I’m a fairly smart person (Ivy-League degrees, high IQ) and I constantly get asked why I don’t “do this” or “do that” so I can “be a huge success.” Even my business partner says, “You know, you can make ten times what you’re making now if you just apply yourself.”
Guess what? I don’t care for the narrow definition of “success=how much money you make or how much power you have.”
One nice aspect of being fairly smart is that one can find quite a few ways to achieve satisfaction and happiness INDEPENDENTLY of financial or business accomplishments. I’m basically lazy, but it only takes a fraction of my time to make plenty of money to satisfy myself (and my wife). There are lots more things in life that interest me than becoming a VP or owning a third house in the mountains.
I don’t think I have low self-esteem. I think many other people (who are a lot less happy than I am) are seeking self-esteem in the wrong way.
According to this, intelligence and happiness are correlated.
I’d assume it is because more intelligent people are better at understanding their own goals and achieving them than less intelligent people. This is what I’ve seen in my own life. In general, the lower IQ people had more problems (health problems, money problems, vocational problems, interpersonal problems, legal problems, etc) that constantly made them angry, resentful and stressed out while the smarter people were better at either avoiding or solving these problems.
Edit: I see Shodan posted the same study 3 minutes before I did. Either way, my point still stands.
This is far from an authoritative answer. There are myriad studies that demonstrate the complex interactions with people’s minds, hormones, life experiences and dispositions. Basically depressioned people and non-depressed people experience at similar rates. What may ]
I don’t know why people think intelligence is correlated to hard work. Well, maybe I do. The average person needs to study hard to achieve some goals, while the intelligent person can accomplish them without a lot of effort. In fact intelligence can build laziness, because you don’t need to work hard to succeed in a mediocre environment.
Same goes for lots of talents.
On the one hand, people who are identified as “gifted” often experience issues with social isolation, laziness, obsessive-compulsiveness and depression. On the other hand, their abilities often provide them with opportunities that “little brains” could never dream of. But it can also provide them with missed opportunities if they happen to fall short of those goals.
A lot of it has to do with the sort of environment they were raised in.
many intelligent people are depressed because people don’t understand things on their level, which is actually normal. it’s the same reason why so many dumb idiots think they’re TEH SHIZ … all comes down to arrogance. Self esteem is all about feeling better than those around you, or at least equal to those around you. Intelligent people can’t relate to “average” people so they feel left out of the party which is comprised of 90% of the world population.
You’re talking about the Dunning–Kruger effect - Stupid people tend to overestimate their abilities because they are too stupid to know better. Intelligent people underestimate their abilities because they assume the tasks are just as easy for other people. For example, ZonexandScout not realizing that having “business partners” and a business that can sustain him financially on 10% effort puts him ahead of most people.
I think what can also be frustrating to Big Brains is the fact that the success doesn’t always go to the smartest. How many politicians or corporate managers seem like complete morons? How many celebrities seem dumb as shit? How many meathead sales guys do you see driving Porsches compared to college professors and scientists? How many brilliant engineers have to suffer dimwitted project managers with their Gantt charts and daily standup meetings?
And the smarter you are, the more intolerable regular jobs would seem.
In your defense, adverse is a word with a very similar meaning to averse.
I think there’s something related to the Dunning-Kruger effect and Imposter Syndrome going on: people of high intelligence are more aware of their shortcomings, and also feel they have more to lose from being “found out” as less talented.
I actually did know the difference between averse and adverse when I posted. I think I made a simple typo just because I use the former word more often. I am a big admirer of intelligence. I know I have decent intelligence but I lack education and general exposure to a lot of things. I can tell when I run into someone with superior intellect. I don’t exactly envy them but I do wish I had what they had. I get very frustrated with them when they seem so negative about themselves. I have this weird desire to hold them captive and use their brain. This is what people with money basically do all the time.
IIRC, self esteem is respect for ones self (yourself?). High, or low, intelligence has little to do with respecting yourself. Does someone feel bad about themselves because they have few friends? Maybe they should be working on their social skills? Or take a bath? Acquiring one more degree isn’t going to make someone more popular if they act like Sheldon on the TBBT.
A perfect recipe for low self-esteem was nature giving a child both a high IQ and a neurodevelopmental disorder. It’s only been a handful of years since most people believed you could have a learning disorder or something like ADHD if you were very intelligent, so kids like my brother and I grew up under the constant disapproval of adults who were all convinced we simply weren’t trying hard enough and being willful.
Now a days they call kids who are gifted and have a disability “twice exceptional” or “gifted and challenged” but when we were young, it was “Smart, but…” As in “you’re smart, but you don’t listen/pay attention” “You’re so smart, how can you fail to think things through before you ___?!” “You’re so smart, so why won’t you bother to remember where you left things?” “You’re smart but you’re so disorganized” “You’re smart, so why can’t you focus on what you’re supposed to be doing??” and on, and on, for 12 years of school.
They say there’s no IQ high enough to completely mitigate the affects of having ADHD, and with rare exception people with it will always be less successful than NT people of the same IQ, and I have to wonder how much of this is growing up being told by everyone that you aren’t meeting expectations…
I did as well. Turns out, after some testing, I mostly just found sitting and listening to a teacher drone on for 45 minutes excruciatingly boring.
The problem with high intelligence that in order to be successful with it, you still need to do something smart and creative - start a successful business, invent a better lightbulb, compose a brilliant musical piece, write a great novel, whatever. You can be somewhat smart and do very well just by showing up on time, getting your work done and not being too much of a jerk.
I think where highly intelligent people have problems is with the long period of “paying your dues”, often requiring dealing with coworkers or managers who are significantly less intelligent and who may feel threatened.
More than that (IMO) is that interpersonal skills are far more important to success than intelligence.
I’m not sure that very smart people tend to lack interpersonal skills or if it’s just a stereotype. But I suspect that the stereotype is correct, and that it’s largely the result of very smart people having high-IQ interests which separate them from the majority of lower-IQ people who won’t share those same interests. (And this also applies to personality generally. For example, there are some types of jokes which will be funny to intellectuals but not to non-intellectuals, and vice versa.)
Nothing personal, Inigo, but Bukowski didn’t actually say that. It’s a dumbed down and less poetical plagiarizing of Yeats’ 1920 poem The Second Coming:
As I discovered here, Bertrand Russell expressed a similar sentiment 13 years later, regarding the rise of the Nazi party in Germany:
In 1989, Bukowski was interviewed about the art of writing, as expressed in one of his poems, and said,
So Bukowski wasn’t talking about the world in general, as Yeats and Russell were, but about writing specifically. But somehow the Internet takes a scrambled version of Russell and attributes it to Bukowski, ignoring Yeats, who said it first and best.
Much better to go back to the source and quote The Second Coming.
Actually, radio personality and raconteur par excellence Jean Shepherd, quoting the bard in “The Endless Streetcar Ride into the Night, and the Tinfoil Noose” from his collection, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. Read the whole story here.
My favorite passage:
Is there a correlation between the intelligent and “the Doomed”?
FYI, Shepherd wrote the script (and the short stories it was based on) for A Christmas Story.
My I.Q. is in the 150’s range. I think part of the problem is with having to parent an intelligent child. While there are tons of resources for parents with low I.Q. children, having an I.Q. is not seen as requiring special treatment.
Even intelligent children don’t know better, when they’re very little, and believe what their parents tell them about themselves. If you have the bad luck to be born to parents who made you feel unlovable and not good enough, you internalize this. If you’re intelligent, you reason out at some point that this isn’t logical and that you’re actually not so bad, and that your parent had issues. That negative self concept is still in there, like a nagging little voice.
