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.

Not true at all: 1) more intelligent people are happier (author of the blogpost cherrypicked 2 studies, one of which in fact showed that iq is positively correlated with hapiness. 2) IQ negatively correlates with neuroticism. 3) In fact IQ correlates positively with almost every positive facet of human experience - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2212794120

In the Bay Area, I feel surrounded by such people. They solve imaginary problems to get a promotion. But they are competing with thousands of other, equally smart people, to also get promotions. So it's non-stop change for no reason, and wasting resources.

This has been a somewhat popular line of thought in internet circles for a while and I'm inclined to agree. I also believe the threshold past which these problems begin to crop up may be considerably lower than commonly thought… One doesn't need to be a chart topper to fall into these cognitive patterns.

That said, it probably doesn't need to be this way and I would suggest that the root issue lies with the way that modern society is structured. It's not really optimizing for happiness on any level, which is greatly exacerbated when one has the mental acuity to zoom out and see the bigger picture.

I feel like high intelligence is crippling itself, the more intelligent you are and the more issues to solve you find and the more conscious of your environment you become, awaking you to new sets of information and again, new sets of issues.

This overflow might contribute to less happiness as a result.

Same thing, not a psychologist, just some thoughts.

I believe this was the overarching theme of forest gump

I agree. I know a guy who is just brilliantly smart but he can get caught up in ruminating or "thought spirals" as you say and is constantly imagining all the ways things can go wrong and is therefore afraid to take any risks or start anything new.

You are confusing medium intelligence with high intelligence I fear.

Truly intelligent people won't be getting into doom spirals and self-sabotage. They will - obviously - use their superior intelligence to avoid that situation (or mitigate it before it becomes an issue), but the merely middling folks get trapped by it and cannot work their way out of it because they're just not intelligent enough to realise it is happening and/or work out how to stop it.

Good luck.

Or, you could just ask "Why aren't people happy?". I don't see how IQ could make you happier. Smart people are not as smart as they think, they usually perform better because they're overspecialized.

Now, emotional intelligence, that would greatly influece your happiness. The hurdles you're talking about are emotional, not intellectual.

Does an inability to inhibit the default mode network correlate with IQ?

> I think beyond a certain level surplus IQ begins to cause problems.

YES, with an emphasis on the idea of "surplus IQ". If you are similarly blessed with high EQ, great social skills, athletic talent, etc. - not much of a problem. Vs. if you're nothing special (or worse) in some of those other areas, while having a metaphorical Mjölnir in your IQ toolbox - Big Problems. "Solve it with IQ" becomes your go-to strategy in far too many situations, you tend let other skills type atrophy...and treating everything as a metaphorical nail really doesn't work well.

Perfect essay for ya:

https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah

Our horns got too big. What once was an advantage is now getting stuck in the tree branches.

Anecdotally, expectations and identity (through narcissism) do a lot of the lifting. When we see ourselves as "smart" while still being emotionally immature, then falling short of certain signals and accomplishments we project on that is thought to be tantamount to being a failure.

What should be impressed upon us far earlier is that our actions dictate our identity. If they are in harmony with your real desires, as opposed to surrogate desires, you'll be happier.

It's a double-edged sword.

A properly disciplined person is capable of great things according to the measure of his intellectual power and his discipline. However, without discipline, that extra horsepower can be a force multiplier for error, and more intricate rationalizations can make it easy to lodge yourself in a web of false justifications.

This is one reason why the ancients and the medievals always emphasized the importance of the virtues. Intelligence is just potential. What we want is knowledge and ultimately wisdom. But there is no wisdom without virtue. Without virtue, a man is deficient and corrupt. His intellect is darkened. His mental operations dishonest. His hold on reality deformed. Virtue is freedom; a man of vice is not free, but lorded over by each vice that wounds him and holds him hostage. His intellect is not free to operate properly. Good actions are strangled and stifled, because his intentions are corrupt, because his impure will cripples and twists the operations of his intellect, because his vices dominate him and cause disintegration.

Without virtue, we are but savages and scum.