Why aren't smart people happier? IQ tests miss wisdom

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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" androi […]

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.