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- Hacker News
- 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)
by dang - Can the reasoning not be:
1) Our brains are evolved prediction engines
2) It is more beneficial and urgent to predict danger (e.g. approaching predator) than benefit (e.g. approaching prey)
3) There are always more negative outcomes than positive ones (entropy)
4) (1), (2), (3) => the more powerful the prediction engine, the more negative scenarios it will consider
by hliyan - Or: The world could truly be a fundamentally awful place, and smarter people are just closer to comprehending the true nature of reality.
- I find it interesting that there's an expectation that smart people would be happier.
Being smart is essentially "having a strong brain". Would we expect people with a strong back or legs to be happier? I wouldn't expect someone good a maths or puzzles to be any happier than someone good at carrying heavy things.
There's a difference between smart and wise. Some smart people become wise people, and I find them to be happy.
by mmorriso - Smart people are more likely to be able to choose the work they do (on the basis of what makes them happy).by amelius
- I kinda would expect a person with a strong back or legs to be happier. I think there's a strong correlation between health and fitness and happiness.by bittercynic
- I've learned that the more intelligent you are the more models you know and the more trust you place in them being actual reality vs just being models. This leads to overconfidence in things being a certain way so when life calls for flexibility, your rigidity will make you suffer. Cynicism develops from this rigidity.
Additionally, the more intelligent you are the more skilled you become at thinking about things logically. An intelligent person can convince themselves of anything using logic without realizing that all logic depends on unproven axioms and assumptions. Combined with cynicism, logic leads to a negative outlook on life that is hard to shake off.
by phyzix5761 - Sounds unintelligent to me. What's your definition of intelligent?by colordrops
- > _An intelligent person can convince themselves of anything_
I think it might be just the opposite: convincing yourself of things relies on exploiting limits for which very intelligent people have much higher threshold they might as well not have them. When it comes to happiness, it’s kind of a superpower which I think very intelligent people just don’t have because it fights against their intelligence by definition. It’s also something that I think happens unconsciously.
It’s ironic, as you yourself provided a perfect example: a logic argument depending on unproven assumptions, if it lands in “convincing” yourself, exploits a limitation in accounting for the validity of the assumptions themselves (meaning: you believe it anyway). Assuming one could pick and choose the arguments (i.e., what to believe in) wouldn’t that trivially unlock happiness?
by n0on3 - An intelligent person can convince themselves of anything
Not to mention via shortcuts, reductionism, and other (ironically) lazy thinking. After all, they're too smart to take a shortcuts that lead them to the wrong answer, so if they took a shortcut it saved them effort and was also right!
by ip26 - Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity.
Or at least I am; I won't speak for everyone else.
by rationalist - > Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity
And then we visit websites like HN, filled with people who think they are smart.
I don't mind a stupid person who knows they are stupid, but I despise the so-called 'expert' who is wrong, but society considers that person to be the authority
by dosisking - Can’t have Hacker News without the hubris! Love it
- 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.by slowhadoken
- And it doesn't help that we are getting deeper in the idiocracy timeline everyday.by Seb-C
- Right there with you.
There's different flavors of stupidity. There's the "oh damn, why didn't I think of that first" and there's the smug "I did my own research and your evidence doesn't match by beliefs".
by pstuart - I do think an important part that we leave out when we analyze datapoints like "people who test well in one subject tend to test well in other subjects" is that "test taking" is itself a skill that people can be good or bad at.
I was always an expert test taker from a very young age. I loved standardized tests, and excelled every time.
I remember thinking many times how I was pretty sure I could do pretty well on a test on any subject, even if I didn't know the subject itself.
I had a chance to test (hah) that theory when I took a summer job at a college testing center when I was a college student myself. I would give out these tests in a number of different subjects, but I had time to kill while the students were taking the tests. I decided to try taking some for subjects I had never studied.
I scored well above the average scores on these subjects I knew nothing about, I just knew how tests were written. I could pick up context clues in the wording of questions, use my experience on how test questions usually go, and use clues from other parts of the test to figure out how to answer a different question.
That doesn't mean I was any good at those subjects, I just was good at that form of test.
by cortesoft - There may be such a thing as pure test-taking skill, but I think it boils down to two things: General knowledge/literacy, and knowing the specific format of the test. A well-written test should not have question context for one thing that informs the answer to another question, or have logical inconsistencies/redundancies/ambiguity that can be exploited. Questions should also not build off of each other in a way that causes cascading failure if you can't answer one. These things may happen in low-stakes classroom exams but they certainly shouldn't in a standardized test.
Practically everyone goes to school in our society, so they have very similar opportunity to learn how to take a test. Some of them never get good at it after many years. Maybe that is a sign that they also wouldn't be good at any academic subjects. You wouldn't have a reliable way to measure that, because test-taking is out. I guess they could try to practice test-taking by taking a ton of random tests and grading themselves, but then they might accidentally become experts in some subjects!
by wakawaka28 - Horrors beyond your comprehension are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix.by Telaneo
- I'm not very smart, but I've read so much history.
I've also got a pretty strong pattern matching engine.
Since the age of 8 my family traveled across the world interacting and working with thousands of folks of all walks of life. I still travel a lot and love to talk to people and ask them their stories. I've worked many different jobs, to this day some of my jobs are minimum wage, some are extremely high earning.
The pattern matching engine has a lot input to match on and it reminds me a few dozen times a day that today my current country is fractionally less safe than it was yesterday. There's nothing I can do to fight against a high tech propaganda media campaign that's morphed into a mass cult that craves genocide.
No amount of prepping or homesteading or storing away gold will help when the food riots come.
CBT and journaling and meditating have helped me come to the realization that while I'll almost certainly die from violence, I will be present and enjoy every second until that happens. I form deep connections with my neighbors and build a big community of people I love. I share joy with all I can, and I comfort those who are sad. The only thing in life that matters are people and how I treat them, so I try to embrace them all and meet them where they are with kindness and love.
A brilliant thru-hiking documentary says it best: "It's The People".
by JackMorgan - 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".by pixl97
- 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 8 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? 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?)
7) What is the connection between happiness and benevolence, giving vs receiving? Relationships? Why?
8) 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.
by gregw2 - Great list!by spencerflem
- It's a blog post. Unless you're reading Gwern or something, you shouldn't expect a really deep comprehensive take on an issue this ill-defined. I mean what does happiness mean? Its hard enough to get people to agree on that.by paulpauper
- Very thought provoking list. The kind of thing I am glad to find on HN!by intrasight
- There is an excellent blog post from [0] a guy who, due to a circulatory issue, ended up temporarily dropping down in IQ.
In summary, he felt much happier b/c he wasn't constantly seeing broken systems everywhere and feeling frustrated that they needed to be fixed.
Great read and highly recommend.
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20120508004058/http://garrysub.p...
by alexpotato - Another great and somewhat sad read is Flowers for Algernon.by ashray
- Thank you! I've been searching for this for years, and haven't been able to find it.by gkoberger
- 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.
- Humans simply didn't evolve to be connected to a constant firehose of random information. I firmly believe that even the smartest person will become an idiot if they just scroll X all dayby ifwinterco