Someone more aware might internalize their failures. Plenty of mutations of this mechanism.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I will out myself as being incredibly smart and also incredibly unhappy in a general sense (although content with my life). The answer is very simple and mundane: I observe and understand problems that have simple solutions that will never be applied because the mass of people cannot understand the problem and solution or are unwilling for social reasons from implementing the solution. This creates a sense of powerlessness and futility, and if you aren't careful can cause you to spiral into nihilism.

Finding stoic philosophy was a major turning point in my life, because it helped me gain the perspective to understand that I should invest my mental efforts on things that are within my control. That's helped me be happier in my 40s than I was in my 20s.

This video hit me really hard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N6qPEA_dGc

As far as what approaches to life are enabled by high intelligence at "low level", but which simply do not work as "high level".

He talks about dealing with 100 problems not by prioritizing them and taking the first step on the first one, but by rotating them and recombining them until there are only 90 problems, and this becoming a terrible habit as the scale & complexity of the problems makes it less productive.

He talks about intelligent people simply noticing more things about the world that are working poorly and understanding what has gone wrong, but not having any commensurate capability to fix them.

Emotional intelligence and rational intelligence are different things. If you believe in IQ, this is rational intelligence. If you believe in the measure of emotional intelligence, it is considered EQ. They are not the same, the ability to solve problems, is different than social skills.

I don't think smart people ever ask this question.

It's an invalid question attempting to correlate unrelated dimensions. One would hope that's even the point the article goes on to make, I didn't read it.

The value of being smart, similar to the value of knowing the truth, is not in how happy it makes you.

There might be a coincidental inverse correlation that makes the two things seem related, but the two things are never the less, unrelated in any way that matters.

Your unhappiness isn't caused by your capacity to percieve or understand some bad thing, it's caused by the bad thing, and ignorance is no way to resolve it to get happiness.

The question isn't even interesting to ponder like some mystery, except for a few minutes one time one day as a young person.

Why should being smart make you happy?

Lots of reasons, I suspect.

Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter. They are subject to thinking they’ve got it all figured out, when really they don’t. Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.

Then there are other attributes like discipline. A very smart person with little discipline could easily end up in a worse state than someone with good discipline and less intelligence. Sort of the Forest Gump model, if you like.

Superior intelligence is absolutely a gift. But not the only kind of gift, and not necessarily the best one. Ask someone like Stephen Hawking.

I think it’s a combination of:

1. “Smart” people tend to constantly see patterns others are missing. So they’re fretting about problems others are blissfully unaware about. Sometimes these “problems” matter and somethings they don’t.

2. Contrary to popular belief, the smartest people in the room typically despise being the smartest person in the room. They typically are starving for someone to challenge them, to debate them, for them to learn something from others. That lack of stimulation is typically depressing to a “smart” person.

Theory: There are more smart, happy people than it seems. It’s just, that particular combination tends to come with a reduced inclination to question their feelings and to engage in discourse about feelings.

Because you realize everything is a scam.

The premise of the title is wrong. Being Smart and Happiness is not related. There is no cause and effect.

Whenever I see title like this, I wonder why do you make the connection of thoes two unrelated concepts?

Baity Title.

I live by "everything is grey". I am interestingly smart in some niche domains that I have a hard time communicating exists. I also insist on not fitting any template. Pretty dumb, right?

Bertrand Russell wrote a text which touches on this exact subject, The Conquest of Happiness [1].

Ignore the hyperbole of the "who should read it". In my opinion, it is his thoughts on happiness from his own life. Some of it is dated, but I found it a relaxing and rational take on the topic.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Happiness-Bertrand-Russell/d...

What about this: Happy people try less hard (because why would you? things are going great!), thus getting challenged less, thus appearing not as smart/proving themselves less.

If monkey know how to open coconut and monkey like coconut, then eating coconut is what make monkey happy, not knowing how to open coconut or reflecting on its ability to do so…

The first comment on the blog has it.

Subjectively, personally, we can all decide for ourselves what purpose we live for, but the purpose of life as a phenomenon in the world is not to enjoy itself. It's to perpetuate itself. Stay alive long enough and win a competition for scarce resources needed to reproduce. Being largely freed from the tyranny of constant threats and true scarcity, humans can aspire for more, but we're still living creatures. When bears come down from the mountains to fight to the death for winner take all access to the pool of twelve available mates, they're not happy when they win. They mate and get back to it, rest a few months, then fatten up again and prepare for another year of fighting to the death, until they finally get old and lose to a younger, stronger competitor. That's the tale of thousands of generations of ancestors spilled into all of us, humanity included.

Even just look at specific highly successful humans. Take famously miserable, no friends Michael Jordan. Win every year, enjoy it for twenty seconds, then immediately get back to work, 14 hours in the gym every day, alienating everyone you ever meet, having no friends, only to win again and feel just as hollow. Why? Because genes and behaviors that make an animal that driven, to succeed at any and all cost, including their own wellbeing, is the basis of success at the only thing that actually matters to life itself, as opposed to any individual thinking creature.

He may or may not want to be that way. I'm a reasonably smart guy, nowhere near as driven or successful as Michael Jordan, but I still often wish I was less smart and less driven than I am. The logic of life dictates that we always want more. Nothing is ever good enough. It's why we're collectively miserable no matter how much abundance and wealth we collectively create, even among those who have more than 99% of the world. We can tell each other all the stories we want about the fairness of the distribution, convince yourself your misery is especially justified because you believe you'll be the first generation of humans ever to pay more for housing than your parents. It isn't that. You're not special. None of us are. Dissatisfaction and always wanting more are core to what makes life life.

Being smart probably makes you better at life, but being better at life is barely correlated with enjoying it, if at all.

As a Smart Person with at least 2 sigma IQ, never studied in school, college was not a wake up call it was also easy, yes it was a good college, blah blah...:

Knowing what is worth doing or what would make me happy is the hard part. Achieving the goal isn't the hard part, it's setting one. Knowing what will make me happy is something philophers smarter than me have been wondering about for thousands of years.

Because it's hard to be "happy" when you know how shitty this world is for the majority of life on it, even if your own life was perfect

In my experience who live and work with smart people, and make smart decisions about their personal lives and families are pretty happy .

You can have a high IQ and make really stupid personal decisions.

Albert Einstein was notorious for this . He made catastrophic personal decisions that destroyed his families. His various wives and numerous mistresses ended up despising him and his son ended up in an asylum .

> Why aren't smart people happier?

I think any discussion on this topic should begin with answering "Why would one expect smart people to be happier?"

Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.

If you're interested in this topic, I love pg's Why Nerds are Unpopular. It was the first place where I started to realize things like being popular, being happy and others require their own sort of intelligence and effort.

https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Because you can be smart about 1 thing, but have all the wrong assumptions in life. I.e. just must deeply believe that it is your right to seek hapiness, not that you must adhere to what people generally believe is the optimal way to exist in your culture.

Such realizations require experience, wisdom, contemplation. Not whatever leads to a high IQ.

Other people call me smart. I think I'm just hard working.

I read enough books to spot liars, and when people you built Idealistic trust with break it, you never leave your guard down.

No psychologist or psychology book can break it. They are just idiots. Or maybe they believe Plato's Noble lie is good for society. But once you see, you can't unsee.

Now everything in my life has ~0 trust but all supervision.

From politics to food safety to personal relationships, don't trust. Verify.

I am not the smarter, but I believe that I am smart enough. My problem is that my mind overthinks all the possible scenarios that could happen. For example, now with AI, what happens if the AI replaces all jobs, are we going to all live happy lives doing nothing? or are we going to be all super poor with the top 1% living in closed cities?

Good question. For me the problem is complex. It is not only about self feelings, the educational system and our society is a part of it...kids are growing up with "facts" that good results and adults high income make happiness...and often the essential is forgotten!

Likewise, rich people don't seem to be happier - sampling the few thousand people I have spoken to in my life.

This is exactly the question considered in Voltaire's short story "The Good Brahmin"[0]

0: https://www.online-literature.com/voltaire/4411/

I would rather know who is happy, what is meant by happy and why those cohorts are more happy. Smart may or may not be the primary thing. E.g. if parenthood makes one "happy" (defn. needed) and being smart makes you forgo that for ambition that would be interesting to know.

To address this question, apply a mathematical trick, and convert it to the equivalent "Why aren't happy people smarter?". This new question admits a range of straightforward solutions, depending on how kind you are to the handicapped.

It's practically a disorder. I remember the book, Too Smart to Be Happy by Jeanne Siaud-Facchin. (French)

Gifted people often are top-down thinkers, which has a lot to do with creating connections, so we can gain insight as we keep the bigger picture in mind.

Happiness is subjective, so that is the first obvious problem. Thee are probably a lot of smart people are are not as successful as they feel entitled to despite qualifications, and maybe this leads to feeling of inadequacy or resentment.

We know that intelligence tests and tests in general can be impacted by motivation and potential monetary gains (the article brushes on that). Maybe they can also be impacted by the happiness and other emotional states of the test taker.

To see, and to know, is to suffer.

The world is largely a horrible place and ignorance is bliss.

Also the smarter you are the more prone you are to mental illness, which may be related to the above or maybe like why you're more likely to crash a fast car.

Decades ago Gerry Weinberg (and maybe Gauss--i can't recall) went down a similar path and used the word "puzzles" for the ones the author calls "well-defined".

Knowing a problem is a puzzle helps a lot to replicate a solution.

There's nothing clever about being "smart".

And being smart on its own really should not be seen as any kind of good thing.

Being smart _can_, however, be an enabler to achieving certain positive qualities (helping people, being considerate, being kind). But being smart can also enable negative qualities (exploiting people, being manipulative etc).

I used to think of myself as "smart" (top marks in high school, Oxbridge degree, PhD), but actually now I think I'm probably fairly average in objective intelligence, but I just try and think hard, and work hard.

I'm now surrounded by people that I think are smarter than me, but that doesn't mean I just give up thinking. Sure, it might take me longer to think of something, but that doesn't mean I still can't contribute.

Ever since I read "Flowers for Algernon" twenty years ago, I have known that being foolish does not necessarily mean being unhappy, nor does being intelligent guarantee happiness.

Yeh what even is smart really? There’s a bit of objectiveness here I think. For me, if you’re not using your smarts to be happy (or content with life) that’s not very smart.

Pride. Regardless of intelligence the most miserable people I know are the ones who can't get over themselves trying to survive in a world that is not about them.

I first came upon this phrase from the movie 'Liberal Arts' (quoting some religious text):

For in much wisdom is much grief. And he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.

have you met most people? I can't really recommend it.

Some of them put knowledge ahead of wisdom, but certainly intelligence also allows you to see the faults of the world and can create a pessimistic outlook.

I think saying the reason we are unhappy is because the biggest questions are poorly defined misses that happiness was never the goal for why consciousness is here.It's pretty clear to me that consciousness exists for the biology and not the other way around (I submit as evidence how much suffering your biological portion will let you experience before it dies, it's way more than your consciousness would ever authorize if it were in control). As long as your unhappiness isn't to the point of materially affecting your reproductive success, it's a non issue for your biology so has never been optimized for. Smart people are unhappy because they experience the irrelevance of their happiness more fully than dumber people. The dumbest people are slightly more unhappy because they have a way crappier experience on average and they are not dumb enough on average to not notice this.

People could be smart on something and be foolish on something else. The two founders of Apple could be a good example for this.

Understanding the problems in society and the solutions but also the barriers that are impossible to overcome.

Generally I believe a person's baseline happiness is determined at birth.

Some people are just born happier than others.

Mensa means “dumb” in Spanish. That’s evidence of how the smart can have so little common sense.

Knowing the retention time of CO2 in the atmosphere makes you BOTH smarter AND more worried.

Smart doesn’t mean they are necessarily emotionally intelligent or mature. Emotionally intelligent people know how to regulate their emotions and not to lose sleep over factors that are out of their control. Everything happening in and around the world is not your problem or concern most people are just unhappy because they focus on negativity

I'm reading all these accounts of people who were considered "smart but lazy", who were bright but not disciplined or driven to participate in things that gets grades. As a kid I had a near perfect memory and limitless curiosity. I would sit with all the textbooks before the academic year started, flip through them and feel excited. I also loved doing my own experiments, sometimes with near-perilous outcomes too. I was way ahead of the curve and did great academically too until high school.

Over time I lost my golden memory and started finding it hard to remember exact details and even vocabulary as easily as normal people do. The slowness and the academic rut also stifled my natural growth. I forced myself through a bachelor's in computer science. I loved every topic and went diving deep into many of them and I could explain them better than my professors, but I had no desire to pass silly exams and prove myself. I passed with a CGPA 8.4/10 and entered a workforce that followed the same rut. Silly, irrelevant interviews that force you to "prepare" for months for them. I did it early on to get my first job but never indulged in it since.

I have had a fulfilling career so far, working on interesting problems with real outcomes. I switched to data science. I dabbled on both sides of the industry; the research papers obsessed R&D and the whatever-shit-sticks side of software development and found mediocrity and sleaze on both sides. I never climbed the corporate ladder and never got close to getting loaded.

I think for smart people happiness comes from chasing exciting and meaningful goals, but the realities of life keep them chasing other more mediocre things and that takes a toll.

Personally, I have stopped looking to my work for intellectual satisfaction or growth or safety or camaraderie. It's a purely transactional relationship. I work sincerely and I get paid. I give them inputs on what can be improved and what makes more sense, but I don't go overboard and make any efforts beyond my paycheck.

I let my true self run amok in exploring things I do on my own, in applying the scientific and analytical mindset to everything from gardening to sewing to building better learning environments. If some of it brings a windfall someday, I'll be marginally happier.

I suspect it's because they can see through all the bullshit but can't do much about it because being smart is not enough and actually makes you feel helpless and inconsequential.

I’m interested in a different question: are powerful people happier?

Any references?

Because they're smart, but not as smart as they think they are.

99% of the replies here speak from the point of view that they are of the intelligent group. Hmmm, either hacker news is some sort of naturally forming mensa community or there's a lot of ego being put on display here.

I see a lot of top comments here about how smart people will be disappointed by the world. They see everything broken about it because they are so smart.

I don’t really buy it. There is a sizeable minority here with high enough wealth and income that also (because of their place in society) think that a lot of things are more benign, neutral, or good than they really are. I’ve seen enough threads here demonstrating that. They think that this thing is just a mistake. That other thing can just be fixed by getting smarter people in charge. We just need good and capable people in charge of this other thing and it will be alright. And so on.[1] They watch the news and think that the presenters and people they interview are on their side—and they often are, relatively speaking at least.[2]

This is basically “Mistake Theory” that that Alexander psychologist wrote about. Out of what I have read from him that was the most true thing I’ve read. (But those high IQ + higher income bracket + gadfly interest people just dress it up in let’s say less academic and more improvised theories.)

Independent of intelligence, people with less authority and wealth have more input in their life that gives them reason to doubt and fret.[1]

PD: People lamenting their smartness: 355 comments and counting. Predictably catnip subject.

PDD: It is weird that for an IQ fetishist community where intelligence can solve most things, the only thing it cannot solve is your own contentment, as in it actively sabotages you. But why not? I’m not convinced.

[1] This is basically my vulgar understanding of standpoint epistemology.

[2] But note: sizeable minority. It’s not like I have numbers or anything, but I think there are plenty of people here who are cynical and pessimistic. Not as in, they are wrong. But due to intelligence or background they have reasons to doubt the great order of things. And this place has gotten more realistic/cynical (I say both) over the years. Still, this still is a hub for well paid US West Coast programmers.

Pressure, from inside and out, concisely.

Smart people aren’t lazy. They often speak less because their attention is focused on productivity, achieving their goals, and earning more money.

Maybe because they are not that smart? :)

Gotta love all the “I don’t consider myself intelligent but…”.

HN is one bad UX decision away from becoming the new LinkedIn. Humble brags galore!

"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher

Because they can see the consequences.

The idea that stupid people are happier comes from the effects of lead poisoning, which turned you into a happy, inane person.

Because junk food and soda tastes good but we are smart an know it will make us fat and dead so we drink water and eat carrots.

> "Müller-Lyer illusion, the two lines that look like they’re different lengths but aren't"

I hate that the author gave a picture in which the two lines actually are of different lengths, as you can see from trying to pick a rectangular screenshot.

I'd quantify the exact feature in the line that I'm using for reference (which would be by itself ironic considering the discussion on well-defined relations between entities attached to that picture), but it's unnecessary - none of them match!

All thought is born of failure.

Because being smart doesn't mean being wise. Lack of wisdom can fuck up your life far, far worse than lack of intelligence... and I for one am not wise when it comes to people.

because they are not using their smartness to make themselves happier

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

If you're smart you probably have bigger, more challenging goals, so chances of success aren't higher. Deliberately setting goals lower might not help. Having a mindset which decouples happiness from goals would help, but people are generally not wired for that, evolution wanted us to push harder.

Simple, many-times-repeated fact: smartness -> high expectations but low yield -> disappointment. The imbalance between expected and returned may or not be the person's responsibility.

Every smart person should invest time to learn the dexterities to manage their talent.

> people score higher on IQ tests when you pay them for performance, so what looks like a test of intelligence may in part be a test of how hard you’re willing to try.

I remember when I took the WAIS-IV for diagnostic purposes. I do not think I have ever taken a more boring testing in my entire life. Not to mention, the test felt like it was never going to end.

I eventually got so bored that I started intentionally giving incorrect to questions to just to see if the psychologist would say anything. That was until I got in an actual argument with the psychologist during the symbol matching section.

I do not think there is enough money that one could pay me to take one of those tests ever again. I seriously rather put toothpicks under my toenails and proceed to kick a brick wall. I already held much of the field of psychology in great contempt. After my test, I proceeded to do more reading of research on the topic of IQ, and I must say, I think it only furthered my contempt for psychology.

Honestly, I think the entire notion of IQ is disgusting and dehumanizing. If you need an IQ test to figure out if someone is "intelligent" then you might be incompetent or an imbecile.

No think, no worry.

Ignorance is bliss.

Lots of moving parts on this discussion and wise / smart people have probably all weighed in without solving the problem necessarily

I'll suggest that maybe "biologically" speaking, intelligence makes smart people seek out knowledge which makes them "unhappier"; this would explain why they can't simply use their knowledge to become happier, as "ignorance is bliss" and their native intelligence naturally has them seek "knowledge which isn't bliss".

Along with this, I've experimentally noticed that what we focus on seems to influence our sense of happiness, so then you could hypothetically just try to focus on things that make you happier; with the intelligent, though, they may tend to focus on things that do not make them happier, even though they may trade happiness for a greater sense of meaning and purpose. For example, it's been said that parents are less happy but have a greater sense of purpose in life (according to some studies). Likewise, the intelligent person may try to contend with difficult and troubling intellectual issues, or may become aware of thoughts which have a greater emotional impact on them than a less intelligent person. So again, intelligent people "just happen" to likely make themselves unhappy, by virtue of being intelligent (?).

There is some fuzziness about what it means to be intelligent or happy, and yet at the same time we seem to have an understanding of what those things mean. If it is clear what makes us happy, then the smart person can just do those things. But, basically happiness can be subjective - some people derive a lot of happiness from inflicting a lot of pain on themselves (like a smart person trying to tackle progressively more painful intellectual problems). So... it's also kind of unclear if we know what makes us happy (it might vary per person), and also if happiness is even the goal in life (versus living a meaningful life, although happiness and meaning are often thought to go hand in hand).

The article notes that positive psychology cannot be used to increase happiness; I'm kind of skeptical of this view, but sympathetic to the view as well. What I did was ask AI what makes people happy and to try to do likewise, and the conclusion was kind of like going fishing, like you can go out on the water and show up, but the fish still decide if they bite or not. Happiness is like the fish - still a little outside our control, but we can possibly create some conditions where it might be likely to "bite" us.

Also there may be "multiple happinesses" - kind of again getting at the question of what it means to be happy. I've seen Christian saints describe a kind of internal sense of joy, even when externally they might be in lots of physical or emotional pains. Or by contrast there may be a sense of "inner peace" which a person could have, while their life physically or otherwise is chaotic and might be associated with "unhappiness". A clean conscience can be important and overlap with some of these things.

Anyway, just a quick comment reflection after reading the article and mulling it over a bit - surely more is to be said on such an enduring topic.

What does being smart even mean?

A few observations. I consider myself smart, but far from smartest.

tldr: intelligence lets you control some variables for happiness, but it is not the entire happiness function.

1. We're social and emotional beings beings. Emotions are more powerful than intelligence. We gladly choose something that we enjoy over something that will make us happier long term. All humans do this, mental fortitude is in short supply.

2. Life, and society move the definition of happiness constantly. Either through manipulation, new discoveries, new laws, new constraints. So even smart people need to adapt. If yo were happy last year, maybe today you have to pay higher taxes, or your country gets into a war, or you get a new president, or you're just competing with other smart people in an endless game of chess.

3. We move our own goalposts. Think the rich who thought wealth was the source of happiness, then they get there are are miserable. Or simply spend their time looking for new challenges, infinite growth, etc.

4. Living in a society means your happiness is always, always dependent on the state of that society, and therefore the happiness of others. It's like fluids. You can't be the one drop of water in a bottle that is red. It will dilute, and vice-versa. Maintaining a state of happiness in an unhappy society means building barriers and constantly fighting "them".

5. I have a theory that live is like a wave of ups and downs. The sum of all your highs will equal the sum of your your lows by the time you die. You have some control of when, how much and for how long to be happy/unhappy (unhappiness also means hardship, work, selling time for money, etc, the things we use to pay for happiness), and that controls how the quotas get distributed throughout your life. I have absolutely not tested this, I am still experimenting with my life. Counter examples may exist, I have a sample size of 1.

This is one of those topics that everyone likes to have an opinion on, especially smart people :)

Folks that are smart also have a common set of medical conditions. This ranges from everyday annoying like insomnia, NCAH, EDS, IBS, and more to more life long ADHD, ASD, and Alzheimer's. I spent years researching the underlying genetics and how they are connected while working with a doctor to be able to take care of this group better. Being able to help so many fundamentally improve their life has given my life impact in a way that many things haven't. Often small things, but more than we as a society would like to admit, fundamentally changing their life for the better and in the long run helping to dramatically reduce their Alzheimer's risk.

Genetics is a compression system and re-uses stuff. Serotonin in the brain and the gut for example. The fact that we see overlap is both expected, but also a great way to decode what is going on. The fact that I can see their whole genome for under a grand is amazing. Combined with lab work and symptoms treatment has never been easier.

Intelligence can be broken down into a few different things. Starting with raw brain "stuff". Literally needing more brain stuff, faster brain stuff, etc. When I have given talks and walked through all of those mutations I can quickly draw your attention to the common pattern of what they are compensating and I can walk back through human dna several hundred thousand years talking about that, but that simply sets up the hardware. (A big AI model that is barely trained isn't great)

The other half is to keep trying, but trying something different and learn from what it tries. To do this the hormones result in someone who is more on edge, more sensitive to any change, etc. aka they are less happy.

While you can see this individually smart folks seek out each other, have kids and so you see this all together is a bit of a cop out. Long term evolution doesn't care about that. There is a fundamental basic biological systems problem that all of these are compensating for which brings up the how did humans even climb this ladder to begin with.

This heavily overlaps with AI models and at this point I have tools to rapidly convert from the brain and genetics related to intelligence to AI models You want bigger and better brains (more weights, etc) and you want to expose them to more data and you want to fine tune them etc.

A personal favorite topic is white boarding out why brains have ~4.7bit weights and why brains didn't go down to 2bits. I can show this both at the biological level, but quickly go to the information theory math on this.

There is also Williams syndrome aka "happy syndrome". Like anything you want to be able to articulate not just why some folks are sad, but why some are really happy.

This is a deep rabbit hole, didn't even touch on dreaming and many other topics that all influence this in their own way.

So why are smart people not happy? Sure there is always the outliers of bad environment and other causes, but more often than not the story can be found right in their genes and not one gene. Like everything it is more complex than anyone saying it is X.

This is a topic I have fallen into which heavily overlaps with AI for the obvious reasons. If any AI labs want a more detailed Friday afternoon talk on it feel free to reach out.

Because we’re social animals and 84% of the population can’t do calculus or understand any meaningful statistics. It makes honest discussion and cooperation with the average person nearly impossible.