If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?

A common complaint where I'm from, where I'm surrounded by lots of smart overachievers, is that happiness is for stupid people or happiness is for lazy people. A lot of times, it's not. Runners will say, "I don't want to be happy because I want to be successful. If I'm too happy, perhaps I would lose my desire and I will no longer work hard and I will no longer be successful."

And like everything else, there is some truth to this. Generally, the more intelligent you are, the more you can see behind the facade of everyday life being easy or safe. You can see all the risks and the downsides of the calamities that await us. You can see the cynicism and the manipulation behind so many things that are portrayed as being good for you or good for society. You naturally become cynical, and you signal your intelligence through cynicism.

Very smart people will often communicate in purely cynical observations. It's okay to not want to be happy, but we're going to explore together whether you can increase your happiness level without significantly lowering your drive and without significantly lowering your intellect.

So let's take the first one, which is: I'm not happy because I'm smart. Partially true. You are unhappy partially because you know too much. You've been exposed to too much. You understand too much. But that doesn't mean that you can't undo it and retain your intelligence. You're not smart because you're unhappy, so don't get it backwards. But yes, you're unhappy because you're smart. It means that it's gonna take more work for you to be happy.

But the good news is that smart people are good at figuring out the truth, and it turns out the more you dig into certain deep truths, the naturally freer and more peaceful you will become. That peace will itself lead to happiness.

If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? I absolutely believe that it's true. The beauty in being mentally high functioning in our society is that you can trade it for almost anything. If you're smart, you can figure out how to be healthy within your genetic constraints. If you're smart, you can figure out how to be wealthy within your local environmental constraints. If you're smart, you can figure out how to be happy within your biological constraints.

But your biological constraints are a lot larger than you might think. For people who have ever drunk, been on psychedelics, meditated deeply, or experienced altered states of mind through breathing and hypnotic techniques, they turn into versions of themselves that are much happier for brief periods of time.

Now, some of this is a fake pleasure-driven happiness, of course, but there's some truth to it as well, or you wouldn't desire that state. So in a sense, it can show you the dynamic range that you have as a human. The ability that you have to go into certain states where you're happier is actually quite large.

So how do you nudge yourself in that direction on a perpetual basis, as opposed to just visiting there by essentially stunning your mind into submission and silencing...