Oh yuck. Obviously you were in the remedial class – no one else would order such an abomination.
I like to hold my poop in.
It’s high enough that he will likely never knowingly meet someone with a higher IQ. This board is not a microcosm of the world at large.
I know people with lower IQs who skimped on social skills because they were too smart to really need them, whether by their own volition, due to circumstance, or even parental pressure. The exact level of intelligence isn’t the issue here.
In fact, the same thing happened with me. And while I’ve done what I can to learn (like an adult trying to learn a new language), I’ve also stumbled upon a very useful bit of advice: most other people don’t know what they are doing either. Sure, there’s the guy that’s really cool who actually has great social skills, but most people don’t. You are at an actual advantage in that you realize the problem and have a desire to improve.
And you (the OP, obviously) have ways of learning that are not available to everyone. You can actually learn this in a somewhat academic manner, which avails you of the experience of others without having to learn things the hard way. It’s better to be a highly intelligent person with social deficits than a less intelligent one.
My point is, things are not as bad as you think. Sure, share for catharsis, but then work on improving your situation. You can do it, dude. You’re already quite entertaining here, both in the Pit and in Mafia. I see no roadblocks in you having a happy and fulfilling social life if you work at it.
“I blame society”
You are in your early 30s and you sound like you are 13 years old, and not a particularly mature 13 year old at that. Your failures in life have relatively little to do with your purported above average intellect and everything to do with your dysfunctional social skills and insanely childish attitudes. You need to stop moaning about how much school sucked for you and get on with your life.
If this is really how you actually view your life and the unfairness of the universe it’s (on a practical level) unlikely you are going to be able to change your lifelong personality and emotional issues in your 30’s. If you are making minimum wage with a 150+ IQ in your 30’s it’s likely you have been making some very bad lifestyle decisions.
I think you should seek professional mental therapy.
You will never have good social skills if you view everyone else as a herd of cattle. People don’t like being looked down on. And the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve found that my IQ doesn’t really matter. (Just in case it matters to you, I’m in the 150s as well.) People all have different things at which they excel. Some of us came with quicker reasoning and better memory. Some of us came with a big heart and an electric personality. When I open myself up to people and try to get to know them, I have good results. I don’t always make friends with everyone, but I haven’t had a completely negative reaction to my trying for 20 years. I don’t have a large circle of friends, but I do have friends and they actually want to hang out with me. (which is a change from my high school days when my friends were only willing to visit with me at school if I happened to be handy.)
You’ve gotten some good advice. Don’t dismiss it because you may not have gotten your feelings validated like you wanted. We all had sucky things happen in our lives. I didn’t have a perfect childhood (parts of it were pretty darn horrible actually) and I found school frustrating and repetitive myself, but that didn’t mean that my classmates were worthless animals and my teachers no more useful than the adults on a Charlie Brown cartoon.
Decide what you want out of life and go get it. You want that college degree? Figure out how you can. People go back to school all the time. If they can do it, you can do it. You want friends? Find a meet up group or club that discusses something you’re interested in. You might also find doing service work helpful. It will open your eyes to the world around you and help you see the rest of humanity as worthwhile.
Good luck.
People are incorrectly latching onto what they perceive is immense hatred the OP has for humanity as a whole, while ignoring the bullying. I wonder what could make someone bitter at humanity as a whole? Hmmmmmmmm.
EDIT:Just once example from the OP:
“I would be treated to periods of absolute torture, where absent an authority figure, I would attempt to make my way to the next holding pen without being singled out, stolen from, tripped, pushed, or otherwise targeted. Then for good measure, I’d sit at the table nobody else sat at during lunch period, to emphasize that I did not belong. Because any seat elsewhere in the cafeteria was “taken” by someone’s book bag.”
A high number of posters, myself included, were bullied as kids. But somehow we’re not up to our pocket protectors in “woe is me!” screeds.
Good for you, and? A guy who admits in his OP he has no friends comes here and pours out his soul about a very traumatizing period of his life and gets shit on about it, told he is a pussy and a whiner.
I honestly have no idea what in the OP was considered so offensive, he probably won’t return either.
Many of us endured (including myself) relentless, sometimes horrific bullying as kids for being freaks or geeks or fatties or just different etc. or any combination thereof. This is (purportedly) a grown man in his thirties blaming bullying and imperfect grade level assignment for his lifelong torment.
We all had to pick up our socks and get past it. Listening to someone in his 30’s positively wallow in all the injustices his superior intellect has thrust upon him as a rationale for his life failures is annoying.
Just because you weren’t traumatized by something doesn’t mean that others can’t be.
There are a ton of people who have been mugged, shot at, and raped, who are able to dust themselves off and never look back.
And then there are others who can’t do this, because they’ve been traumatized. Do you lack sympathy for them too?
I don’t get the hate either. Even if Askthepizzaguy is wrong about the cause of his problem, it doesn’t negate the fact that he is obviously suffering from one. Heaping scorn on him is not the least bit supportive or encouraging. It only confirms to him that the world is indeed chock full of assholes and jerks and that he’s better off being alone. I guess that’s how people want him to feel? I don’t understand why people who lack empathy for folks like the OP just don’t refrain from posting in these kinds of threads.
My IQ came back as 148 when I was a kid. I went to a Catholic school system, but they didn’t provide any special curriculum for me. I was sent to a psychologist when I was 11 years old and after a few sessions, he said that I was bored and probably should study things that interested me on the side. I liked cars and started doing things like tearing apart automatic transmissions to see how they worked.
I did have a chance to skip the 7th and 8th grades and go directly into high school. I’m glad that I didn’t as my social skills were already lacking. I was a C and B student in high school and grade school as I’d lose interest quickly and couldn’t keep focused. I also worked one or two part time jobs so that I could buy a car or two.
After high school I knew that I didn’t want to go to college. I’d had wasted it by partying. Instead I joined the US Air Force as an aircraft mechanic. While in the USAF I became an instructor and learned about PCs and databases in the '90s. I earned two associate degrees, a BS in Education, and a dual MA in Computers and Human Resources by going to night schools for years.
I got married while in the USAF to a wonderful woman and we have 3 great kids who are now adults.
I got out of the USAF after 24 years and now work as a database administrator. I also taught night classes in college for 16 years.
I’m a member of Mensa but haven’t gone to a meeting or event in about 14 years. Instead of mental pursuits, I enjoy riding my bicycle about 4,500 miles a year and doing the occasional half marathon. Mental stuff comes easy; it’s the physical efforts that I have to work hard at.
I’ve found out that almost everyone is special and talented in some way. I’ve also found out, sometimes the hard way, that we are all fools in our own way(s).
I’m living a very happy life. I don’t remember every going through a major ‘woe is me’ phase. I’m the kind of guy who looks forward and for new opportunities.
Life is good if you work at it.
Which is why I think he shouldn’t have posted the OP. There are very few people on the internet who are willing to read through his long life story with respectful eyes, and even fewer people who are equipped with enough compassion and wisdom to respond in a helpful manner. A therapist is someone who can fill these needs.
I was bullied so badly by both other students and teachers, and had such a shitty home life and lack of parental care that I dropped out because I couldn’t take the daily torture anymore and was considering suicide or something close to it. The admin didn’t help at all when I reached out alone, the vice principal told me there was a kid in the school with a colostomy bag and he wasn’t bullied as bad as me. Yea that really helps.
I know why everyone did it, because I was a total social idiot. I didn’t insult people or intentionally bring it on, but I was off enough that it rained down.
Looking back I think I made the right decision, I just couldn’t take it anymore and didn’t know what to do.
It doesn’t consume me all the time, but you bet your ass I remember and sometimes wonder what my life could have been like with institutional and parental support and backup. I don’t swell on it often because I like my life right now, I’m happy. But it was still traumatic and shitty and did nothing but set back my social development to be bullied like that.
Really? I’ll give you a clue, sneak bragging about how oh-so-smart he is and blaming a positively pedestrian childhood on his failure to be what he imagines he should be… from a 30 year old man.
I will respectfully disagree. He writes
If true, he should have started a blog. He has posted here long enough to know that this board encourages discourse and discourages blogging.
He didn’t help his cause by going on and on about his life being the way it is because he is too smart. I would guess had he posted something along the lines of “I hate that I’m still holding on to childhood bullying” he would have been met with plenty of ((( )))'s.
And smiley or not, “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. Leaving? Bye!” is a shitty way to preface a post looking for sympathy.
In my case, I also had to deal with parents who thought I was doing this all to embarrass them. And they don’t understand why I don’t visit much.
I’ve also had a better life than most of the kids who abused me. Oh, sure, it’s tempting to think that the kid who wanted me to commit suicide whose father later did deserved to experience this and that his father probably killed himself because he hated his son so much, or that the girl who wanted her brothers to get me pregnant through rape so I would have to leave school ought to be raped and get pregnant from it, but you just can’t let this eat you alive. They’re not in my life now. I’ve been tempted to message several of them through Facebook and tell them that they’d better be grateful that my parents didn’t own a gun, because I would have taken it to school and shot them if they had, but it’s best to just not let people like that take up space in my life.
I still can’t defend myself, and this fact makes me all the more grateful in today’s job culture that I don’t have to work.
He said if he could go back in time he would hit himself with a brick, or do anything else to make himself normal. He hates having a high IQ.
I think I should stop posting in this topic.
153 is somewhere less than 1/5000 people in the population at large, but 146 is 1/1000, and I’ll wager that the experience of someone with those IQs is pretty similar if not identical growing up.
That’s the point I’m making- his experience in being a smart kid in an educational system aimed toward students about 2 standard deviations off of the mean isn’t that unique.
I do think that there should be equal educational effort spent on children outside of those two standard deviations, and not just a huge effort on the bottom end, but that’s kind of out of scope for this discussion.
I think the reason that many of us are so harsh is that a bunch of us experienced something similar- very intelligent, suffering through crushing boredom in school, being disciplined because we found something else to do/someone to talk to, being picked on because we weren’t quite normal, etc… but we’re not blaming it for all the woes in our lives.
We aren’t holding a torch for how badly we were treated in school; we got over it and realize that in general people are jerks, and a great many are also kind of stupid.
We also realize that in most, if not all cases, it’s not our intelligence that’s holding us back, it’s the way we act and the things we believe. For example, I didn’t have a lot of luck with women until I was in my late 20s/early 30s. It took me realizing that there wasn’t anything wrong with the women, and that ultimately there wasn’t anything wrong with me, but that I had consistently misinterpreted the signals for years and assumed that something was indeed wrong with me. Once I figured that out, dating and sex wasn’t really that difficult anymore.
I could have taken the other route and never rationally evaluated my situation and become bitter and hateful toward women and myself, and it sounds like that’s what the OP did in terms of life.
I agree with what you’re saying in general, but the bullying a lot here went through is something no child should have to put up with. Instead of helping adults just say “law of the fucking jungle man, man up and beat a bitch”.
It is like going to a school run by Roberto | Futurama Wiki | Fandom
I have rarely seen a thread summed up so succinctly.
:golf clap:
Regards,
Shodan