I've always considered this as an offshoot of the Tragedy of Choice, in that miserable smart people are often so because they see *too many* ways out of problems that all have downsides.
What's making me sad in 2021? My back porch sucks.
What do I need to do to be happier about it? Replace it.
But do I use Trex? A competitor to Trex? Metal? Fiberglass? Should I make it bigger? What if I want to put a hot tub on it later? Should I run power to it? What if I want to use it as a small garden? How much can I afford? What could I do if I spent $1,000 more? What about $10k more? Do I need to move the septic lines to get more footers in place? Oh, maybe I should screen part of it in? Wait are we going to move next year, because then I should make a minimum purchase to sell the house? I could spend this money on a 7% return investment. Would we even use it anyway? Oh what if we make a separate patio?
1) your point #2 is much broader than you give it credit for. "I have obligations to others that I feel bad for not satisfying" is common, and many people do not feel the agency over their perceived obligations that you imply with "I'm sacrificing my happiness for others."
2) "miserable" and "happy" are not exact opposites on a single dimension. There can be multiple modes of evaluation on different timelines, such that a person can be miserable about many things and still overall happy (or happy with most things and still don't consider themselves happy overall).
3) (which you certainly understand, but left out for reasons I'm unsure of) Tactics and emotional manipulation. In some situations, people treat you a little better if you're miserable than if you're happy.
I suspect that "I don't feel like I have agency and control over my own perceptions and interpretations of the world" is probably the root of a lot of misery. "If you're so smart, why don't you reframe your situation to recognize more joy" is a rephrasing of your question I wholly support.
1. While we may all know smart know-it-alls that are miserable, it’s quite likely the case that, on average, smart know-it-alls are less miserable than everyone else, or at least not more miserable.
2. Happiness is elusive and not that compatible with our nature, which doesn’t exclude the nature of very smart and knowledgeable people.
3. Intelligence doesn’t seem to be highly correlated with rationality, let alone wisdom, both of which seem necessary to attain happiness, if it is indeed attainable.
4. Feelings of general contentment and well-being (sunny dispositions, positive outlooks), and their opposite, seem to be to a great extent the result of our natural temperaments (in ordinary circumstances, at least), and, if so, may not be that amenable to be shaped by our conscious and deliberate decisions.
You don't have to be all that unlucky to end up with family obligations or health problems that severely limit your upside happiness potential. Unless you are very selfish or a psychopath, you can't just cut loose family obligations. I've come to believe that a large part of what makes people successful (on top of IQ and motivation) is great luck in circumstances that allows one to even focus on ambitions.
I doubt people can chose their happiness, any more than they can chose to believe in God or aliens. A person can have an objectively good life compared to most people and still be unhappy.
Happiness can be actively curated. I think you are probably right that there is some innate baseline. But attitude is definitely something people can work toward changing. There is always something lacking either in one’s circumstances or the world at large. And likewise there is always good and beauty. How those are weighed is an internal choice, but something that can be influenced by what information is consumed, who you spend time with, what you consume, and deliberate contemplation amongst many other practices.
I LOVE the question, but as I ponder it, I realize that I know at least 10 people who are miserable and actively try to make others miserable for every one that is happy and tries to share happiness. I count myself in the latter camp, btw.
A separate insight, however: I have been married for 42 years, and am still happy, as is my wife. However, I realized early in my marriage that I could not MAKE her happy. The best I could do is avoid actions that make her unhappy. For each of us, our happiness is a function of our decisions, actions, and attitude. As a friend once commented, "Grateful people are happy people." The corollary is true as well, in my experience. Thus, happiness is not a function of intelligence, but of attitude.
It seems a reasonable answer to say “I am unhappy because I am lonely, in so far as I have trouble connecting with people who are not as intelligent as I am, and those that are are very uncommon.” It has been noted that people have a hard time communicating with those who are pretty far from their mental level (half a standard deviation or more of if I recall). That seems very isolating to me, if one wants to share ideas but no one else can really grasp them.
Similarly, people get frustrated when people do stupid things that make life worse for everyone. It is very hard to avoid interacting with dysfunctional social institutions that intrude on your life.
As someone with a lifetime of persistent major depressive episodes, though, I have certainly done extensive research on how to manage it, and it is very challenging.
1) The "psychology of happiness" research, like most of psychology, is complete and utter nonsense. Moreover, much of it is propagandizing.
2) To the extent that happiness is really just "reward prediction error", I've leaned into my high openness to experience to generate plenty of memorable happy moments that I am grateful for. Long periods of wallowing in despair tend to disappear in the rear view mirror of life's memory beyond noting their appearance at particular times in my life.
more loosely "the pursuit of happiness" can be divided into chasing hedonism and obtaining fulfillment through positive contribution to humanity in some sense. The former runs into a wall of tolerance known as the "hedonic treadmill", and the latter is extremely difficult to achieve within the current conditions and institutions of contemporary society.
4) I've pivoted towards seeking to maximize the experience of "flow" instead
Obvious answers: happiness is partly hereditary, meaning there's a certain percentage that you have no control over, however smart you are. Intelligent people may also be lacking in social skills, charismatic skills (sport/art) or other factors that lead to happiness. You can work on these but humans are deeply habitual, so that's tricky.
The short of it is that intelligence doesn't naturally equate to happiness.
I agree with the overall sentiment and would love for many Miserable Know-It-Alls to shut up.
But the piece treats intelligence and emotional control as going in the same direction, when that's not always the case. Depressive people sometimes *know* what they have to do to feel happier and even "want" (depending on how you define it) to do it, and yet can't make themselves do it.
Why? Because the way the brain evolved makes it have contradictory instincts, feelings, and thoughts at times. People fall prey to depressive thoughts just like they can't resist a temptation. For instance, no one chooses to get anxious at first. There are, of course, techniques to get less anxious, but they don't always work.
Four things, if held in common, lead to unhappiness: brains, an egotistical perspective, laziness, and an easy, wealthy life. My friend has been so unhappy he was institutionalized!
I am pretty certain that if my friend would spend 40 hours volunteering at a charity kitchen, he would dramatically improve. Or, he could go on a two-week backpacking trip. Or he could spend a week walking through the slums of India. Or he could get a menial, physically-demanding job.
Smart, unhappy people, such as my friend, need to get out of their spiraling egotistical vortex by changing the parameters of the equation. View real poverty and suffering. Help others. Get physically exhausted from manual work. Go on a challenging, outdoor adventure. Redirect their attention away from themselves and toward a larger purpose. Basically, get out of their heads.
Nah, those are short term solutions, totems if you like distracting you from your underlying issues as they say in CBT. If you are sitting home miserable doom scrolling, you will just be actively moving hiking and still miserable; it might even make you more miserable as you tried to fix it and failed. People always pretend a change of scenery is a pancea but it's generally not, you are just in avoidance.
Not saying don't try new things but it's not a magic bullet either.
Yeah I wasn't assuming absolutism here, I'm just saying I think people have entirely too much confidence in it generally in the public narrative in my opinion.
It reminds of this excellent SNL skit which captures the heart of this:
One thought: I know some miserable know-it-alls but the best argument I use against them has always been “look at so-and-so who is smarter than you and quite happy.”
For this reason I think that personality traits are driving this more than most things and that my miserable smart friends may actually be congenitally incapable of the kind of happiness I have enjoyed. If true I am sad for them, and I also hold out hope that personality is more malleable.
There is an old refrain about Communism: "True Communism has never been tried." Of course Communism has been tried all over the world and never worked but true believers keep saying it. There is a similar refrain about open borders and how they would be great. The problem is it has and is being tried in the US and Europe. And it doesn't work. The only way True Communism would work is if everyone was already a True Communist. But no one really is. The only way open borders would work is if the only people who entered were all hard working people who wanted to work. Nope to that too. As for happiness. For some people being unhappy is what makes them happy and if they can make other people unhappy they are even happier. It's an oxymoron but it's also true. They are happy being unhappy, they just don't want to admit it. You need opposites. To understand something that is sweet you need to know what sour is.
Friedman's Law. You can't have perfectly open borders and perfectly generous welfare otherwise all your money disappears overseas.
So rather than going to either end of the scale and having either open borders + zero welfare or closed borders + living-wage equivalent welfare, we compromise and have fussy borders and penurious welfare.
Don't you know, we live in a capitalist hellscape, or a country ruined by communist Democrats, one of those two. Either way, the rich elites/billionaires control the world and are trying to keep me down—maybe me personally, or maybe just all "regular people" (IE, people like me).
Seems like a common answer, anyway. Personally, I think things are pretty great, though I agree that there's a lot of technically-but-not-politically low hanging fruit to make things even better.
I've always considered this as an offshoot of the Tragedy of Choice, in that miserable smart people are often so because they see *too many* ways out of problems that all have downsides.
What's making me sad in 2021? My back porch sucks.
What do I need to do to be happier about it? Replace it.
But do I use Trex? A competitor to Trex? Metal? Fiberglass? Should I make it bigger? What if I want to put a hot tub on it later? Should I run power to it? What if I want to use it as a small garden? How much can I afford? What could I do if I spent $1,000 more? What about $10k more? Do I need to move the septic lines to get more footers in place? Oh, maybe I should screen part of it in? Wait are we going to move next year, because then I should make a minimum purchase to sell the house? I could spend this money on a 7% return investment. Would we even use it anyway? Oh what if we make a separate patio?
What's making me sad in 2025? My back porch sucks
I think this is oversimple on a few counts:
1) your point #2 is much broader than you give it credit for. "I have obligations to others that I feel bad for not satisfying" is common, and many people do not feel the agency over their perceived obligations that you imply with "I'm sacrificing my happiness for others."
2) "miserable" and "happy" are not exact opposites on a single dimension. There can be multiple modes of evaluation on different timelines, such that a person can be miserable about many things and still overall happy (or happy with most things and still don't consider themselves happy overall).
3) (which you certainly understand, but left out for reasons I'm unsure of) Tactics and emotional manipulation. In some situations, people treat you a little better if you're miserable than if you're happy.
I suspect that "I don't feel like I have agency and control over my own perceptions and interpretations of the world" is probably the root of a lot of misery. "If you're so smart, why don't you reframe your situation to recognize more joy" is a rephrasing of your question I wholly support.
Some thoughts:
1. While we may all know smart know-it-alls that are miserable, it’s quite likely the case that, on average, smart know-it-alls are less miserable than everyone else, or at least not more miserable.
2. Happiness is elusive and not that compatible with our nature, which doesn’t exclude the nature of very smart and knowledgeable people.
3. Intelligence doesn’t seem to be highly correlated with rationality, let alone wisdom, both of which seem necessary to attain happiness, if it is indeed attainable.
4. Feelings of general contentment and well-being (sunny dispositions, positive outlooks), and their opposite, seem to be to a great extent the result of our natural temperaments (in ordinary circumstances, at least), and, if so, may not be that amenable to be shaped by our conscious and deliberate decisions.
You don't have to be all that unlucky to end up with family obligations or health problems that severely limit your upside happiness potential. Unless you are very selfish or a psychopath, you can't just cut loose family obligations. I've come to believe that a large part of what makes people successful (on top of IQ and motivation) is great luck in circumstances that allows one to even focus on ambitions.
Don't be sad. You're too smart for that ...
I doubt people can chose their happiness, any more than they can chose to believe in God or aliens. A person can have an objectively good life compared to most people and still be unhappy.
Happiness can be actively curated. I think you are probably right that there is some innate baseline. But attitude is definitely something people can work toward changing. There is always something lacking either in one’s circumstances or the world at large. And likewise there is always good and beauty. How those are weighed is an internal choice, but something that can be influenced by what information is consumed, who you spend time with, what you consume, and deliberate contemplation amongst many other practices.
I LOVE the question, but as I ponder it, I realize that I know at least 10 people who are miserable and actively try to make others miserable for every one that is happy and tries to share happiness. I count myself in the latter camp, btw.
A separate insight, however: I have been married for 42 years, and am still happy, as is my wife. However, I realized early in my marriage that I could not MAKE her happy. The best I could do is avoid actions that make her unhappy. For each of us, our happiness is a function of our decisions, actions, and attitude. As a friend once commented, "Grateful people are happy people." The corollary is true as well, in my experience. Thus, happiness is not a function of intelligence, but of attitude.
It seems a reasonable answer to say “I am unhappy because I am lonely, in so far as I have trouble connecting with people who are not as intelligent as I am, and those that are are very uncommon.” It has been noted that people have a hard time communicating with those who are pretty far from their mental level (half a standard deviation or more of if I recall). That seems very isolating to me, if one wants to share ideas but no one else can really grasp them.
Similarly, people get frustrated when people do stupid things that make life worse for everyone. It is very hard to avoid interacting with dysfunctional social institutions that intrude on your life.
As a miserable know-it-all, I take issue with the question itself.
https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/happiness-is-bullshit
As someone with a lifetime of persistent major depressive episodes, though, I have certainly done extensive research on how to manage it, and it is very challenging.
1) The "psychology of happiness" research, like most of psychology, is complete and utter nonsense. Moreover, much of it is propagandizing.
2) To the extent that happiness is really just "reward prediction error", I've leaned into my high openness to experience to generate plenty of memorable happy moments that I am grateful for. Long periods of wallowing in despair tend to disappear in the rear view mirror of life's memory beyond noting their appearance at particular times in my life.
3) https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/happiness-and-the-pursuit-of-a-good
more loosely "the pursuit of happiness" can be divided into chasing hedonism and obtaining fulfillment through positive contribution to humanity in some sense. The former runs into a wall of tolerance known as the "hedonic treadmill", and the latter is extremely difficult to achieve within the current conditions and institutions of contemporary society.
4) I've pivoted towards seeking to maximize the experience of "flow" instead
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/from-will-to-power-onto-will-to-hobbies
which is a more sensible target than "happiness", while still constituting, in affect, the absence of misery.
Obvious answers: happiness is partly hereditary, meaning there's a certain percentage that you have no control over, however smart you are. Intelligent people may also be lacking in social skills, charismatic skills (sport/art) or other factors that lead to happiness. You can work on these but humans are deeply habitual, so that's tricky.
The short of it is that intelligence doesn't naturally equate to happiness.
I agree with the overall sentiment and would love for many Miserable Know-It-Alls to shut up.
But the piece treats intelligence and emotional control as going in the same direction, when that's not always the case. Depressive people sometimes *know* what they have to do to feel happier and even "want" (depending on how you define it) to do it, and yet can't make themselves do it.
Why? Because the way the brain evolved makes it have contradictory instincts, feelings, and thoughts at times. People fall prey to depressive thoughts just like they can't resist a temptation. For instance, no one chooses to get anxious at first. There are, of course, techniques to get less anxious, but they don't always work.
Four things, if held in common, lead to unhappiness: brains, an egotistical perspective, laziness, and an easy, wealthy life. My friend has been so unhappy he was institutionalized!
I am pretty certain that if my friend would spend 40 hours volunteering at a charity kitchen, he would dramatically improve. Or, he could go on a two-week backpacking trip. Or he could spend a week walking through the slums of India. Or he could get a menial, physically-demanding job.
Smart, unhappy people, such as my friend, need to get out of their spiraling egotistical vortex by changing the parameters of the equation. View real poverty and suffering. Help others. Get physically exhausted from manual work. Go on a challenging, outdoor adventure. Redirect their attention away from themselves and toward a larger purpose. Basically, get out of their heads.
Nah, those are short term solutions, totems if you like distracting you from your underlying issues as they say in CBT. If you are sitting home miserable doom scrolling, you will just be actively moving hiking and still miserable; it might even make you more miserable as you tried to fix it and failed. People always pretend a change of scenery is a pancea but it's generally not, you are just in avoidance.
Not saying don't try new things but it's not a magic bullet either.
I don't doubt that my prescription is over generalized and not guaranteed.
Yeah I wasn't assuming absolutism here, I'm just saying I think people have entirely too much confidence in it generally in the public narrative in my opinion.
It reminds of this excellent SNL skit which captures the heart of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbwlC2B-BIg (start around 1 minute in)
Ha ha! Thanks.
Paddington > Vatican.
This is very sweet, Bryan.
One thought: I know some miserable know-it-alls but the best argument I use against them has always been “look at so-and-so who is smarter than you and quite happy.”
For this reason I think that personality traits are driving this more than most things and that my miserable smart friends may actually be congenitally incapable of the kind of happiness I have enjoyed. If true I am sad for them, and I also hold out hope that personality is more malleable.
There is an old refrain about Communism: "True Communism has never been tried." Of course Communism has been tried all over the world and never worked but true believers keep saying it. There is a similar refrain about open borders and how they would be great. The problem is it has and is being tried in the US and Europe. And it doesn't work. The only way True Communism would work is if everyone was already a True Communist. But no one really is. The only way open borders would work is if the only people who entered were all hard working people who wanted to work. Nope to that too. As for happiness. For some people being unhappy is what makes them happy and if they can make other people unhappy they are even happier. It's an oxymoron but it's also true. They are happy being unhappy, they just don't want to admit it. You need opposites. To understand something that is sweet you need to know what sour is.
Friedman's Law. You can't have perfectly open borders and perfectly generous welfare otherwise all your money disappears overseas.
So rather than going to either end of the scale and having either open borders + zero welfare or closed borders + living-wage equivalent welfare, we compromise and have fussy borders and penurious welfare.
As I like to write\say. Everything looks good on paper. You make plans and then life interferes.
I Know It All, and what makes me so miserable is that those around me are all so stupid that they don't realize (or appreciate) that I Know It All.
If ONLY they KNEW (and appreciated, of course)!
Don't you know, we live in a capitalist hellscape, or a country ruined by communist Democrats, one of those two. Either way, the rich elites/billionaires control the world and are trying to keep me down—maybe me personally, or maybe just all "regular people" (IE, people like me).
Seems like a common answer, anyway. Personally, I think things are pretty great, though I agree that there's a lot of technically-but-not-politically low hanging fruit to make things even better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-being_contributing_factors