What is the saddest truth about smart people?
Social isolation: Everything seems imperfect and subpar, and not worth investing time and energy. Applies to jobs, people, dating, relationships, practically the 99% “normal” world. It’s largely because of “lack of diminishing returns”, because they know their time, energy, talent is better off invested into reading, researching, inventing, building. “A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
Everyone thinks they are super-smart. You’ll rarely find anyone calling himself stupid. But only the truly smart people can recognize who is actually smart, which sadly doesn’t matter in the real world. Most of the power and wealth is concentrated into the hands of not-so-smart industrialists and politicians, and the world runs on their judgement. They’ll rarely acknowledge the other person to be smarter than them. Hence, it leaves smart people with even fewer options than normal folks who sound more like not-so-smart folks, and don’t threaten them.
Dunning–Kruger effect: Smart People know what they don’t know, and hence less confident than idiots who can easily ignore their blindspots as they lack the cognitive ability to recognize their own ineptitude. More damage has been done by those having an IQ of 100, pretending it to be 150, than those who have an IQ of 180, and pretend it to be 130.
Hatred/ Envy: Smart People are hated a lot. Much of the mediocre world envies and hates natural talent, geniuses, and prodigies. Smart folks ought to have steel balls in today’s overpopulated world, having very high density of mediocre folks, to take in all the hate, and still able to do what they are meant to do. If normal people had their way, they’ll wipe out the entire group of intelligent folks, because of their genetic advantage.
On Happiness: “With knowledge, comes sorrow. You can either choose knowledge or happiness, never both.” - Nietzsche
On Money: Most smart people die broke. Nikola Tesla led an impoverished life, inspite of inventing some of the most remarkable technologies of twentieth century, thanks to his credit being stolen by Thomas Edison. Most smart people aren’t enterprising or industrious, and thus, exploited a lot by someone who knows how to make money riding on their talents.
Frustration: What is common sense for smart people, is not so common for those not “cursed” with intellect. Thus, most of them go through life highly frustrated and irritated by the irrationalities and actions of normal people.
Unhappy smart people are more common than happy smart folks. Happy and stupid idiots are more common than unhappy stupid idiots.
Smart People are judged a lot, and are subjected to very high expectations by normal people. Even at jobs, they are expected to carry the full load of an entire team, at same payscales as that of others.
Smart People aren’t seen as human: Smart people are expected to have empathy, but never shown any, as they are “smart” enough to be like a machine.
Smart People don’t focus on self-replication: Smart folks don’t think about self-preservation, self-replication, and genetic transmission (propagation of hereditary information through offsprings). Part of the reason is that they focus on high-level pursuits, in arts, philosophy, linguistics, science, technology, etc, and hence get wiped out slowly, by being outnumbered by normal people who produce a lot of offsprings in order to have a greater chance for their normal genes to survive against superior genes of smart people. We are getting dumber as a race partly due to this reason alone.
