Why aren't smart people happier? (opens in new tab)

Of course they may praise you for this and perhaps you get addicted to this positive feedback, but it comes at a high cost, especially as you can end up spending so much effort on "friends" that you neglect to solve or even recognize your own problems.

I have come to realize recently that I don't actually have any friends, only dependents. Declining to take ownership of people's problems caused basically all of them to more or less cut off contact with me (maybe I get a text once a year or something), but I am so much happier now that I ever was before.

Slavoj Žižek (someone who does seem to be especially smart):

“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.”

Results: Happiness is significantly associated with IQ. Those in the lowest IQ range (70-99) reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with the highest IQ group (120-129). Mediation analysis using the continuous IQ variable found dependency in activities of daily living, income, health and neurotic symptoms were strong mediators of the relationship, as they reduced the association between happiness and IQ by 50%.

There’s also evidence that IQ correlates with education, income, number of friends, lifespan, having a successful marriage, and having the desired number of children you desire (in case that’s not clear here’s an example: if you want 2 kids, it’s more likely you end up with 2 kids the higher your IQ). All that surely plays into happiness

Disclaimer: Individual results may vary

But being smart just means you know the awful reality of things. Congrats, you learned about all these awful things you can’t do much to fix, and the reward is you get to experience existential dread. Congrats, you have learned the history of humanity and how our society functions, and your reward is you get to be angry at the vast amount of injustice.

Happiness and suffering are two sides of the same coin and we evolved these feelings (or they were bestowed upon us by God, either way) in order to guide us. We do more of what feels good, less of what feels bad.

If we're happy all the time, happiness loses its intended purpose. Same for suffering.

That's why, no matter what financial windfall you may experience, give it 6 months and you'll be just as miserable (or worse) as you were before. But because you got a high off of it initially, you keep pursuing more and more, always convinced the next upgrade in your life is what will do the trick. But it doesn't. All you're doing is raising the bar for what it takes to make you momentarily happy.

It's the "poverty of affluence", as described by Paul Wachtel in his book by the same name.

So our minds are constantly adapting to our circumstances and rebalancing things so that we come back to the center.

Chasing happiness, much like running away from suffering, is a fool's game. We are hard wired to feel both in roughly equal measure, regardless of our circumstances, over the long haul.

For this reason, I think the buddhists and stoics have it right. The best thing we can do is nothing. Sit down and shut up. Get off the wheel of suffering, observe the world as dispassionately as possible, and accept both joy and suffering as inconsequential inputs meant to guide us.

It's the closest any human will ever be allowed to experience peace in their mortal life. If you chase the highs of life, expect massive lows, as well. Accept life on life's terms. Stop chasing things and you may not be happier, but you'll probably be less miserable and experience fewer bouts of crippling depression and anxiety.

Or as Charles Bukowski's epitaph famously reads: Don't try.

Intelligence can help you climb to the highest positions in business and academia, wisdom allows you to understand that it isn't really worth it.

At no point does it say that smart people are less happy (it does mention two studies where in one "lowest scoring" were a tiny bit unhappier, and in another "highest scoring" were happier): the overall tone is that they are equally happy regardless of their intelligence.

And then it wonders why the familiar trait of intelligence does not translate to those people setting their lives up for happiness?

You might remember the TV show from the 70s called "Eight is Enough," about a family with eight children. That's the source of my new motto. I don't know that 0.8 is the right number, but I do believe that when I'm not feeling 100% happy, I shouldn't feel guilty or angry, or think that anything unusual is occurring. I shouldn't set 100% as the norm, without which there must be something wrong. Instead, I might just as well wait a little while, and I'll feel better. I won't make any important decisions about my life at a time when I'm feeling less than normally good.

In a sense I tend now to suspect that it was necessary to leave the Garden of Eden. Imagine a world where people are in a state of euphoria all the time — being high on heroin, say. They'd have no incentive to do anything. What would get done? What would happen? The whole world would soon collapse. It seems like intelligent design when everybody's set point is somewhere less than 100%." """

-- Don Knuth

From: Going Through An Existential Crisis? https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existentia...

It is how our brains are wired and a result of evolution. Even if a person lived in a paradise and had all their needs and wants provided; one of two things will occur - Either that person becomes bored or they wonder 'hmmm, I wonder if x,y or z could be better in some way?' and then trying to improve on perfection.

Another aspect of this is that smart people - people good at solving well-defined problems - tend to see well-defined problems everywhere, tend to try and reduce things to well-defined problems, so that they can apply their unique gifts. This manifests as an apparent discomfort with ambiguity, which poses a problem, because comfort with, or at least an openness to, ambiguity is a prerequisite for happiness. The analytical mind is quick to label things and categorise them, including whether they are good or bad, but I find that happiness is more about refraining from applying such labels to things.

It's like with dealing with an incident. The unhappy say "the website is down, this is terrible", whereas the happy merely say "the website is down".

It's about social connections and inter-human things ... not some skills you learn on universities but from loving and well raised parents.

I believe myself to be pretty good at programming because I can achieve execution performance that almost nobody else can and solve problems most people cannot. After 20 years of practice my greatest enabling skill is better organizational skills.

I am not good at bad programming though. I have spent a good deal of effort in the first half of my career to thoroughly refine my precise which also means recognizing and avoiding anti-patterns. I avoid things like frameworks because they are much slower, super large, get in the way, and really slow me down. As a result people dependent upon frameworks probably think I am a really bad programmer.

As somebody who has learned to increase their own productivity by doing more from less, better organizational skills and higher conscientiousness, encountering excess complexity in other code makes me unhappy. It’s really depressing. Often solving simple problems in such code is a tip-toe dance through a minefield unless I have the bandwidth to write it again with test automation.

Now, this sounds mean, but my Dad was a psychological genius.

This was exactly what I, personally, needed to hear in order to trigger the thought, "Wait a minute.. these are social SKILLS... I should be able to learn them"

And I could, and I did.

A few years after that I asked myself, "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?"

I got working on that... and I succeeded again

> Philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that if two kids playing hopscotch or push-pin are gaining as much joy and pleasure as someone reading poetry, they have enjoyed as much utility.

> John Stuart Mill took a different approach. He argued, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”

1. https://seths.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/stop-stealing-...

Deep rumination over negative things is a hallmark of depression, and deep rumination over a hard problem is a hallmark of intelligence. I suspect the "deep rumination" instinct can go astray, causing deep-set unhappiness.

But we associate and measure intelligence (think g) with respect, broadly speaking, to abstract problem solving; it is mathematical ability, logical thinking, shape rotation, vocabulary, working memory. In fact, for people who are "smart," but not in the sense we normally associate with that term (e.g., typically not good at math), we use "street smarts." Picasso, who was an artistic genius, is not defined as "intelligent," and we don't say, "Picasso was an artist, why wasn't he happy (assuming he wasn't)?

The idea is that happiness and cognitive ability live in the same space, but why should that be true? All of us have seen many people with low IQs happy, cheerful, satisfied. We might think it's because they don't understand much, and we'd be approaching an important insight.

Why are we surprised that smart people are not as happy as we think they should be (which is not true, as far as the literature tells us), but not that smart people are not more physically fit (if you are so smart, you can't lift weights three times a week on a rational program, can't you use your brain to eat moderately and be satisfied with 2k calories instead of 5k), and not that smart people don't get laid as much as we think they should, since that should be a positively selected trait?

> So smarter people are happier, right? Well, this meta-analysis says no.

The linked meta analysis says:

> At the macro-level, we assessed the correlation between average IQ and average happiness in 143 nations and found a strong positive relationship.

...

As for the 'IQ poorly measures solving ineffable, poorly defined problems' - sure. IQ is however strongly correlated with how much money people make. If making a living over decades in a fast changing world isn't a poorly defined problem, I don't know what is.

Someone may say they are less happy on Monday Morning than on Friday afternoon, or they were happier last year but then the pandemic lock down saddened them. And, some people perceive their own happiness differently, on person may say, I am very happy, but they perhaps are not as happy as another person who says they are only moderately happy because they may have a higher expectation of happiness.

And what is it really, many philosophers have spent a lot of time on that topic. Is it that all my needs and wants are met and I am in a committed relationship? Others may define it differently. The article touches on these points.

In my view these are just two different unconnected attributes, asking if intellect and happiness are correlated is like asking "how big is the color red?" it is not really a meaningful question.

Anyone can be happy, whether they have a high IQ or not.

Say you have one man who has a low IQ, works as a laborer, but comes home to a wife and loving children. They do not have a large house or fancy car but if you ask him, he may say he is very happy.

Another man, lives alone in a large home with a nice car but enjoys solitude and contemplation, perhaps occasionally having a friend over and they have a deep conversation about quantum mechanics. You ask him and he might say he is very happy.

Obviously, you could easily reverse those examples and add many more.

Now let's measure that?

Personally, I just don't see how.

I grew up in a culture that did not talk about being happy or cared about objectifying happiness in any way. In fact, we don’t even have good words for it that would be separate from other notions. Growing up, I only ever experienced people talking about if they were healthy or satisfied or enjoying life.

This is a long way of saying that perhaps, it’s not only about calling out the vagueness and ambiguity of “intelligence”, but about considering that the term “happiness” also deserves the same degree of scrutiny. It, too, lacks a clear objective definition and comes with a lot of subjective and cultural ambiguity.

Maybe asking why one ambiguous undefinable thing doesn’t cause or correlate with another ambiguous undefinable thing is a futile statistical exercise to begin with?

Would you sacrifice a portion of your intelligence for an equal (whatever that might mean) portion of happiness?

There are people that you would consider very dumb and very happy, do you desire to swap places with them?

And finally, would you sacrifice all of your intelligence for eternal bliss?

If the answer is no to all, then you simply don't value happiness that much, which is totally fine. Society/culture might force you to think that happiness is the ultimate goal, but you don't have to accept that.

YMMV, but what worked for me is accepting happiness as a resource, same as food or sleep. You don't need too much of it, just enough be healthy and get through without dying.

"I'm getting hustled only knowing half the game." "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish" by The Coup

Why aren't smart people taller?

- Ecclesiastes, somewhere between 450-180 BCE.

That's why posts like this gets voted up all the time.

Bad news: Most HNers and programmers have only average intelligence.

A) multiple types of intelligence exist and can be measured that aren't already measured by a mainstream intelligence test

B) a type of intelligence that makes you happier exists, and can be measured by performance on another task

C) when you ask someone how happy they are and they say "7", it means they're experiencing the same level of happiness as another person who also said "7", or even experiencing the same level of happiness they were when they said "7" decades ago

I have overcome depression and I am "satisfied" with my life (I prefer the word "satisfied" to the overinflated one: happiness). And now that depression is in my past I think that was a puff-piece article, and so is this.

One could say that more intelligent people tend to overthink things; then again someone even more intelligent would know better and not overthink things.

Mindfulness is a big component of my new Life.

>Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems.

I wish the article went a bit deeper into analyzing the structural flaws of intelligence tests, because I think this is also an answer to why some people do poorly in school, yet seem to do very well in life overall (materially and emotionally speaking). The ability to find happiness is something worth teaching to people, if it can be taught. I honestly don't know if it can be. Certainly the ancients believed a good, moral life could be achieved through instruction, as the sheer number of writings on that topic they left behind clearly indicate, but then they also had a lot of curious ideas about the nature of reality as we know it. I think it's definitely worth considering reordering the priority of our education toward "poorly defined" questions, at least in part. The real difficulty will be finding people "qualified" to teach these "lessons".

Specifically, I don't think there is any evidence that happiness comes from having "solved" problems in your life. It is well-known that winning the lottery doesn't change happiness -- you get happier for a short period, but then people seem to re-normalize to the new wealth level. Other changes in life circumstances seem similar.

Happiness as a transitory emotion certainly exists. But is happiness as a reportable statistic (like weight or income) meaningful? I think the null hypothesis should be "no". It isn't clear what we are measuring, or what it means in terms of our lives. If I report that I am happy, there is some notion that it is durable and meaningful, but three hours later, I may think about my relationship with my estranged kid and be feeling blue.

I don't think "happiness" has any meaning beyond "the emotions I feel this moment", which are inevitably a reflection of "what I have been thinking about in preceding moments". If I am working on an engineering problem and come to a satisfying solution, am I "happier" than I will be when thinking of my ex-wife?

As local "emotional weather", it's meaningful. As a reportable statistic, it's garbage.

Regardless of whether that is true or not, the author of the article takes direct aim at him for believing such a "conspiracy". Not only that, the OP also takes some personal shots at John Sununu and Bobby Fischer for their personal beliefs also.

I guess when you are smart as the author(Adam Mastroianni) and know everything there is to know about EVERYTHING because you have read it on CNN, you can pass judgment on other people like Langan, Fischer and Sununu for their beliefs because you know better than them, and you know for a fact that their beliefs are dumb and nonsensical because you read it somewhere and that is fact.

The OP seems to feel vindicated that someone who believes in a conspiracy theory is actually dumb and that actually intelligence tests mean nothing anymore and are not a relevant metric we should be using. Instead we should be using his Grandma as a baseline because she can raise a family and that, is all the intelligence we need. So shutup and talk to his grandma and get some wisdom.

It's difficult to take the OP seriously when he resorts to denouncing certain people as idiots for believing in non-mainstream accepted theories of certain historical events.

Was that really necessary to trash these people?

Happiness is such a vague concept that it's hard to measure. It's hard to imagine why something like being good at <insert arbitrary field of expertise here> would translate directly into living a happy life when most people's lives revolves around other things.

If you're smart then you're probably in a field that has infinite opportunities and paths available. If you're not, you've probably landed in the niche that works nicely for you.

The former's potential is near infinite, the latter is pretty damn close to their endgame and happy to repeat till retirement.

Sidebar I dislike the term smart, I make no intentional judgements in this comment in regards to intelligence or lack of in comparison to career choice. I know plenty of people who have been called smart (including myself under protest) who are absolute doofuses outside of their field haha. Smart might as well just mean specialised in something that took more than 4 years to learn.

Even despite trying to be super delicate there.. actual smarts vs not smarts (normal definition) is probably similar. Smart folks have more potential to live up to.

Bp's skirt the line betwen well defined and ill defined questions: there is no general rule you can follow to always solve it, but the answer can be trivially checked. I'm sure there is data on whether the ability to solve BPs is correlated with IQ, I assume so. It would be interesting if it was not, or only weakly.

[1] https://www.foundalis.com/res/diss_research.html

2. You learn something new every day.

3. Every day you have less bliss.

Either way, if joy and happiness is the goal, than a lot of adults are morons measured against trying to do that. We isolate ourselves, allow stigma and bias to push our choices, and ultimately worry so much about happiness that we do a poor job being happy.

Being intelligent[0], I can see more solutions to my problems than most, but I can also see more problems that need solving. And I choose to work on the hardest problems I can manage.

Dogs are not known for their intellect, and can be made incredibly happy just by the appearance of their favourite person (who may be a human or another dog). Anyone who expects dogs to be anxious about global warming, AI alignment, or the thermodynamic heat death of the universe, has probably overestimated them.

[0] any comment which contains claims of this type must contain at least one unfixed tupo or autocorrupt error, it's traditional.

I could move to Hawaii, teach surf lessons, live in a shack, and smoke weed all day. That would probably make me “happy”. But what the hell is the point?

Driven people aren’t happy. Sometimes they aren’t even sad. They’re just driven. How are you going to fix problems if you look around and see no problems?

That's not all. Smart people are also more perceptive to problems, they identify more of them, and solving one problem is never enough. Ergo they can't ever be happy as in "content" (which is what all those 'happiness' self-report studies measure), in fact as time goes by they should get increasingly depressed by identifying more problems. Ignorance is often a bliss.

I'm not going to address the condescending tone, but is it possible that for the grandma what otherwise seems like a poorly defined problem is actually pretty well defined because of exposure and the experience that comes from living a long life?

But beyond good audio, I have ambitions that don't have anything to do with having good audio. In fact I reject happiness, I find it a weakness to pursue it, it's the easy way out.

Being smart and knowing how to make smart decisions are different.

Being smart is the sword. Wisdom is swordmanship.

All of which is an aside -- I doubt it has bearing on finding happiness. It's more a critique of the way the paper wants to frame the problem.

It's generally a mix of them who lead to happiness, if that even exists

Lack of happiness isn’t relegated only to “smart people”.

My observation: managing stress related to ever growing amount of responsibilities (as comes with age), finances, and spouse can have a disproportionate impact on one’s happiness. None of which are tied to intelligence.

But I think I find that second assumption hard to justify.

Thanks for the thought pattern about "well-defined" vs. "ill-defined" intelligences.

Hell if I know, Right now is the best time to focus on personal lives and relationships or all this mass bs will never let you be happy... None of it matters for us..

Many people eventually give up thinking about things too much and give up to various forms of hedonism, but that's not real happiness. When it happens after 40s it's called a 'mid life crisis', I don't think it has a name when it happens earlier, but fundamentally it's the same thing.

Real happiness would require advanced transhumanism or even more (ie. uploading) - without it, we are all trapped only being able to imagine perfection.

Ctrl-F, appears about 2/3rds down the article. Could have come around a bit quicker :-)

1:18 "For an abundance of wisdom brings an abundance of frustration,

So that whoever increases knowledge increases pain."

Most things labelled smart these days are not.

Happy (one of my least favorite words) seems to mean passive contentment in the modern context -- a recipe for getting nothing accomplished.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/happy "characterized by a dazed irresponsible state" a punch-happy boxer

That definition seems to fit the 'happy' people pretty well.

Old adages sometimes have the answers; in this case "ignorance is bliss".

I prefer the idea that not everyone has to be intelligent, or that intelligence is not in fact correlated with "goodness" or "selfesteem" because it makes understanding people like Elon Musk a lot easier. It also makes understanding the self a lot easier when in fact strengths in one area do not correlate to strengths in another area.

I think the author is skipping a step in their logic.

Happiness doesn't come from succeeding in your goals. This seems childishly naive, like "if only I got that promotion then I'd be happy". "If only I had a better car then I'd be happy". No… you wouldn't.

The author's thesis that (tl;dr) "IQ tests only measure ability to pass IQ tests" completely disregards just about all research on the topic of intelligence and success, and the actual correlation between success in poorly defined problems and IQ tests.

It's not that "IQ test scoring" defines an intelligence scale. It's that it's strongly correlated with success.

So whatever intelligence is, IQ tests are strongly correlated with it.

But success, or intelligence, is not happiness.

A person with Down's syndrome can be very happy, but there is no "therefore is more intelligent than the Mensa member successfully running a multinational conglomerate" or the next Einstein, even if they are happier.

So this article is not "A new way to think about brainpower", but an old and tired disproved one.

Bill Gates seems to be doing quite well on the happiness front.

Smallpox, yes. Polio, unfortunately, no, as evidenced by the current anti-vaxxer polio outbreak in New York.

Also our ability to locate and live among the people with which we’d be most successful and happy.

I think this gets to the meat and potatoes of something I've been thinking about after reading some Marcuse[1] recently. I think our whole idea of IQ, at least popularly, revolves around how well someone's able to succeed capitalistically. It's all about how Productive someone is, or their productive capabilities. Earlier in the article the author wrote:

> 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? ... All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier. I think there’s an important lesson here: if solving a bunch of well-defined problems did not make our predecessors happier, it probably won’t make us happier, either.

Implying I suppose that we got smarter but not happier, which is a surprising conclusion from someone that was so careful throughout the article to point out the racist and unscientific history and basis for much of what makes an IQ. Are we smarter? I don't know. Are we happier? No, we know we aren't, and I don't think it's because we're smarter, I think it's because we're poorer, and doing things that hurt us. How can a species who have Curiosity built in, and a evolutionary strategy utterly dependent on community building and society skills such as communication and tool building, be happy in an increasingly isolated, repetitive society? Our needs and wants have been coopted. Marcuse wrote:

> The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment...

We've been reduced to consumers and producers. No wonder we're sad. Like the blog author wrote:

> So if you’re really looking for a transformative change in your happiness, you might be better off reading something ancient. The great thinkers of the distant past seemed obsessed with figuring out how to live good lives: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, even up through Thoreau and Vivekananda. But at some point, this kind of stuff apparently fell out of fashion.

I always wonder why that kind of thinking fell out of fashion. Why did I find myself arguing with a college educated person a few days back about why cutting off the hands of thieves is bad? We've got a couple thousand years of work done here and we've spent it mostly, it seems, making fantastic technologies that indisputably make our lives better, safer, more comfortable, and longer, but I wonder if we're not spending as much energy as we should on these "hard to define" problems? To call back to the first paragraph I quoted, are we spending enough time venerating and learning from grandmas who know how to build and hold together a community? That seems like some core, important intelligence that we should be taking notes on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse

> Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitols is not going to help you solve them.

Stupid people.

We as society shouldn't focus so much on being „happy“. Happiness by itself is not worthwhile. What are you going to tell on your deathbed and how will your relatives remember you? Oh, he never did anything, but he seemed happy all the time!

At that point, the question is just "why aren't people happier". I doubt theres any one answer, but a lot of the responses in this thread seem to point to some of the possible reasons.

Superior human cognitive ability is a merely an instrument of male territorial aggression which was subject to a fisherian runaway sexual selection process beginning around australopithecus and terminating with the advent of civilization. This process accelerated, jerked, snapped, crackled, and popped because superior human cognition has a side effect of enabling humans to more effectively extract resources from their habitat.

To even ask the op's question is to presume some utility or value for superior individual cognitive ability. It isn't meaningful, useful, special, or advantageous. An outright stupid human is perfectly capable of achieving the resources, relationships, habits, and social standing among peers necessary to be reliably content.

If anything, the gifted man is burdened by going through life with the false conviction that his life and ideas matter more because of some trait he possesses which is altogether vestigial in the modern world.