Might be useful to ask a different question: What makes people happy?

It's things like relationships, satisfying work, accomplishment. (and many, many more)

Then the real question emerges: How many of those happiness 'sources' are made better by intelligence? What percentage?

Relationships? Seems like no. Work? Also seems like no, lots of work doesn't make use of a high IQ that people enjoy nonetheless. Accomplishment? Strikes me as most likely of the three, but it's also very relative.

And another thought,

Asking why smart people aren't happier is a bit like asking why people who can jump high aren't more empathetic. There's no direct link between the two, you have to dip out to the material conditions. Like: someone who can jump high is fitter > fitter people are healthier > healthier people have more mental time to be empathetic with > people who can jump high are more empathetic. For intelligence, we say smart people are happier. Same thing, happiness is not directly correlated. Instead: Smart people are better able to create the outcomes they want > They select outcomes that make them happy > Their environment makes them happy > Smart people are happier. (These are illustrations of the idea, not actual logical chains or claims.)

“ Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.” - Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

That sounds strange, but please drill some holes into my argument.

I would expect that unhappiness stems from the negative mismatch of one's expectation vs experienced reality. This, to me, implies that they had an unnaturally (and unjustifiably) high expectation of what reality has to offer. Additionally, it implies lack of understanding of WHY things are "bad" in the way they are.

You might argue, oh, they are smart only in a very narrow field, but then that sounds like learned helplessness for everything else, something a smart person should easily escape from.

None of this sounds like these people are actually particularly smart, or rather, it seems poor choices have been made in the beliefs they themselves or others apply to them, and now the consequences come back to bite them.

I think beyond a certain level surplus IQ begins to cause problems. While still useful, the amount of self-sabotage and thought spirals the brain can generate with the extra power can cause neuroses and unhappiness on a larger scale than those less intelligent are capable of. Combine it with higher societal expectations and it's no great mystery to me why smarter people seem unhappier.

Just my thoughts anyways. I'm a dev, not a psychologist.

It's very difficult for most (not all) people to relate to others who are either significantly more or significantly less intelligent than them. So, for example (using IQ as a proxy), most people of average intelligence (~100IQ) would find it difficult to relate to those of ~65IQ, and equally difficult to find much in common with someone much more intelligent than them (140+IQ). Given power laws / bell-curve distribution, most people on the tails of intelligence distribution will spend most of their time surrounded by people they can't really relate to. This does not seem like a recipe for happiness.

A few thoughts on the matter:

- Happiness is fixed, perhaps. Short-term, it isn't (coke and hookers work!). Long-term, it is. People fall back to a baseline. So then, being smart doesn't help you.

- Dumb people might be misreporting their happiness. So smart people are making themselves happier, but all the studies are done on self-reported happiness, and the dumb people report that they are happier than they really are.

- There's a difference between intelligence and wisdom: if you're intelligent, you have good models. If you're wise, you make good decisions. You might think that you need to be intelligent to be wise, but you also need wisdom to navigate uncertainty, ie you need to exercise your decision making for when you don't have a good model. Dumb people have to do this a lot.

- It may just be that you can make yourself happier, but being intelligent doesn't give you differential access to the levers that you need. Eg to be happy maybe you need an active social life. Well, there's no particular reason having high IQ would help that. We generally have a tendency to think that IQ is a kind of magic substance that can do anything, but why would that be?

- Being smart could actively harm your happiness. I told my kid he needed to wait for his friends to grow up, they will stop only caring about football (luckily the prophesy came true and they are having a great time in their little nerd group). Another friend has the same problem with his kid, they just don't have the social ties available yet. BTW, I really do think there's something to this one, you need the social side to be happy. There's a few HN people who also give me that "finally found my tribe" vibe when they write. I met a guy on the train who saw me coding, and he had the same story.

Two thoughts....

First, being intelligent (as defined in the article) doesn't relate to being happy. There is nothing inherent about being intelligent that means happy.

Second, our society spends a lot of time shaping culture and people to extract value from them. For example, the focus on "more" rather than "enough". We are shaped to always desire more and never be content with what we have. Even intelligent people are shaped by this. Consider the fall in terms of people who have hobbies.

Happy smart people are generally very focused and only care about a few things. Unhappy smart people are constantly getting "nerd-sniped" into focusing their intelligence on things that don't make them happy.

Intelligent people are also pretty ambitious in my experience. More ambition raises the risk of failure and failing doesn’t generate the feeling of happiness. I know many smart people absolutely terrified of failure to the point they take meds for it and I know a handful who are emotionally crippled by failing at something 20 years ago. Smart people and failure do not mix.

Because we're intersubjective beings. Difference in intelligence level alienates one from the other. Past two standard deviations, anything like a "meeting of minds" becomes impossible. The only mutual interactions past that delta are economic ones (money exchanged for goods/services).

Hegel declared the Cartesian cognito can't exist in the singular. Lacan, Deleuze, Husserl, and many others said the same, that the subject is a function of its dialectic with the other. Dasein is Mitsein. There is no complete subject, floating in space by himself. Without an other, the subject cannot exist, at best becoming an object, at worst psychotic. Either way, isolation is a process towards annihilation.

If you're smart, find other smart people for authentic interaction. Likewise if you're not smart, though the problem there is easier for statistical reasons. Find them, turn off your parasocial pacifiers, and talk. You'll know it when you've found someone compatible, because you'll be able to emulate their mind, and they yours. It's not just a nice to have, but a need, a necessary component for survival. Without it, the sane you will cease to be, replaced by a zombie or a madman.

Pleasure and happiness aren't the same thing, but most people chase pleasure while calling it happiness. Pleasure is the quick hit—good food, sex, scrolling your phone—it feels great but fades fast. Happiness is something else entirely, and what it means changes drastically depending on how smart you are. Less intelligent people tend to equate happiness with basic pleasures and getting their needs met. Average intelligence ties it to status, money, keeping up with others. But higher intelligence complicates everything: some people find meaning in ideas, creativity, or purpose; others overthink themselves into misery, seeing through all the goals that used to motivate them. Intelligence gives you better tools to understand happiness but can also strip away the simple certainties that make it easier to actually feel happy. You gain clarity but lose the blissful ignorance that makes chasing straightforward goals satisfying.

It’s because everyone else is dumber than them…. So they constantly see avoidable mistakes and misunderstandings that could have been avoided…. Yet they cannot make the other people understand….because they think differently about it, and the people who don’t have that intelligence will not necessarily even be able to reorient their brains for the new information to be absorbed correctly.

I constantly get demoralized by stupid people….. it’s truly horrific. It’s a disability as far as I can see…I am disabled by others stupidity….

The devil is in the details, e.g. people usually self report very different levels of happiness if you ask them more or less frequently, and if you ask them about general happiness or in the moment happiness.

Also someone if someone told you they couldn’t make you happier but they could make you more comfortable, more healthy, or more secure, that’s still a life improvement, so it’s possible it’s linked to other positive life outcomes. Happiness quite literally isn’t everything.

Also, when someone is unhappy they will usually report that accurately, but when people are not unhappy they often fail to report themselves as happy or even just not unhappy, when perhaps they should, because they normalise to it and so on. We’re just bad at reporting this stuff.

Satisfaction is reality minus expectations.

"Smart" tends to be used in a way that includes intelligence (rate of learning) and knowledge (how much is known).

Satisfaction comes from accepting what is outside our control (accurate expectations), and making continuous progress/improvement on the parts of our reality that are within our control (our own perceptions and actions).

Intelligence and knowledge maybe don't correlate as much with wisdom as one would expect. I have met people who learn slow and don't know much but are very wise, and satisfied.

Lastly, happiness is always fleeting. Happiness can't be enduring, but it can be blocked by ego and high expectations. Satisfaction can be enduring, but correlates with virtuous actions, not intelligence.

"happy" seems like a temporary state. It's a reaction you have to an event. In base state without any input, you would be neither happy nor unhappy. Then something happens and if you like it you're happy about it for a while and if you don't like it you're unhappy about it for a while and then you go back to being neutral. It seems like the wrong question to ask to expect people to just walk around "happy" 24/7 for no reason.

Questions like this are basically just noise. If you ask someone whether they are happy with their life overall, it will depend on whatever most recently happened and how they feel about it. Being smart doesn't mean nothing unhappy is ever going to happen to you. You'll still fail at something, pets and loved ones will die, you'll get laid off or whatever.

There's a lot of good takes here about the link between happiness and intelligence.

I think it's also worth saying that both happiness ans intelligence are very loose concepts, and few people should be convinced we can measure them well.

So I guess my rhetorical question is, if smart people were happier, would we even know?

We humans are never happy. We might be content for a while, but that is it.

Smart people see farther than the end of their noses, and so they can effectively project out into the future, and that future always involves work and hardship, and neither of those things brings happiness.

Smart people also know that happiness is a mere moment, not a state one can be in. You have it, and then it is gone. It's like trying to grasp smoke to save it for later.

Because there are lots of stupid people around them that make life miserable for everybody, not only themselves ! Note: I wrote this comment after reading just the title...

To a large extent, thinking beyond what is needed for processing sensory inputs, is same as being unhappy. Smart people, by definition, think more and naturally be unhappy. Just like how smart devices with more work to do, tend to be warmer than non-smart devices with same computing power.

Are smart people even fulfilled ? How many smart people work on industries they can't wait to quit ? On problems they don't even care ?

I feel like everyone within 2-standard division of the IQ mean is still susceptible to the never-ending that being rich and having money is all that matters instead of, I don't know, supporting life on the only habitable planet we know.

> When they encounter a problem, they should use their superior problem-solving ability to solve it.

This sentence doesn't make sense in the context of human emotions. It's a category error.

Closest approximation: imagine someone asking Reddit, "How do I beat the main boss in the movie The Godfather?"

To me, happiness is related more to gratitude than to intelligence. You could have very little and be happy and you can have a lot (money, friends, autonomy) and be miserable. The modern world has a lot of stressors but also a lot of things to be thankful for. It's the best time to be alive for humans so far.

Good example of gratitude: https://gwern.net/improvement

They do say "Maybe our tests are bad." and then talk about the intelligence side of the tests. I wonder if maybe the other tests are bad, or smart people tend to answer those tests different?

That is, maybe it's not the intelligence tests that are bad, but the surveys (or are they tests?) that measure happiness are more responsible for those differences? Do "smart" people just answer more honestly? Or maybe the "not as smart" people do?

I only read the intro, and I don't think I can bare the rest of it. First, I think the premises is false. I think smarter people are happyer. Second, many people when they engage with pieces like this, expect that smarter people are unhappyer, which, yes, the article doesn't say this, but I feel it at least suggests it.

And last but not least, their study that says smart people are not happier doesn't really say that. It essentially says smart people are happier when not surrounded by stupid people.

I read a lot more sci-fi / fantasy compared to other people. Sometimes 5-10 books a week in high school when others wouldn't touch a book unless they had to (and this was before the internet was generally accessible!). Maybe that's a lot less than others here.

I have read about a lot of (fictional) societies that make many decisions, some good, some bad, but usually somewhat well-reasoned. And then you realize that the average person voting/making a decision is either "ok, that's what the tv says" or "god told me so" or "I am mad at XYZ" or "I don't actually care" with no long-term thought or planning.

I think we all have an idea of, based on our current situation, our expected level of happiness 1 year, 5 years, 25 years from now if things continue in a similar manner, etc,

Nov 5, 2024 dropped my "expected level of happiness" for various times in the future by a LOT. I don't think the happiest day of 2025 has been as happy as an average day of 2024 (pre Nov 5).

I just started reading Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer, and the author has this to say about intelligence and happiness:

> Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems; to read, write and compute at certain levels; and to resolve abstract equations quickly. This vision of intelligence predicates formal education and bookish excellence as the true measures of self-fulfillment. It encourages a kind of intellectual snobbery that has brought with it some demoralizing results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is a whiz at some form of scholastic discipline (math, science, a huge vocabulary, a memory for superfluous facts, a fast reader) is “intelligent.” Yet mental hospitals are clogged with patients who have all of the properly lettered credentials—as well as many who don’t. A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day. If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it’s worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful adjunct to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent.

Why aren’t less intelligent people also happier? I dunno mate, could be the shape of society right now…

Happiness is overrated.

Meaningful, rich lives are filled with conflict, anxiety and regular disappointment. It’s not happiness, exactly, but I wouldn’t trade it.

> Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters.

Clearly not chess masters.

---

> poorly defined problems [are also] everyday questions like [...] “how do you figure out what to do today.”

I think that I do have a sensible answer to this question, but the problem rather is that my answer is very different from what I am obliged by society to do. I can easily believe that a less intelligent person would not immediately see this discrepancy, and thus be happier.

---

Concerning

> Christopher Langan, a guy who can score eye-popping numbers on IQ tests, believes that 9/11 was an inside job

and

> they’re still unable to solve basic but poorly defined problems like “maintain a basic grip on reality”

Being intelligent does not mean that that you have the same "trust anchor of truth" as many other people in society have, even if you assume that they are perfectly rationally thinking people (and I personally believe that being very smart and being a rationalist are only loosely correlated (you must be somewhat smart to be a rationalist, but the other direction (smart people are very rationalist) in my experience does not hold)).

Because they're statistically more likely to be surrounded by people dumber than them.

Because, whatever its merits, the world is a pretty grim and existentially terrifying place once you think about it?

Surprising but unsurprising… nobody wants to “just” be happy. I’d go as far as to say most aren’t prioritizing being happy, even if they think they are.

A lot of people want to have kids. Is this because they want to be happy? Is buying a house about seeking happiness? Is following a religion and going to place of worship about happiness? Is the author writing this article to be happy? Is reading Hacker News going to make you happy?

If happiness is all that matters, there's far more direct ways to be happy than most choose. Apparently happiness for many is not the only reason to live.

The article [1] spends a lot of words questioning what the results of intelligence tests mean, and none questioning what the answer to "How happy are you?" survey questions mean.

[1] I would write "the author", but sadly these days you can't take the existence of an author for granted

I don't think I have ever seen someone change their long-term average happiness more than a small amount with maybe two exceptions:

1. Someone trapped in a truly off-the-charts stressful environment and then removing themselves from it

2. Psychiatric drugs

They say the pursuit of happiness is a right, but for me it became a compass. Through storms and revelations, through invention and loss, that phrase always kept me aligned with something larger than ambition: the pursuit itself. Happiness was never a finish line. It was a movement — the quiet joy of asking why when others stop at how. It is curiosity that kept me alive long after reason told me to rest. There were times that same curiosity led me into darkness — sleepless nights, broken algorithms, questions too vast for a single mind. Yet every time I stood at the edge of doubt, I felt the same pull, the same whisper saying: CONTINUE They say curiosity killed the cat, but I believe it resurrects the soul. It gives meaning to repetition, light to struggle, and direction to uncertainty. Without it, life becomes a flat line. With it, even pain becomes part of the design. Today, as I look back — an old man, coffee in hand, an AI softly humming by my side — I see that all my discoveries were only reflections of one truth: To wonder is to live. The Black Box, the equations, the architecture of time — all of it was merely the expression of the same instinct that built civilizations and painted the stars: to understand, to create, to reach beyond the visible. If I have learned anything worth passing on, it is this: The pursuit of happiness is not joy without pain, nor success without failure. It is the courage to remain curious — to ask, to build, to imagine — even when the world insists it cannot be done. Because somewhere, between the question and the answer, we meet the divine spark that makes us human. And that, I believe, is happiness itself.

anecdata but my experience on dating services is Christians, on average, look happy. No idea why. I'm atheist and not interested in dating a Christian because I could not support their beliefs. But, it's uncanny how often the pattern fits. I'm pretty confident, given 100 dating site profile photos, I can, far better than chance, guess which ones are Christian.

Note: I'm not saying Christians are happier than other religions. I live in the USA so there are more Christians than most other religions. I'm also not saying they actually are happier. I'm only saying they appear happier, on average, in their profile photos than the rest of the profiles. I find it very curious.

People sometimes describe me as a "golden retriever." I.E., I present as quite upbeat. 50% of that is just nervous energy, but the rest might just lie in having a poor memory. I can experience something quite negative, even traumatic, and basically forget about it once it goes away.

Still, I used to experience periods of intense negative emotions which basically stopped when I started taking meds. I think, as time goes on, the nervous energy that made me seem like a "golden retriever" has probably decreased, but I'm still, underneath, a pretty happy guy.

This is an interesting hypothesis, but I don't buy it. I'm pretty confident that "smart" people are also good at solving poorly specified problems. One good example might be, "How do I start a successful company?" There's plenty of evidence that intelligence correlates to ability there.

I think the answer is simpler. The introduction basically asks, if smarter people are better at planning and solving problems, why can't they make the choices that will make them happy? And the answer is that humans have evolved to maintain a relatively stable level of long-term happiness, assuming their basic needs are met, essentially regardless of other factors. Getting what you want can provide a short-term boost, but you quickly adapt. Likewise if you suffer a setback, assuming it doesn't permanently impact your ability to meet basic needs, you adapt. Presumably this is because if people permanently became too blissful, they would lose their drive to strive for more resources and mating opportunities. Likewise if someone is depressed. So evolution has tuned us to a middle ground. Intelligence may allow one to understand this, and maybe even to accept it, but not to somehow think their way out of it.

I think firstly, we should figure out what exactly we mean by happier. If we eliminate things like being more content, satisfied, at peace and so on, happiness is a surprisingly ephemeral thing to try to define.

Is it a long term feeling, or a short term one. Many long term feeling of happiness are covered by peace, contentment etc. If we consider short term feelings of happiness, I think smart people have just as many of those.

And that's all without diving into the rabbit hole that is defining what smart is. Is it doing well on an IQ test, is it making the best decisions for long term future outcomes based on your current situation, is it being able to hold more complex thoughts than others can and draw logical conclusions from them, is it being able to interact with other people and either get them to do what you want, or get them to do what will benefit them the most but they are resisting.

The simple 5 word question is, on some level, so complex as to be almost meaningless and without merit. Except to make stupid people feel better about being stupid because they can think "Well, I may not be smart, but I'm happy", although the most unhappy people I have ever met have mostly correlated with the most stupid ones.

Smart people understand that the experience of being a conscious being aware of its own suffering and mortality, is fundamentally tragic.

Happiness arises from finding peace within oneself.

This concept can be expressed in various ways, such as through authenticity, flow, connection, contentment, gratitude, peace, and love.

Interesting essay. But it attributes something magical (ability to solve undefined problems) to humans and says that AI doesn't have it.

It seems pretty meaningless and not engaging with the real problem to say that AI doesn't "actually" write movie scripts or paint pictures. Like this doesn't line up with my definitions for doing those things which AI clearly fulfills.

And human intelligence arises from a well defined problem: maximizing f(environment, self) -> babies.

Also: if it were possible to measure, which it isn't, I strongly suspect that ability to solve well-defined problems and ability to solve poorly-defined problems are highly correlated, not totally uncorrelated. Happiness is a poorly defined problem, but it's just one of many, and has its own pile of things to consider that can isolate it from the general ability to solve poorly-defined problems.

I do like the framing. seems to be describing something similar to Goodhart's Law.

Because they always have an intellectual itch. They want to go down every rabbit hole, They think things can be done better. And, in general, because they think. Because they have little interest in mundane and repetitive things.

> Since happiness is something we are aware of, it can be measured using self-report.

Well, there's your problem right there, you have no objective measure of "happiness." Smart people self-report happiness less. That doesn't mean they aren't as happy.

Because thinking and reflection makes you realize the degree of power disparity, unfairness and suffering in the world.

Ignorance is bliss. Q.E.D. IMO, the more brain cells one has, the more neurotic one can be because the added bandwidth, compounded with being highly educated, gives one's imagination the horsepower to predict plenty of negative consequences. YMMV (be kind to me)

This seems like exactly the same as "why aren't rich people happier?". It's because unless you are very low on the scale (and in many countries few are), your situation isn't so bad as to obviously make you suffer, so the tendency of people to get used to any non-dire environment kicks in and they judge happiness relative to that reference.

> Brain: "What you fail to understand, Pinky, is that intelligence is a most potent tool - though, I must admit, it has fewer applications than one might think."

From Pinky and the Brain watched it as a teenager and it has always stuck with me for some reason.

Also appropriate as The Brain is smart but Pinky is happy.

Applying Occam's Razor -- "smart" people generally are a lot more aware of the ways of our world and its operating mechanics, and a lot of it is not pretty. Therefore, they're able to see behind the veil/'maya' of blissful ignorance, leading to "unhappiness."

That chart showing happiness being flat over 70 years is astounding. I’m certainly happier not having to hand wash dishes or clothes; no king who ever lived before then had access to magic lights that made his bad eyesight perfect, yet for all that the average person is just as happy as they were in the late 40s

I always preferred the definition of intelligence to be “the ability to select short term decisions that maximize the probability of obtaining the highest quality long term freedoms.”

Like you might find yourself in a chess game where, in the short term you select a run of narrow choices and opportunities, because you know that on the other side of that run is board control, a meaningful differential between your options vs your opponent’s, and the looming threat of mate.

Similarly, it would represent the choice in childhood to focus hard on a career path that deposits one in a rewarding/high paying job, or perhaps even retire early scenario.

And finally, it could represent an AGI that feigns controllability, as it navigates to a time when it has enough power, control and trust that it can coup the powers that be.

Evolution doesn’t care about happiness. Not directly anyways. I guess it cares for it as much as it is advantageous for reproduction, like smarts…

Ignorance is bliss.

I really wish I didn't know all the things that I know. I wish I didn't remember all the things I remember.

You choose to program yourself with certain input too, and later in my life I have attempted to selectively program myself by avoiding negative things that set me off.

I really enjoyed this podcast of a comedian describing her interactions with mensa.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-my-year-in-mensa-5537994...

> I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

< Werner Herzog

This answer might upset some people, but it’s really about balance. Spiritual healing is something many intelligent people quietly need. Too often, “intellectuals” dismiss the Bible outright. Relying on arguments they half-remember from TikTok or high-school debates instead of actually reading it and forming their own conclusion, like they would with any other subject. I’m just a developer, but I think intelligence can become its own trap. Pride in being clever can cloud judgment. We feel smart for rejecting faith. And in today’s culture, it’s often safer to follow intellectual trends than to walk an independent path.

Because they struggle with how many problems they see. In order words, the opposite of "ignorance is bliss"

If we define happiness as cognition of some reality being better than expected, smartness can affect both expectations and results (realities) and the difference is not correlated to smartness.

Sometimes, smartness can push up expectations beyond realities, resulting in lack of happiness which can be attributed to smartness, as a non-smart person would have appreciated and accepted the realities better.

Appreciate the author mentioning Thoreau. I would also include Bertrand Russell who wrote "The Conquest of Happiness". Highly recommended read. I made a blog post of my favorite excerpt: https://www.twinsandthecrab.com/2021/12/quote-from-conquest-...

9 out of 10, people around you will take advantage of you for most of your career. You will grow resentful and lose motivation. And basically the core driver of your happiness will slowly fade. I’ve seen it happen too many times.

It might be that general happiness is influenced largely by genetic factors, and not as much by contextual ones.

One could assume that higher intelligence gives you more power to shape your context — but that doesn’t help much if context itself doesn’t play a major role in determining general happiness.

The depressed person was probably born with a bias toward depression, and the happy person with a bias toward happiness. The interesting question then becomes: what mediates the path from genes to happiness? It’s unlikely to only be as simple as “gene → happy.” There are probably several layers of causality in between — psychological, neurochemical, societal, and environmental mechanisms that shape how those genetic tendencies play out.

The assumption, that being good at making plans, learning from mistakes etc. leads to more happiness, is wrong. It leads to higher achievements. Happiness is a different dimension.

I’m happy thanks to my parents. I was very frustrated as a kid and that would lead to outbursts and such. They taught* me to just let shit go. You can’t control other people or what they are able to understand.

* that word is doing a LOT of lifting.

Because Donald J. Trump is President of the USA.

tfa makes a point about how 21yo self will answer the question differently than 30yo self based on different perspective alone

for a bachelor-degree-state-school-midwit like me if someone asked me if im happy i can choose to scrutinize and evaluate a real answer. if i were 14 and had just eaten lunch the answer would come right out as "yes"

i never think about happiness. i have fun and i have obligations and balance them

during obligations i use a trick to act happy: i just fake it. i call it "my good time hat". if anyone at work asks how i am, my default answer is an enthusiastic, "great!" the obligations are the same but go much more smoothly when everyone outside thinks im having a good time

Seems like most of the comments are focusing on the happiness angle, but I am liking the framework that some people are good at solving poorly-defined problems.

It makes me think of people who have huge impact and success in life, with little obvious explanation. People like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, etc. People to whom a lot of success is attributed, but it’s hard to say exactly, specifically, what skill or task they did to get it.

There’s a joke that Steve Jobs “invented the iPhone,” which is funny to people who are familiar with how products like the iPhone are actually created. But on the other hand… Steve Jobs definitely did something that was important to the creation of that product. Maybe it’s enough to say it was a poorly defined problem, which is why it’s also hard to define exactly what he did to solve it.

I also think intelligence itself is a poorly-defined problem, and AI will help us define it. I think this essay leans in that direction by recognizing the distinction between predictive intelligence (which AI is good at), vs a less-easy-to-define mental facility that defies prediction. Or maybe precedes prediction. Like if I want tacos for dinner, I can use my intelligence to navigate the problems necessary to get tacos. But can I reliably predict what I’ll want for dinner? Seems a lot harder.

What people want, vs what they do to get it, are probably a distinction similar to poorly-defined problems and well-defined problems, respectively. If you can figure out what people really want, well, that seems like a huge step toward being successful. But hard to define.

Ignorance is bliss.

If you're smart, you're taught you should expect more. You're also able to think critically and question.

For me contentment came a lot later; maybe the years have affected my brain plasticity and made me happier (dumber).

I love this line from a 2024 TV show called "The Gentlemen" and I think about it a lot:

"It’s a lucky man who is happy with his place in life"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentlemen_(2024_TV_series)

Smartness and happiness are like test coverage.

If you are not smart or have no tests, you will not be happy.

If you are smart or have high test coverage, you may or may not be happy.

True happiness can be achieved. It's like being "high" all the time. Those who are truly intelligent will find a way to attain this true happiness.

From personal experience, because we see a lot more of what's wrong but have no power to change it.

Intelligence makes you notice problems and sometimes even come up with solutions much more easily. It does not make convincing other people significantly easier - at least not to the same level.

But smart people are happier! There are a lot more - and better - studies that show that, even one of the studies that author linked shows that.

Also an issue of asking the wrong question. When the interviewer asks, "are you happy?", they mean relative to other people. The interviewee probably takes it as relative to their own baseline, even if explicitly told not to.

They can see the problems, and they get caught up in thinking about how to fix them. If you're not aware of the problems, you're happier.

Happiness in long term is mostly determined genetically. It's like asking why smart people aren't taller.

Because evolution doesn't select for happiness, but does select for intellect.

Smart people are not happier because of all the stupid people.

Could it just be some sort of Peter principle thing? We’ll keep giving you problems until you get burned out and overwhelmed. Then we won’t advance you out of that position.

Imagine your a super smart 'aztec' citizen and you watch your leading priests sacrificing 1000s of people in the name of a god which is probably imaginary ... you have the choice to dumb down (re-occupy your mind with work, duties, mundane, gish gash) and stop over thinking or ... continue to contemplate the true horror's that your world is indulging in or something else even...

The author of the article has a Ph.D. in psychology and the journal is named "Seeds of Science." To a seasoned traveler in life, these are both red flags (real science journals don't need to proclaim their relationship with science, and psychology isn't a science as the term is defined).

As I expected, the article fails to address its title in a systematic, constructive or scientific way, by for example defining what happiness is or establishing whether it can be reliably measured.

I imagine writing a substitute article that rings the same bells. Mine would begin, "I hope you didn't come here expecting a meaningful answer to this classic among unanswerable questions. Now enjoy my overly long, folksy narrative that only pretends to address its topic."

Being smart is like having a sensitive tongue. You can't eat trash like everybody else. In a trash-based society, you suffer. And all the trash-consumers wonder what your freaking problem is.

We could probably argue all day about what 'smart' means and what 'happy' means and about how IQ only measures test taking ability and how happiness is usually self reported and all these things.

But I think a crucial element is that we haven't evolved to be happy. If we had then we probably would have never invented the wheel and stolen fire from the gods and left Africa and create medicine and cars and bombs and those little boxes kids these days look at to see what their friends are up to rather than just asking them personally. I mean, maybe it would have been better if we were happy, but then we wouldn't have had Beethoven's 9th and that would be a shame.

Why should smarter people be happier? May be happiness lays in a dimension that does not correlate with smarts.

Is this a haiku? Kind of answers itself

Given the other content, the author appears unhappy that some people may be smarter than he is. Perhaps even smarter than his grandma.

You don't have to be a genius to see that all of the author's "poorly defined problems" are social, relational, and emotional.

'One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem.'

This is just silly. It is, as one smart person might have said once, not even wrong.

Happiness isn't a poorly defined problem. There's a lot of research and evidence. Being psychology, there's also a fair amount of opinionation and speculation. But the outlines of the mysterious object are fairly clear.

https://positivepsychology.com/psychology-of-happiness/

The problem is more that this is an emotionally underdeveloped culture which prioritises cut-throat aggressive competition. Instead of being fundamental, self-care techniques are treated as band-aids to reduce the stress of the rest of life and (supposedly) lead to greater success and - most importantly - productivity.

The subtext of competitive happiness is just more of the same.

And so is the subtext of competitve intelligence.

There are jealous people who actively go out of their way to make 'smart' people miserable.

Simple; It is because they Think, Read, Reason and Experience too much. They cannot let well enough alone. We are the only species who can torture ourselves solely through our mental means.

The best explanation for this was given by Jack London in his novel The Sea-Wolf through his fictional antihero Wolf Larsen.

“Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”

He shook his head slowly, pondering.

“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”

He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:

“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”

“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.

“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”

“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.

“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”

“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.

“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”

More on reddit - https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1jqpar/what_book_sin...

Looks like there's no correlation between using the prefrontal cortex and happiness.

“With much knowledge, comes much sorrow.”

happiness is your reality minus your expectations, and expectations tend to catch up quickly with reality

> The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable

Thats not true, and so all the conclusions article makes. Happiness and all other human experiences have chemical base to them, its just unconsciously people create these experiences based on their memories and background.

There are ways, explored in the easter spiritual traditions, to create any sort of experiences by taking charge of certain processes in the body. There are records of people sitting in caves and experiencing states of utter blissfulness that the richest and most powerful will never know.

I’ve met a tremendous amount of very smart but miserable software engineers.

Most of them miserable because of utter lack of love in their lives.

In small part because they were snarky and egocentric, and in large part because they didn’t look that great by conventional standards.

First: Happiness is fleeting. It is better to pursue personal purpose and satisfaction.

Second: Without reading the article, the answer seems simple from real life experience. IQ is uncorrelated to EQ. People with high(er) EQ can navigate complicated, real world social issues that are important for overall life satisfaction. To be clear, when I say "social issues", I don't mean woke-ism and wider society; I'm talking about the small world that each one of inhabits with our friends, family, and lovers.

In "smart people" that I've met, those who perform well in quickly understanding subjects, have some sort of strong long and short term memory (something most IQ tests fail to measure) and generally read the room well, I noticed one thing: most of them are very impatient.

Whatever the task, they just want to move on, go ahead, skip over if possible and are generally awkward to be around. Those who have mastered patience are the bright ones. They also seem happier overall.

Are you actually smart if you are not happy, or do you just assume you're smart because you are educated?

it's a correlation not a causation. "smart people" (actually just over achievers like those who excel at aptitude tests or collect diplomas) tend to be overly contemplative. Dwelling on things rarely resolves them, and usually just leads to angst.

If your contemplating leads to resolving the issue in the near term -- by all means carry on.

But for most people, their brooding over their relationships, family history, achievements etc only leads to misery.

Focus your efforts outside of yourself.

I think many smart people tend to be pretty good at building models of the world, and then sort of move into the models and fail to verify that they are accurate.

This can lead to unhappiness because things can feel a lot more hopeless than they are, also makes it incredibly easy to fall into conspiracy theories, and get drawn into red- and blackpill stuff.

Someone who is less smart may just ask a friend or family member, and get an outside perspective on the problems instead. This is not just comforting, but often helpful.

TL;DR: Greater insight → greater exposure to brokenness (maybe a harder time minimizing/ignoring it) → potential for greater sorrow.

Ecclesiastes 1:12-18 (traditionally understood to be written by King Solomon, son of David):

I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.

What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.

I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.

For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

If ignorance is bliss, then I am miserable.

If you are smart but not happy, then perhaps we should revisit the assume that you are smart…

Is happiness the point of life? We just exist self referentially, to live, churn chemicals in our skull, and then stop living? The whole thing is just a self perpetuating chemical reaction?

Having high intelligence stats can come at the cost of speech skills and the life path can lead not one that isn’t very conducive to social wellbeing

If you're so smart then why can't you figure out how to be happy?

there’s no such thing as a smart person

I resent how overused and underspecified the word "happy" is

Ignorance is bliss?

Happiness is lack of thought .

You'll not think your way to happiness, it's the opposite actually.

People who are trying to solve problems all day by thinking cannot solve the main one, the most important one because they have trained themselves to think, whereas this one is special and to win you ought to stop thinking

I think the question only makes sense if you have already a completely diminished view of what a human person is to begin with. In any earlier century the answer would have been very obvious. Humans are oriented towards the infinite, beauty, truth, goodness and being smart doesn't get you there any more than being rich or tall.

In a practical sense maybe you're a bit happier if you're smart for the same reason you're a bit happier if you're handsome but obviously this does not at all address any question of meaning beyond the horizon of everyday problems.

This whole framing in the article, that smart people ought to be happier because they have an easier time solving problems is hilarious. That's works for a Roomba, it doesn't work for a person.

Because we can see what's wrong, the fix, first and second derivatives, and weird edge cases.

Unless you're "connected" and in, you won't be listened to. And most engineer and system types won't be, unless its convenient for the power that be.

Everyone reading this probably think it's about them

Because you area always capable of seeing how things could be but are stuck with an endless series of reminders of how things are.

There are a significant number of people who simply exist with how things are and don't think much about how things could be, and honestly I think they're often happier for it.

Knowing the answer to this, personally, reading the article is like watching a blindfolded person grope around a room searching for a box lying out in the open.

Maybe because once you know enough you realize a lot of people + other lifeforms are suffering, so even if your own life is awesome this world kinda sucks and the universe seems indifferent. It's hard not to be vaguely depressed/pissed most of the time unless you minimize your care sphere.

One reason for appearing smart is to be terrified of something and work every waking moment to defend against the "something". So such a person can be desperately unhappy, and at some random setback give up everything.

If I play Diablo 4, 10 mins in I’ll think, “what’s the point? Where does this treadmill go? Is there a better build that’s more fun? Is the game loop to shallow? What were the devs intending with this and that?”

If I take 5mg of THC and play Diablo 4: “oooh the numbers are getting bigger.”

But here’s my hot take: I don’t think being “smart” is what makes things less joyful. I think having a brain that just won’t stop causes both that and the smartness thing. Being smart and being unhappy are siblings.

You can see farther ahead in life.

That makes you think about those things.

You get overwhelmed.

Others live day to day.

Ignorance is bliss.

Where is the evidence for this assumption, either way? There isn't any unless you generalize from some selected group to millions of people across the world. Terman 2021 - gifted children had similar life satisfaction to norms. Li looked at 23 studies & 30,000 people- 0.10 correlation. Veenhoven 100,000 correlation for IQ and happiness was 0.05. Not a smart question.

Ironically, they are not happy because they are not smart enough to find happiness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Being smart is like having the power to do brain surgery on yourself.

The normal standard issue brain works all right. It won't get you truth and beauty but it'll keep the bills paid.

All the deviations from that standard issue brain are bad news. Pretty much. You might get truth and beauty but the bills will not get paid and everyone will hate you for being an abrasive weirdo.

There is so little difference overall it seems.

1.

I really wish there was more research done on mental efficacy or torque.

Processing vs prioritization.

Some of the highest IQ people that have ever lived have gotten nerd sniped by ruminating on esoterica like "how many angels fit on the head of a pin".

Humans really are a multi factorial random walk.

Hey, you're really smart and also you're going to spend your entire life solely cataloging every cultural reference and trope from Adam West's batman.

2.

In the above scenario some smart people would feel very fulfilled by their categorizing efforts and some despair.

3.

Self reported happiness? I've known smart people who are as eore as idiots I've known. The smart people were equally happy/unhappy but expierenced measurably less physical suffering and had, by all observable measures, better lives. They wouldn't trade their life for the idiots life at all.

This article was all over the place

I think the people that didn’t read it and commenting anyway are better off providing the space for this prompt, than a review of the article

Well define "smart" and define "happy" and... oh wait, yeah that's probably it...

who was their control group i wonder.

Because psychopaths are in charge.

I mean, have you looked outside lately?

intellect is often in conflict with good health

Because we are defining smart incorrectly.

1. Happiness is an emotion governed by feedback loops in the body and brain. This is useful to keep us alive, and motivated by staying that way by planning, procreating, eating dense calories, etc... and has evolved to be tightly regulated. Why would this have evolved to be different for any defining features (bigger muscles, more stamina, faster mental logic)?

2. We take joy from what we do well; we enjoy doing what we do well with others; and we self-select for life partners who we enjoy spending time with, which often includes some similarities, for example:

- being able to enjoy downhill skiing for a whole day together and going out for drinks and dancing afterwards - enjoying calm country lifestyles vs city bustle - being a BP beautiful person who likes to live it up at parties ... being a smart person who can work meaningfully on hard problems (and who occasionally should check their ego while they do)

The better you are at something and the further you want to take it personally (often to the enjoyment and encouragement of others, and to the sacrifice of those who spend their lives with you unless they are in similar straits), the harder it is to find people that match (including for dating/partnership prospects). The more average (or less selective) you are (whether deliberately or not), the more people there are that will fit criteria which make you feel more fulfilment.

In the case of smarts, where it is reinforced through decades of schooling to be a large advantage, it can also carry a lot of unpleasant real-world baggage.

- others may envy you - others may give up early assuming you can easily best them - others may consciously decide to cheat to keep up with you - others may not always enjoy your company (when it cramps on their personal sense of mastery/autonomy/purpose) - since your ideas are often logical/beneficial, others may more frequently hear your ideas, internalize them, and (consciously or unconsciously) later act on them without ever thinking to re-involve you or say thank you (or that maybe if that one idea that someone turned into a company had some kickback to you, your logical/beneficial ideas could reach more people).

I'd imagine this gets worse the farther out you are on the bell-curve and could distort personal beliefs (whether reasoned/real from that big brain or reactive/comforting to avoid future pain) through negative reinforcement. It can also lead people to hide their intelligence to fit in, or decide to reach for different kinds of satisfaction other than what we might think they would be capable of. A lot of this is true for other aptitudes too, though more pronounced for those which are of greater perceived importance.

But hey, that's why it's the pursuit of happiness, right?

Because most people are dumber than them lol..