Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

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.

Horrors beyond your comprehension are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix.

All these studies suggest loneliness makes you unhappy, however I feel happiest most when lonely and doing my thing and not with people. With people I just feel frustrated or weird, because I think so different than the others.

Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity.

Or at least I am; I won't speak for everyone else.

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)

(I left out some small threads that were neither smart nor happy)

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".

Obviously a lot of depression is genetic or due to some unfortunate life circumstance. It's got nothing to do with intelligence.

But what I've also noticed is that a lot of people with unbalanced lifestyles end up becoming depressed.

For example, they might have a habit of going to bed at weird inconsistent times, wake up late, eat junk food, not regularly exercise or go to the gym, etc.

Someone with that lifestyle is much more likely to become depressed compared to someone who sleeps 8 hours a night, wakes up at a reasonable time every morning (i.e. 5am - 8am), has a stable job, and exercises regularly.

Humans are built for routine. Drifting away from that is unnatural.

> 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!

I am not the smarter, but I believe that I am smart enough. My problem is that my mind overthinks all the possible scenarios that could happen. For example, now with AI, what happens if the AI replaces all jobs, are we going to all live happy lives doing nothing? or are we going to be all super poor with the top 1% living in closed cities?

Ugh. This analysis starts off a little interesting with its observation that "intelligence", as analyzed historically, tends to be about solving bounded-context problems (with a known right answer) rather than open-ended problems (D&D called this "wisdom", right?

But it is lacking so, so, so much in explaining why smart people aren't happier or evaluating the premises of the question.

If my teenager gave me this analysis and question, I'd give them 9 more avenues to explore, none of which the article addresses:

1) Is intelligence Kahneman's "type 1 thinking" or "type 2"? Do people (including you) act on their thinking or their emotions? (Can/do you think smart + act dumb and end up happy?)

2) What does being happy have to do with having autonomy and control and purpose? (Existentialism)

3) What does happiness have to do with contentment and the scope of what one wants to control, ie ambition? Attachment? (Buddhism)

4) What does happiness have to do with one's overall outlook of being pessimistic or optimistic?

5) Is there some deeper insight why a widespread religious tradition such as the Judeo-Christian one has a creation story where 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, giving vs receiving? Relationships? Why?

9) Why does a socio-economic system based on money-maxxing intended to obtain happiness lead to oversupply which leads to demand-generation/creation/marketing which leads to unhappiness? And similarly leads to conflict and resulting unhappiness? Is there an inherent ying/yang dynamic to intelligence and happiness on a personal or socioeconomic systems level?

I do agree with the author that it's a question worth re-evaluating in an age of "Artificial Intelligence" promises.

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.

We know that intelligence tests and tests in general can be impacted by motivation and potential monetary gains (the article brushes on that). Maybe they can also be impacted by the happiness and other emotional states of the test taker.

i’m sure everyone replying to this thread has a level headed and unbiased assessment of themselves

> Why aren't smart people happier?

I think any discussion on this topic should begin with answering "Why would one expect smart people to be happier?"

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

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.

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.

Maybe happy smart people know better than to spend all their time taking IQ tests and participating in psychological studies?

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?

Why should being smart make you happy?

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.

Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.

Likewise, rich people don't seem to be happier - sampling the few thousand people I have spoken to in my life.

Speaking only for myself: you can't be tortured by thoughts you're not having, and I, sadly, am having thoughts.

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.

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.

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...

Maybe because they are not that smart? :)

"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher

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.

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.

I wouldn't say there's any particular evidence stupid people are happy though?

There's a whole lot of them putting themselves right out there now and I wouldn't say any display signs of being happy.

Ignorance is bliss.

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.

[dead]