This analysis starts off a little interesting with its observation that intelligence tends to be about solving bounded-context problems (with a known right answer), but it is lacking so so much in explaining why smart people aren't happier.
Avenues to explore:
1) Is intelligence Kahneman's "type 1 thinking" or "type 2"? Do people act on their thinking or their emotions? Can you think smart, act dumb, and be happy?
2) What does being happy have to do with having autonomy and control? (Existentialism)
3) What does happiness have to do with contentment and the scope of what one wants to control, ambition? Attachment (Buddhism)?
4) What does happiness have to do with one's overall outlook of being pessimistic or optimistic?
5) What is the significance of the Judeo-Christian Genesis story where "knowledge of good and evil" is inherently problematic?
6) What does happiness have to do with dopamine and the timing or frequency of solving problems of small vs large size?
7) 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?)
8) What is the connection between happiness and benevolence? Relationships?
As a "smart" person, I think the author's analysis is very limited.
1) The author conflates intelligence with solving bounded-context problems, ie that have a right answer.
2) The author suggest that happiness might have more to do with solving more open sets of problems that are difficult to be scored.
3) The author appears aware of the "many (8?) types of intelligence" way of thinking about intelligence (emotional intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence etc) but doesn't seem familiar with how, say, Dungeons and Dragons described the split between "intelligence" and "wisdom" but I think that 2-way split nicely corresponds to his bounded and unbounded problem solving context. And leaves his core question completely unanswered.
4) The author appears aware that philosophers
I don't see any
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.
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...
During the same period, I also absorbed a lot of information, including some ghastly one. And yet my overall feeling of well-being improved.
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".
Maybe some sort of hormonal development. It seems to be outside my will, though. Just happened.
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".
> 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?
One big outcome of this is being alive 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.
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!
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
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 to them. Someone more aware might internalize their failures. Plenty of mutations of this mechanism.
Along this particular axis I prefer to think of intelligence is to wise as smart is to knowledgeable. It may be simply wordsmithing but it provokes empathy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
A high IQ allows for a higher quality of life both superficially and meaningfully. This experience is usually weighted down by bullies and vindictive dysfunctional people. Envy is an intense oppressive force.
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.
My secretary is absolutely clueless about maths and yet every interaction with her
improves my mood, she is a lovely motherly 50something person who cheers you up every day.
Her being my colleague definitely makes me happier.
For me it's the lack of curiosity that makes me resentful of people. I can understand completely people are clueless about maths. But having no curiosity about anything seems to be so common in this country right now.
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".
Knowing a problem is a puzzle helps a lot to replicate a solution.
Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much 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.
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.
Superior intelligence is absolutely a gift. But not the only kind of gift, and not necessarily the best one. Ask someone like Stephen Hawking.
The golden ticket to happiness is having particular aptitude for some skill that there are supply constraints for and make it pay more than it ought to and being dumb as rocks beyond that.
Related. Others?
Why aren't smart people happier? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824864 - Nov 2025 (622 comments)
Why aren't smart people happier? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409811 - Aug 2022 (494 comments)
This analysis starts off a little interesting with its observation that intelligence tends to be about solving bounded-context problems (with a known right answer), but it is lacking so so much in explaining why smart people aren't happier.
Avenues to explore: 1) Is intelligence Kahneman's "type 1 thinking" or "type 2"? Do people act on their thinking or their emotions? Can you think smart, act dumb, and be happy? 2) What does being happy have to do with having autonomy and control? (Existentialism) 3) What does happiness have to do with contentment and the scope of what one wants to control, ambition? Attachment (Buddhism)? 4) What does happiness have to do with one's overall outlook of being pessimistic or optimistic? 5) What is the significance of the Judeo-Christian Genesis story where "knowledge of good and evil" is inherently problematic? 6) What does happiness have to do with dopamine and the timing or frequency of solving problems of small vs large size? 7) 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?) 8) What is the connection between happiness and benevolence? Relationships?
As a "smart" person, I think the author's analysis is very limited.
1) The author conflates intelligence with solving bounded-context problems, ie that have a right answer.
2) The author suggest that happiness might have more to do with solving more open sets of problems that are difficult to be scored.
3) The author appears aware of the "many (8?) types of intelligence" way of thinking about intelligence (emotional intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence etc) but doesn't seem familiar with how, say, Dungeons and Dragons described the split between "intelligence" and "wisdom" but I think that 2-way split nicely corresponds to his bounded and unbounded problem solving context. And leaves his core question completely unanswered.
4) The author appears aware that philosophers I don't see any
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.
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...
During the same period, I also absorbed a lot of information, including some ghastly one. And yet my overall feeling of well-being improved.
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".
Maybe some sort of hormonal development. It seems to be outside my will, though. Just happened.
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".
> 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?
One big outcome of this is being alive 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.
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!
Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity.
Or at least I am; I won't speak for everyone else.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
Maybe happy smart people know better than to spend all their time taking IQ tests and participating in psychological studies?
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 to them. Someone more aware might internalize their failures. Plenty of mutations of this mechanism.
Along this particular axis I prefer to think of intelligence is to wise as smart is to knowledgeable. It may be simply wordsmithing but it provokes empathy.
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?
I think it’s a combination of:
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.
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.
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.
Because we are depressed by the realization of how stupid we are.
We aren't optimized for smart, for happy, or for truth - we are optimized for getting our genes into the next generation.
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
Why should being smart make you happy?
A high IQ allows for a higher quality of life both superficially and meaningfully. This experience is usually weighted down by bullies and vindictive dysfunctional people. Envy is an intense oppressive force.
Likewise, rich people don't seem to be happier - sampling the few thousand people I have spoken to in my life.
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.
Maybe because they are not that smart? :)
Ignorance is bliss.
Speaking only for myself: you can't be tortured by thoughts you're not having, and I, sadly, am having thoughts.
Likewise.
There's truth to the saying, "ignorance is bliss."
Or to put it differently: some people can easily ignore things others can not.
i’m sure everyone replying to this thread has a level headed and unbiased assessment of themselves
Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.
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.
I make a lot of graphs...
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.
My secretary is absolutely clueless about maths and yet every interaction with her improves my mood, she is a lovely motherly 50something person who cheers you up every day.
Her being my colleague definitely makes me happier.
For me it's the lack of curiosity that makes me resentful of people. I can understand completely people are clueless about maths. But having no curiosity about anything seems to be so common in this country right now.
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".
Knowing a problem is a puzzle helps a lot to replicate a solution.
"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher
Not if you’re ignorant to what DDT is doing to you.
Lots of reasons, I suspect.
Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much 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.
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.
Superior intelligence is absolutely a gift. But not the only kind of gift, and not necessarily the best one. Ask someone like Stephen Hawking.
The golden ticket to happiness is having particular aptitude for some skill that there are supply constraints for and make it pay more than it ought to and being dumb as rocks beyond that.