The problem I'm having, dear reader, is that I don't understand why I seem to be <i>the only</i> happy person on the Internet.
My twitter feed collectively has depression. Hacker News is a crowd that seems to feel okay on the best of days, when it doesn't realize it has burnout.<p>I feel a little better than neutral when I'm at baseline. On most days, I don't need a reason to smile. I just like to smile because things are good.
I didn't sprinkle this post with happy smileys to illustrate my point (for your sake!) but I would have if I were writing to myself.<p>I wish I could help other people. The point of this is not "look at me my life is great". I just don't know what to do.
I can compare myself to my ex-girlfriend. We both face problems in life, but she is more consistently happy than I am.
I think the main reason is that I was always more ambitions, and more eager to take risks, and this lead to quite drastic changes in my life. Which were good for my career, but which destroyed my social life in the process. Also I abandoned all other interests I had such as hobbies or sports, to single mindedly pursue my goals.
My ex on the other hand has consistently worked on building an ever expanding social circle. She is not so ambition and spends considerably more time tending to her social circle. And when she is alone she has her hobbies that she has been cultivating over many years.
At the end of the day, I go to sleep thinking about the day when everything will turn out great and I will be happy. And she goes to sleep with fresh memories of her amazing day out with her friends. Of course she's happier.<p>It's not some big mystery. It's just that nerds like me tend to neglect to tend to the simple but important aspects of life. Now at 30, I'm starting the hard process of trying to build some semblance of a normal life, after all but abandoning my ambitions.
There is a strong negative correlation observed in all cultures of intelligence and happiness.<p>The more intelligent you are the <i>less likely</i> you are to be happy.<p>This is most extremely observed in the case of the 14 year old child prodigy who committed suicide despite no pressure from his parents to succeed: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/us/one-shot-ends-the-life-of-a-prodigy-who-appeared-to-be-ordinary.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/us/one-shot-ends-the-life...</a>
> Like everything else, there is some truth to this. Generally, the more intelligent you are, the more you can see behind the façade of everyday life being easy or safe. You see all the risks and downsides—the calamities that await us.<p>Maybe it's just me, but when I read something like this I just think of a teenager trying to be edgy. Less intelligent people (assuming they're still at a functional IQ) can just as much get a depressed view on society or live. They're actually at a disadvantage, since they're most likely in a less paying position and have less options to change something.<p>Now, I can also see the counter-point that being smart puts a bit of pressure on you to actually archive something and it's easy to feel like you wasted yourself. But having a massively bad view on society summarized by a few sentences does not mean you're smart, and neither does excessive cynicism - at least to me it just seems like someone is desperately trying to look smart.
Really strange article. It felt like someone writing "I've got cheese, so I like the colour red". The cause effect isn't clear to me, at all, and the article isn't nearly well written enough to expand on anything meaningfully. It's a false dichotomy, or at least a not well explained argument.<p>IMO the living in the moment thing mentioned elsewhere is probably the best known connection to happiness that has broad "proof" around it, but again I'm not convinced this has anything to do with intelligence.<p>If we're gonna get deep about it I suppose you could argue that "beginner's mind" is what is required to assume states of now-ness, and at a stretch you could say that a beginner's mind could be equated with a stupid mind...but really, it's not like that at all. Meditative states, flow states, just being content - these can be attained by anyone, irrespective of intelligence.
It took me about 30 years of to figure out something: being happy is a choice. Just because I felt a twinge of fear, anger, sadness or loneliness didn't mean I had to choose to dwell on it. I could just shrug and go back to being happy. I could choose to do things that make me happy, instead of... whatever that thing I was "obliged" to do. After that realization, my life got a lot better.
How can we use our intelligence to be more happy (in a sense of being ok, content, at peace and able to constructively deal with any situation life throws at us)?<p>In my experience, being happy or not, mostly depends on my emotional responses to any given situation. For example, reading about highly accomplished people here on HN can make me feel envious and unsatisfied with my performance.<p>Intelligence makes it possible to understand facts like:<p>- There is a huge range of possible emotional responses to a single situation. Some are beneficial for me and some are not.<p>- How I react now is simply a habit. It is not something hard-coded in the situation itself. Instead of envy, I can be happy for these successful people, rejoice in their success. Feel inspired by their example. Doing that is being kind to myself. The more we work with our emotions, the more flexible they become. There is a lot of freedom here.<p>- The perceived space where my life is happening can be expanded by noticing that what I focus on (myself, my work, my family, my home...) is not the whole reality. There are other people, other countries, other beliefs, all the nature... and all of that is my world.<p>- Other people are just like me in wanting to be happy and avoiding pain. My happiness is not more important than their - but also not less. We are all doing our best. A kind of feeling of closeness comes through this insight.<p>Any of these facts will make our life better. And all are discovered through intelligent exploration, through using our smartness.
I think it's a lot about very intelligent people have a lot of potential and can't develop and use it at full capacity to improve the world. So they have a meaningless feeling of their life.
> You can be happy and smart—it’s just going to take more work.<p>> If you’re smart, you can figure out how to be healthy within your genetic constraints and how to be wealthy within your environmental constraints.<p>Dumb and unhappy here (maybe? not sure, probably because dumb).<p>I think there's a lot of us in the middle that can do <i>some</i> things reasonably well enough to be happy, but not <i>all</i> the things. It's hard to be happy if you're smart enough to know you have toxic traits or unhealthy habits that need to be addressed, but you don't have the time or energy to address them.<p>I might be able to do a career and hit the gym, but not able to have any hobbies or enjoy social events. When I say "not able to", I mean "may cause depression and burnout that could lead to trouble maintaining employment if attempted and failed".<p>Other people might be able to do a career, have side projects, and network at all the important events, but can't stop smoking cigarettes and chugging energy drinks. I see this all the time.<p>People seem to generally alternate between goal-seeking behavior and coping mechanisms for damage caused by the former.<p>Real people, perhaps dumb people, might be smart enough to know that happiness is attainable, but dumb enough to be incapable of precisely juggling all of a modern life in a way that feels successful.<p>I can see the right answers to lots of things, but trying to keep up with all of it is exhausting.
Happiness' biggest killer is thinking about the future / dwelling on the past. I think smart people do this a lot more, which may explain the correlation.<p>From Buddha to Eckhart Tolle almost every book and teaching about happiness boils down to living in the present. But I guess it's much easier said than done because our minds like to wander (evolution to anticipate dangers perhaps?) and living in the present is like keeping your balance on a stationary bicycle with gravity always working against you.<p>But fwiw we do get glimpses of true happiness say when you're like in the zone and totally immersed in the task at hand that you're thinking of nothing else and just happy (doing what you're doing).
It is rubish that intelligence causes unhappiness. The more intelligent you are the more of this amazing universe you can understand and therefore appreciate... There is so much joy, so much beauty in this life. Art, music, sex with someone you love, the wonder of understanding or creating, and intelligence gets in the way not one iota.<p>Honestly, speaking only in cynical observations is associated with only middling intelligence, or people who have decided to build their identity around some misguided sense of what intelligence looks like, rather than those who actually are intelligent.<p>Think of Einstein, Feyman, Von Neuman, they all knew how to enjoy life. Intelligence is a privilege, and one should appreciate it. Bemoaning ones intelligence, is as ugly and clueless as a richman complaining to the poor about how he has too much freedom. If one is inteligent one should apreciate ones privilege, and think how to use it to help others
I’ve been happier since I started working on my own business full time. The key is to be able to control my own time.<p>If you can figure out a way to be able to control your time as much as possible, you’ll likely be happy.<p>What people really want is not infinite amount of money. It’s actually ~100% control of their own time .
Intelligence is multidimensional. You can be a great mental calculator and at the same time have a very hard time memorizing random data, or learning new languages.<p>The capacity to be happy, or to become happy, involves several of those dimensions. Which dimensions exactly, depend on your circumstances.<p>One I think is important for everyone is not about being “aware of the state of the world”, like the OP says. On the contrary, it’s self-awareness: knowing what’s going on inside your own head.
Being happy is the wrong goal.<p>What is intelligence anyway? We don't know. Not really. We have an idea of what we associate with intelligent behavior but we don't really have a good theory of intelligence that we can use to create intelligence.<p>The reason I think happiness is the wrong goal is because it's a by product of the right goal. Not the goal itself. That which fulfills you should reward you with a feeling of happiness.<p>For example, my children give me happiness when they get to roam and be children. But when I must discipline my kids they get sad and I get sad. There's an error here in my parenting that I'm trying to minimize. It's difficult but it requires me to not take it on myself to shoulder their burdens. They have to work through most of their issues on their own and I cannot protect them from the world. Trying to shield them from it will probably make everyone unhappy.<p>My work makes me feel important but it doesn't make me feel happy. Having a good working relationship with my co-workers rewards me with happiness and meaning.<p>I don't aim for happiness but I'm quite happy. Not all the time but when I care about the right things I do feel genuinely happy.
Odd discussion. I think happiness is much simpler but perhaps deeper than they're alluding to here. There's a bit to happiness which is immediate - a factor of the present. There's longer term happiness, but there's something of a discount function to happiness in the future or past to the present. (This will vary person to person.)<p>Fundamentally, happiness is about desires/expectations meeting reality in agreement.<p>A human's also a complex being capable of being happy about some things while upset/angry about others and so on. A human also ages, so definitely happiness means something different across those ages. A new born baby, for instance, will largely use cries to communicate more than adult, for I hope obvious reasons. But the takeaway, I think, is that happiness is when expectations or needs are met by reality.<p>Anyway, I refute this claim that "smarts" have some inherent relationship to how much happiness a person should have for the above reasons. Happiness is a feeling. "Smarts" is probably how efficient your brain is at using the accumulated facts within it. Quite obviously, those are independent things.
"Generally, the more intelligent you are, the more you can see behind the façade of everyday life being easy or safe."<p>There are different types of intelligence. Some people are smart and happy because they don't think about how unsafe the world/situation/etc is. Also possible that people adopt a mindset that embraces risk.
Your happiness' biggest killer is thinking about the future / dwelling on the past. I think smart people do this a lot more, which may explain the correlation.<p>From Buddha to Eckhart Tolle to Dalai lama almost every book and teaching about happiness boils down to living in the present. But I guess it's much easier said than done because our minds always like to wonder (evolution to anticipate dangers perhaps?) and living in the present is like keeping your balance on a stationary bicycle with gravity always working against you.<p>But fwiw we do get glimpses of true happiness say when you're like in the zone and totally immersed at the task at hand that you're thinking of nothing else and just happy (doing what you're doing).
Interesting points but I think it basically doesn't come down to intelligence but rather 1) Do you like what you do for a living 2) Are you happy with the life you have outside the workplace<p>If one of these are chaotic, the other one can't keep you happy for long
I’ve always thought the search for happiness is framed incorrectly from the start. Happiness is a short term emotional state. It comes from essentially mundane activities (more specifically, your mental reaction to them) and isn’t the consequence of a larger vision or long-term project in the way “being wealthy” is. Being happy is more like feeling full after eating a meal; while you can structure your life in such a way that you eat well on a regular basis, it’s the <i>eating</i> that makes you feel full, not the long-term plan of always having good food around.
My personal theory: intelligent people might become more interested in the internal world than the external world. But they are still emotionally and physically connected to that external world, so there is a feeling of not belonging here.<p>In other words, intelligent people might become addicted to thinking. Meaning that the rest of their life suffers. For example, intelligent people might be more interested in solving tough problems, ignoring the business side, talking to people, making money and building a normal life.
Whenever I feel sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. So they say on television.
Bluntly: If you’re so smart, then why are you conflating smartness with happiness.
IMO the two things happen in different hemispheres. You can’t reason yourself into happiness. You can compartmentalize-away unhappiness— for a time. And surprisingly unsophisticated things make you happy. It doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t need to, because “making sense” is not any place along the axis of happy-unhappy.
I didn't read the article, but ignorance is bliss.<p>There are a lot of things to be unhappy about in this world that no amount of individual intelligence can fix. Climate change, war, disease, poverty. Even if my life is pretty great, relatively speaking, the fact that our society sucks is the primary source of my unhappiness.<p>If I was less well informed, I wouldn't know about all the terrible things going on, and would probably be much happier. But because I know and care, that's just how it is.
Satisfaction is the state of being happy even when you're doing nothing.<p>Pleasure is the state of being happy because of something you're actively doing.<p>Satisfaction usually has a relatively low ceiling but a very high floor compared to pleasure. Satisfaction is also usually gained through the sacrifice of pleasure.<p>My experience is that smart people often try to maximize satisfaction, at the cost of <i>all</i> of the pleasure.<p>I believe you need both to live an enjoyable life. It's hard to strike a balance.
I don’t agree with this article at all. I have known plenty of not very smart people who live unhappy lives because they don’t have the mental skills needed to fix the problems they have. And the happiest people I know are very smart. They actively find ways to remove the pain/friction in their lives that stops them from being happy. They also tends to be honest with themselves about what needs improving. And do the work to fix it.
Makes sense. The smarter you are, the more easily you can find solutions to problems given constraints.<p>Presumably, someone who is otherwise smart but is also unhappy persistently is smart enough to notice things that then lead to unhappiness but not smart enough to fix them given the constraints of their life.<p>That is, there is a valley of unhappiness as you trend upwards in intelligence.
Smart people are rarely happy. That is the curse of the smart. And I think there is a reason for that, smart people are always looking for problems to solve in a smart way :) The only time smart people are happy is when they have solved a problem; that lasts for a brief moment and then they are on to solving the next problem.<p>Just my 2cents hypothesis :)
My father told me, when I was about twelve years old, that being dissatisfied with life was a sign of intelligence and imagination. He said that intelligent people can imagine how life could be better than it is. I mostly think that’s bs (who can’t imagine a better life?), but I agree that imagination reveals degrees of dissatisfaction.
I think my big problem has always been boredom. I was bored in school, and I'm bored at work because nothing ever is particularly challenging. No days off for good behavior.<p>I've been coping by delving into intellectually stimulating hobbies, but that comes at the expense of other areas of my life. There are only so many hours in the day.
Happiness is a second-order derivative; this is why it is so unstable and fleeting.<p>Joy is the first-order derivative of good things happening, or more precisely, your brain noticing improvement.<p>The surest way to maintain lifetime happiness would be to start it in the shittiest possible conditions and see them steadily improving over your lifetime.
I might be less happy than some other people, because I tend to overthink things and spend a lot of time "in my head", but I am at <i>my</i> most happy when I work (on things I care about), when I engage with that inner drive to explore and create.<p>Flow or (focus mode) is my "ignorance is bliss" equivalent.
I think one part of the problem is being "too clever by half": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369</a>
There are troublemakers in school that are suffering from learning issues. But there are also "rebels" that are intelligent - yet it's usually not a good outcome for them.<p>Stanislaw Lem handles these kind of themes in his books. A person, living his life, suddenly gets a revelation and sees the reality for what it is - all that he believed was really a sham.<p>Sure, maybe some people wish they never had this disillusionment. But if it's happened, what do you do then? How do you work, outside or within, the "sham" system?
Hey, I am smart and I am happy<p>But in honestly I believe this to be a case where intelligence which is not pruned and cared for correctly like a bonsai tree will lead you to dark paths<p>To educate oneself in how the world works, why violence is used, what's the global context of things and understanding that this is a matter of systems pinging against each other will go a long way<p>It is sort of better angels of out nature but without the deluded liberalism than pinkers book had<p>As recommendations read Bismark biographies and life, Kissinger, theucydides (my favorite passage is the Melos debate) , Mark fisher, nick land, Marcus Aurelius, confusius, vedas, Adam curtis<p>I feel that the most important thing that one can do, is to take good care of one's mental ecology, and that first comes with taking care of the mental-soil where your ideas will sprout from, learn from the errors of others, we have lots of past wise people whom have made a lot of errors in the past (or things that they thought of errors but weren't so!!), learn from that<p>The world is rough, don't take it personal because it is not, you are just a tiny spec whom might have happened to land in a specific time and place, be grateful of having been born where you have and not as a poor peasant during the 30 years war or wherever<p>Anyhow have a nice evening guys
interesting to see that after 2 hours, theres no mention of those things that our grandparents (or their parents) would consider important to happiness. And indeed the only comment which mentions "religion" in the abstract is greyed out.<p>A historian in the future will have lots to make say about our present time.<p>One might easily posit the idea that the rejection of the ideas of whats important to happiness from our ancestors might be a large part of the reason why there's unhappiness now.
I’ve noticed that smarter people are more likely to reject “traditional” things - religion, family, having roots in a home base, community things, etc. They also tend to be “terminally online” i.e. having a very rich and sustaining existence in digital spheres rather than the real world.<p>It is entirely possible to have a fulfilling and happy life rejecting traditional human things and embracing virtual things. It’s just significantly harder.
Who says 'happiness' is _the_ thing to want?<p>To me, happiness is a peripheral - something that might or might not occur - I don't really care. I would rather be based in truth and do what I think is right, than live an illusory but happy life.<p>And being smart is about #10 of the list of attributes I value too! (Honesty, bravery, curiosity, authenticity are certainly ones that I value more.)
Being smart isn't enough to be happy. You also need a sense of freedom and purpose.<p>If you're out of touch with yourself and aren't free, you will not find a genuine purpose in your life; your whole life will be about channeling the will of those who have power over you.
There is actually a good book with the exact same title.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Youre-Smart-Why-Arent-Happy/dp/B01DYFUVRO/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Youre-Smart-Why-Arent-Happy/dp/B01DYF...</a>
> How do you nudge yourself in that direction on a perpetual basis, as opposed to visiting it by stunning your mind into submission and silence?
>
>Subscribe to Naval<p>Not sure if this was deliberate, but I'd love to know the conversion rate of this CTA.
Pretty slight article.<p>In my opinion, of course things are going to happen that are beyond your control, but on an everyday basis, being happy or unhappy is a choice. You can choose to dwell on negative thoughts or you can choose to dwell on positive ones.
Why does Naval strike me as someone who has a combination of arrogance and judgment in his every interaction? He sounds like a weird mashup of Alan Watts meets Osho meets Vinod Khosla character...
Is intelligence correlated with happiness? If there is a correlation, would it be nonlinear?<p>Some of the most miserable folk I've met are genuinely stupid people whose every endeavour fails.
Because intelligence, knowledge and wisdom lead one to the most painful and inevitable truths of existence, which often lead to despair and hopelessness.
Stupid people are happier then smart people.<p>Look at kids. Kids are generally stupider than adults. They're also happier. So if anything that proves that being smart does not make you happy and it hints at the possibility that being stupid actually makes you happy.
I’m continuously happy when left to my own devices. When I’m mad or sad it’s because of people. This has led me to be somewhat of a hermit, but it is genuinely a far more enjoyable life.