If I'm So Smart, Why Aren't I Happy?
There's a quip from Naval Ravikant (angel investor) that goes like this:
“Happiness is for stupid people.” That’s a common complaint I hear from smart overachievers. They think only dumb or lazy people can be happy. Entrepreneurs will say, “I don’t want to be happy because I want to be successful.” They worry that if they get too happy they’ll lose their desire and won’t work hard anymore.
And he counters with this:
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy? I absolutely believe that is true. The beauty of being mentally high functioning in our society is that you can trade it for almost anything. 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.
I think about this a lot because I think I'm a fairly smart person. But I'm also so deeply, deeply unhappy.
Unhappiness comes from several places. Sometimes it's from one place that's particularly acute, like the death of a loved one or a sudden injury. Other times it's the ambient dissatisfaction of multiple things in your life. No particular dissatisfaction would be enough to make you sad, but all of it together makes you miserable.
Some people are particularly resilient (or have learned to be). Things that might make one person upset barely registers to another.
Some people are predisposed to misery. Perhaps a past trauma or some pathology they suffer from amplifies any adversity they encounter in life.
Me, though, I'm some mixture of both. I guess most people are.
Some things won't phase you -- perhaps you've become calloused to it. Other things you're particularly sensitive too; maybe from an experience too personal and scary to recollect.
Why aren't smart people happier?
Adam Mastroianni has a guess at why smart people are unhappy. Or, at least, why aren't they happier than average.
The problem of happiness is ill defined. There are many ways to be happy, and what makes one person happy may not make someone else happy.
And intelligence or general mental capacity or whatever you want to call -- it's mostly about solving well defined problems. Solving and deriving equations are well defined problems. Making money is a well defined problem. Reading comprehension is a well defined problem.
But being happy?
It's a wash.
I think I suffer from trying to rationalize my wants and desires. But it's hard to tease out where my wants and desires come from. How much of it is biologically ingrained? How much of it is socialized? How much from social media, my parents, my friends? How much of my desire is from somewhere deep inside me?
The mismatch between what I say I want and what I truly want is a great source of unhappiness.
If you meet me, I'll tell you about how I want to change the world. I want to be a popular writer or a notorious engineer. I want to solve problems like hunger or water scarcity. I want to build fucking housing so rent isn't so high.
But deep down I don't think I want any of this. It's all just something to work on in the meantime because I can't get what I really want.
I just want to be happy. I want to find joy and love in living day-to-day. I want there to be less cruelty around me, and less cruelty around the world. I don't want to wake up crying in the shower, wondering why my life feels so void.
All of these other goals are just a means to an end. I don't know how to be happy.
My best approximation is that maybe if I have more fame, or money, or clout I'll be able to turn that into happiness somehow. But I don't think that'll turn out true.
We have so much wealth compared to people 200 years ago. Don't even think about what it was like before -- that's the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish life. Yet, modernity is filled with people committing suicide.
If you're going to be crying, would you rather cry in a Honda Civic or a Lamborghini?
Happiness is hard to cultivate directly. I can't hedonistically chase it. It's great to eat junk food, jerk off or fuck, and procrastinate on work all the time.
But that's just as empty as a life as I have now. And I can't grind happiness either. No amount of money or clout or fame has left me tangibly satisfied.
What if the true intelligence test is how good you are at getting what you want. At the end of the day, isn't that all that matters?
If that's the case, maybe I'm not so smart after all.