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….

You just sound like a misanthrope. If you’re so smart, why are you surrounding yourself with stupid people? Is it possible you’re not as smart as you think, and in fact, just as fallible as the rest of us?

I recently encountered someone who spoke like this and I researched what might be the issue.

I came across narcissism. The idea that you’re smarter than everyone else. Comes from a grandiose sense of self importance. But the truth is most people are smarter than you in some ways and less smart in others, but you’re unable to see it because you’re in this black and white mode where preserving your ego relies on you being the smart guy amongst the idiots.

It’s very common in tech to see this. Maybe because we were all exceptional at maths when we were young and got the idea that meant we were super smart and this compensated for our nerdiness.

I worked with a bunch of physicists and every single one of them was smarter than me at maths and physics, I wasn’t even close. But they sometimes talked about politics and current affairs, which I’m very well read in. I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked at how little they knew and how overconfident they were.

None of those folks were narcissists, thankfully they were lovely people, but for sure it highlighted how poor people were at judging their own expertise in an area.

It’s so easy to dismiss people, criticising is easy, and so hard to see just how stupid you can be yourself.

my whole life in a nutshell. except for when i worked at fb and reddit in the early days. and to some extent AWS in the early days.

Perhaps you are miserable because you are reinforcing your brain to only look for the flaws in others?

> Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?