I will speak from my experience. When I was younger, I considered myself very smart, and I was pretty unhappy. As I grew, I met people much smarter than me; I stopped seeing myself as "the smart" one, and now I am pretty happy.<p>It's not that I became happier because I became less smart; I became happier when I stopped thinking my value was based on my intelligence, so I stopped trying to be recognized by my intellect and started working on my mental health and building healthy relationships.
This really is a question of individualism vs collectivism. If you don't conform, you will be scorned. It's the world against you. And matters of being right or justified aren't relevant, it is merely the first-person point of view. For as long as you are exceptional (in all the wrong or good ways), other people will make your life hell. Most of politics as an example can be seen as a fight between the extremes against the middle, with the middle trying to defend the status quo.
I like this but find the dismissal of multiple intelligences pretty unconvincing. I'm amenable to the idea that IQ (and associated tests) measures some underlying `well-defined` problem solving ability (with each problem having other factors), but the 'poorly-defined' problems sure seem like multiple intelligences by another name.<p>In my experience, different poorly-defined problems have different shapes and how much skill a person can make progress on them depends on a lot of things. For example, it seems like problem of finding ways to make poorly-defined problems fit into a well-defined space ("engineering") and the poorly-defined problems of organizing groups of people into coalitions ("politics") draw on different sorts of intelligence. The author claims that this is often not tested (which is probably true) but the basic observation that unstructured problems are related to each other and different people solve different areas with consistent skill seems true to me.
Given that the purpose of a measure is to make predictions: IQ can be used to improve predictions of academic outcomes, whereas the multiple intelligences models are worse at this.<p>Whether or not there are multiple intelligences or not is an implementation detail unless knowledge of this has measurably lead to some better prediction.
Im not smart (maybe average), but a lot of my unhappiness starts from just having access to information. And then more I process the information, the more unhappy I become. Smarter people than me probably have more information and are able to process it faster, uncovering effects that are not readily perceived by normal folks like myself.
pretty sure if you're commenting on here then you're way above average. It's not a compliment, its just that you're misunderstanding how low the bar is.
I stopped viewing all news media companies five years ago. Real news will get to you pretty quickly by other means such as HN which I still frequent a couple of hours a week. Modern news is re-hashing even the trivial in the worst possible way and inviting the extreme idiots on both sides to fight it out in the comment section, I can honestly say I am missing nothing and still find myself informed and happier.
Same, I've learned if something is important enough I'll hear about it anyway
It is hard to abstain from news completely. The mainstream media is becoming increasingly like social media, feeding on shared sentiment and vague feelings of outrage.
Yes but very possible. I also did it during the latest once the latest election was decided.<p>Removed all news sites but also stopped looking at facebook, news on youtube, and the biggest one was reddit.<p>Reddit really affected me. It was so easy to read -> become angry -> engage.<p>I choose to be less informed to save my mental health, I know I'm way happier.
While my intelligence is ~ constant, my levels of happiness fluctuated during my life and now, at 48, I am maybe twice as happy as I was at 24. There is definitely an upward trend with me...<p>During the same period, I also absorbed a lot of information, including some ghastly one. And yet my overall feeling of well-being improved.<p>IDK what happened, I can at best describe it as if "someone slowly changed the lens I am using to view the world for a less cloudy one".<p>Maybe some sort of hormonal development. It seems to be outside my will, though. Just happened.
I think what you're describing is wisdom, as described in the Serenity Prayer:<p>"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Horrors beyond your comprehension are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix.
When you look into the void, the void looks back into you. When you start empirically testing the void, the void says "Hey, what are you doing, stop touching me there".
Related. Others?<p><i>Why aren't smart people happier?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824864">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824864</a> - Nov 2025 (622 comments)<p><i>Why aren't smart people happier?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409811">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409811</a> - Aug 2022 (494 comments)<p>(I left out some small threads that were neither smart nor happy)
Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity.<p>Or at least I am; I won't speak for everyone else.
Right there with you.<p>There's different flavors of stupidity. There's the "oh damn, why didn't I think of that first" and there's the smug "I did my own research and your evidence doesn't match by beliefs".
Stupidity in the sense of doing nothing good for themselves or anyone else, yeah. People are mostly a collection of local context clues about overly emotional nonsense.
Ugh. This analysis starts off a little interesting with its observation that "intelligence", as analyzed historically, tends to be about solving bounded-context problems (with a known right answer) rather than open-ended problems (D&D called this "wisdom", right?)<p>But it is lacking so, so, so much in explaining why smart people aren't happier or evaluating the premises of the question.<p>If my teenager gave me this analysis and question, I'd give them 8 more avenues to explore, none of which the article addresses:<p>1) Is intelligence Kahneman's "type 1 thinking" or "type 2"? Do people (including you) act on their thinking or their emotions? (Can/do you think smart + act dumb and end up happy?)<p>2) What does being happy have to do with having autonomy and control and purpose? (Existentialism)<p>3) What does happiness have to do with contentment and the scope of what one wants to control, ie ambition? Attachment? (Buddhism)<p>4) What does happiness have to do with one's overall outlook of being pessimistic or optimistic?<p>5) Is there some deeper insight why a widespread religious tradition such as the Judeo-Christian one has a creation story where where "knowledge of good and evil" is inherently problematic?<p>6) What does happiness have to do with dopamine and the timing or frequency of solving problems of small vs large size? What degree of problems need to be present for an intelligent problem-solver to be happy vs, say, bored, (example: Marvin the "brain the size of a planet" android in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, bored and depressed?)<p>7) What is the connection between happiness and benevolence, giving vs receiving? Relationships? Why?<p>8) Why does a socio-economic system based on money-maxxing intended to obtain happiness lead to oversupply which leads to demand-generation/creation/marketing which leads to unhappiness? And similarly leads to conflict and resulting unhappiness? Is there an inherent ying/yang dynamic to intelligence and happiness on a personal or socioeconomic systems level?<p>I do agree with the author that it's a question worth re-evaluating in an age of "Artificial Intelligence" promises.
When people talk about being happy (or not), I always wonder -- why does it matter? I don't expect to be happy, and I don't strive towards it. I DO strive towards making my life better in terms of engaging in enriching and rewarding experiences, spending time around people I care about, perhaps trying to ensure future stability to the degree I can, and generally growing as a person. Never do I consider the pursuit of "happiness". Interestingly this seems to kind of correlate with the premise of the post, where a lot of commonly-accepted definitions of "intelligence" often recognize only narrowly-defined scopes of intelligence, but not broad/overall multi-tiered general intelligence that translates to "having a good life".
It sounds like you're always in the pursuit of happiness, you just don't frame it that way. You are always trying to make your life better than it is, which either leads to less misery or more happiness. 2 sides of the same coin.
I think your objection may be to a narrower definition of happiness than what was used in the article. The article's measure is a global life evaluation that would be the product of the activities that you "DO strive towards".
Oh yeah, my initial objection is/was indeed to the seemingly-more-common definition of happiness that people often use, and then I did see that the author uses a broader scope which I agree with a lot more (insert thumbs-up emoji here) :)
I think the essay has the implicit assumption that if you're 'better' at doing things, you'll end up happier. Since intelligent people aren't happier, the conclusion becomes that intelligence is mostly only relevant to a subset of well-defined abstract problems that don't represent the real messy problems of life.<p>I think the reality of human happiness is that being in better material circumstances, or being better at solving problems practical or not, doesn't necessarily improve long term happiness.<p>Adaption to circumstances, the 'hedonic treadmill', means most people aren't going to obtain some very high level of happiness and sustain it indefinitely, regardless of station.
i’m sure everyone replying to this thread has a level headed and unbiased assessment of themselves
All these studies suggest loneliness makes you unhappy, however I feel happiest most when lonely and doing my thing and not with people. With people I just feel frustrated or weird, because I think so different than the others.
Being alone does not equal loneliness.<p>And merely being with people is not an antidote to loneliness.<p>Being alone and being lonely are distinct concepts.
Possibly you are conflating being alone to loneliness?
<i>Scientists Have a Fascinating Hypothesis About Why Smart People Should Spend Less Time With Friends</i><p><a href="https://www.rathbiotaclan.com/scientists-have-a-fascinating-hypothesis-about-why-smart-people-should-spend-less-time-with-friends/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rathbiotaclan.com/scientists-have-a-fascinating-...</a><p>I don't believe the evidence that this is based on, but if it is true I have a theory that sometimes applies to me. Your sweet, dumb friends have so many dumb problems that are fairly easy to solve that you run yourself ragged trying to solve all of them, and your success attracts more requests. Friends can start to seem like unpaid work unless you're playing dumb.
> 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?<p>One big outcome of this is being <i>alive</i> more, that doesn't really make you any happier. Also consider stuff like a growing global economy that helps with things like, well, not starting as many global-scale wars that decimate whole cities.<p>I also think there is a word for someone who is good at poorly defined problems. "Artist." If you define that very broadly and maybe throw in some religious type roles, community leaders, etc in there too, you have a whole group of people who are dedicating their whole life to this problem. But these are super ancient professions and it's not really surprising that we haven't got amazingly better at them recently. I mean, art from centuries ago is still incredible!
Obviously a lot of depression is genetic or due to some unfortunate life circumstance. It's got nothing to do with intelligence.<p>But what I've also noticed is that a lot of people with unbalanced lifestyles end up becoming depressed.<p>For example, they might have a habit of going to bed at weird inconsistent times, wake up late, eat junk food, not regularly exercise or go to the gym, etc.<p>Someone with that lifestyle is much more likely to become depressed compared to someone who sleeps 8 hours a night, wakes up at a reasonable time every morning (i.e. 5am - 8am), has a stable job, and exercises regularly.<p>Humans are built for routine. Drifting away from that is unnatural.
Have you thought about whether this is kind of backward? It is possible that having a certain genetic predisposition makes it easy or difficult to stick to a good routine.<p>I see this in myself: No matter what I do I find it very difficult to stick to one routine day after day after day. I just kind of get extremely bored with it quickly. I know my life would probably me noticeably better with more routine, but I'm just not wired that way.<p>I do have a lot of creativity, so maybe that's the price I have to pay for that.<p>Long story short: people are wired very differently for each other.
I think it’s a combination of:<p>1. “Smart” people tend to constantly see patterns others are missing. So they’re fretting about problems others are blissfully unaware about. Sometimes these “problems” matter and somethings they don’t.<p>2. Contrary to popular belief, the smartest people in the room typically despise being the smartest person in the room. They typically are starving for someone to challenge them, to debate them, for them to learn something from others. That lack of stimulation is typically depressing to a “smart” person.
I think these things are true for some people, but I think there's also a sampling bias when it comes to generalizing these things for the broader population of smart people.<p>IMHO even just the phrase "smartest person in the room" already frames the conversation in terms of stack ranking and some form of implicit value judgement on being smart, and this in turn opens to the door to all kinds of squishy emotional bias and self-identity issues that go well beyond any objective measure of smartness. In short, I think someone who even thinks in terms of "being the smartest person in the room" is likely to have their ego tied up in the self-perception of being smart, and thus more likely to feel the lack of intellectual stimulation you describe. Whereas I hypothesize there are many equally smart people who do NOT have their ego tied up in being smart, don't see the world this way, and simply don't show up in the data for smart people and their relative level of unhappiness.
> In short, I think someone who even thinks in terms of "being the smartest person in the room" is likely to have their ego tied up in the self-perception of being smart, and thus more likely to feel the lack of intellectual stimulation you describe.<p>Nah. I wouldn't even admit to being smart until I was nearly 40 (no matter what people said, or what I accomplished), and that's only because after taking an IQ test I decided that it was obnoxious and often insulting to other people to deny it. I still don't emotionally accept it, and I think a faithful watcher of "The 1% Club" since it came on would have probably raised their tested IQ a standard deviation. I'm always confused and lost in this world, struggling to understand, and screwing things up, and that's not my mental image of how intelligence should feel.<p>But when you get something, the rest of the people in the room don't, and you say that you're just an idiot, how do you think it makes them feel? I've been told how it makes people feel, in no uncertain terms.<p>It's better just to accept reality, and also not to let people make you feel guilty about your needs. I don't know if that's what you mean to be doing, but you're obviously trying to cast the need for intelligent people to have stimulation as some sort of morally-dubious personality flaw. It's unfair.
Generally I believe a person's baseline happiness is determined at birth.<p>Some people are just born happier than others.
I am not the smarter, but I believe that I am smart enough. My problem is that my mind overthinks all the possible scenarios that could happen. For example, now with AI, what happens if the AI replaces all jobs, are we going to all live happy lives doing nothing? or are we going to be all super poor with the top 1% living in closed cities?
Other people call me smart. I think I'm just hard working.<p>I read enough books to spot liars, and when people you built Idealistic trust with break it, you never leave your guard down.<p>No psychologist or psychology book can break it. They are just idiots. Or maybe they believe Plato's Noble lie is good for society. But once you see, you can't unsee.<p>Now everything in my life has ~0 trust but all supervision.<p>From politics to food safety to personal relationships, don't trust. Verify.
Because we are depressed by the realization of how stupid we are.<p>We aren't optimized for smart, for happy, or for truth - we are optimized for getting our genes into the next generation.
Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.
Smart doesn’t mean they are necessarily emotionally intelligent or mature. Emotionally intelligent people know how to regulate their emotions and not to lose sleep over factors that are out of their control. Everything happening in and around the world is not your problem or concern most people are just unhappy because they focus on negativity
We know that intelligence tests and tests in general can be impacted by motivation and potential monetary gains (the article brushes on that). Maybe they can also be impacted by the happiness and other emotional states of the test taker.
Intelligence is a slippery term, as plenty of smart folks have made dumb decisions. That said, I’ve noticed that many people who don’t understand why their choices are subpar tend to blame others, i.e. life happens <i>to</i> them. Someone more aware might internalize their failures. Plenty of mutations of this mechanism.
> Why aren't smart people happier?<p>I think any discussion on this topic should begin with answering "Why would one expect smart people to be happier?"
I think the essay does a really good job of examining that question, and concludes that you shouldn't. It does, however, start off by explaining why people tend to think that it should.
It’s even worse, the opposite is actually true (but it’s a slight effect).
This gets posted here often even though its a complete fantasy. The actual relationship between happiness and intelligence is well known to be the opposite. IQ correlates significantly with happiness.<p><a href="https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bjop.12039" rel="nofollow">https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/b...</a>
Why should being smart make you happy?
I live by "everything is grey". I am interestingly smart in some niche domains that I have a hard time communicating exists. I also insist on not fitting any template. Pretty dumb, right?
Maybe happy smart people know better than to spend all their time taking IQ tests and participating in psychological studies?
Likewise, rich people don't seem to be happier - sampling the few thousand people I have spoken to in my life.
The first comment on the blog has it.<p>Subjectively, personally, we can all decide for ourselves what purpose we live for, but the purpose of life as a phenomenon in the world is not to enjoy itself. It's to perpetuate itself. Stay alive long enough and win a competition for scarce resources needed to reproduce. Being largely freed from the tyranny of constant threats and true scarcity, humans can aspire for more, but we're still living creatures. When bears come down from the mountains to fight to the death for winner take all access to the pool of twelve available mates, they're not happy when they win. They mate and get back to it, rest a few months, then fatten up again and prepare for another year of fighting to the death, until they finally get old and lose to a younger, stronger competitor. That's the tale of thousands of generations of ancestors spilled into all of us, humanity included.<p>Even just look at specific highly successful humans. Take famously miserable, no friends Michael Jordan. Win every year, enjoy it for twenty seconds, then immediately get back to work, 14 hours in the gym every day, alienating everyone you ever meet, having no friends, only to win again and feel just as hollow. Why? Because genes and behaviors that make an animal that driven, to succeed at any and all cost, including their own wellbeing, is the basis of success at the only thing that actually matters to life itself, as opposed to any individual thinking creature.<p>He may or may not want to be that way. I'm a reasonably smart guy, nowhere near as driven or successful as Michael Jordan, but I still often wish I was less smart and less driven than I am. The logic of life dictates that we always want more. Nothing is ever good enough. It's why we're collectively miserable no matter how much abundance and wealth we collectively create, even among those who have more than 99% of the world. We can tell each other all the stories we want about the fairness of the distribution, convince yourself <i>your</i> misery is especially justified because you believe you'll be the first generation of humans ever to pay more for housing than your parents. It isn't that. You're not special. None of us are. Dissatisfaction and always wanting more are core to what makes life life.<p>Being smart probably makes you better at life, but being better at life is barely correlated with enjoying it, if at all.
Speaking only for myself: you can't be tortured by thoughts you're not having, and I, sadly, am having thoughts.
Or to put it differently: some people can easily ignore things others can not.
Likewise.<p>There's truth to the saying, "ignorance is bliss."
Because junk food and soda tastes good but we are smart an know it will make us fat and dead so we drink water and eat carrots.
Happiness is subjective, so that is the first obvious problem. Thee are probably a lot of smart people are are not as successful as they feel entitled to despite qualifications, and maybe this leads to feeling of inadequacy or resentment.
Maybe because they are not that smart? :)
"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher
Because we see how things fail, and why. And it's usually intentional incompetence and/or greed.<p>Both are fixable, but both require the person or system wants to fix it. So, it's usually not fixed.<p>Things like death "fixes" things. So does leaving the position in simpler ways. Technology can force the issue and force removing incompetence, or equalizing greed.<p>But yeah, it's seeing "intentional incompetence and/or greed" causes stagnation or worse is very disheartening and sorrowful. We could do so much better.
Because being smart doesn't mean being wise. Lack of wisdom can fuck up your life far, far worse than lack of intelligence... and I for one am not wise when it comes to people.
Because we’re social animals and 84% of the population can’t do calculus or understand any meaningful statistics. It makes honest discussion and cooperation with the average person nearly impossible.
Decades ago Gerry Weinberg (and maybe Gauss--i can't recall) went down a similar path and used the word "puzzles" for the ones the author calls "well-defined".<p>Knowing a problem is a puzzle helps a lot to replicate a solution.
Ignorance is bliss.
Lots of reasons, I suspect.<p>Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not <i>that much</i> smarter. They are subject to thinking they’ve got it all figured out, when really they don’t. Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.<p>Then there are other attributes like discipline. A very smart person with little discipline could easily end up in a worse state than someone with good discipline and less intelligence. Sort of the Forest Gump model, if you like.<p>Superior intelligence is absolutely a gift. But not the only kind of gift, and not necessarily the best one. Ask someone like Stephen Hawking.
I don't think Warren Buffet is the last word on this.<p>The top of the IQ stratosphere is functionally unusual.<p>Set a room full of 130s on a hard problem. When they get stuck, adding more 130s won't help.<p>Throw a >160 into the room and see what happens.<p>>160s don't necessarily think they have it all figured out. But as long as they're functional - not always easy - their raw ability at certain tasks is qualitatively different to those closer the norm.<p>I've occasionally had dealings with these people. They really do understand things phenomenally quickly, and some of them can turn their insights into gold.
<i>Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.</i><p>I'm pretty sure he never said that. He has become like Einstein, where people have projected their beliefs onto him.
Technically, the article isn't about the title. It's about the limits of LLMs/AI.<p>It posits that smart people aren't happier because "living a good life" is a poorly defined problem and smart people aren't any better at figuring out poorly defined problems than anyone else.<p>And that may be fair. And I guess my conjecture is a bit in line with that.<p>Just because you know how the system works, does not mean you would be good at working the system. For instance, let's pretend that the easiest way to live a good life, it required you to do things that you felt were morally repugnant. Well, I'd have an unhappy life, because I won't do those things.<p>Or, let's say that you found out that in order to live a good life, you had to meet some physical requirement. Like, if you wanted to live a good life as a man, you had to be at least 6'0". I'd be fucked. And nothing I could do could fix it.<p>And in all honesty, there are a <i>lot</i> of factors that go into things like success and leading a good life. And while intelligence does help, it's not a guarantee. And I would think that intelligent people would also figure that out. And it's frustrating knowing that even if you do everything right, you could still fail through no fault of your own.
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