I will speak from my experience. When I was younger, I considered myself very smart, and I was pretty unhappy. As I grew, I met people much smarter than me; I stopped seeing myself as "the smart" one, and now I am pretty happy.

It's not that I became happier because I became less smart; I became happier when I stopped thinking my value was based on my intelligence, so I stopped trying to be recognized by my intellect and started working on my mental health and building healthy relationships.

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.

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)

Other people call me smart. I think I'm just hard working.

I read enough books to spot liars, and when people you built Idealistic trust with break it, you never leave your guard down.

No psychologist or psychology book can break it. They are just idiots. Or maybe they believe Plato's Noble lie is good for society. But once you see, you can't unsee.

Now everything in my life has ~0 trust but all supervision.

From politics to food safety to personal relationships, don't trust. Verify.

Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity.

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

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.

Generally I believe a person's baseline happiness is determined at birth.

Some people are just born happier than others.

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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.

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.

> 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?"

Why should being smart make you happy?

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?

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

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.

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.

Happiness is subjective, so that is the first obvious problem. Thee are probably a lot of smart people are are not as successful as they feel entitled to despite qualifications, and maybe this leads to feeling of inadequacy or resentment.

Because we see how things fail, and why. And it's usually intentional incompetence and/or greed.

Both are fixable, but both require the person or system wants to fix it. So, it's usually not fixed.

Things like death "fixes" things. So does leaving the position in simpler ways. Technology can force the issue and force removing incompetence, or equalizing greed.

But yeah, it's seeing "intentional incompetence and/or greed" causes stagnation or worse is very disheartening and sorrowful. We could do so much better.

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.

Maybe because they are not that smart? :)

"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher

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.

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.

Ignorance is bliss.

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.

Technically, the article isn't about the title. It's about the limits of LLMs/AI.

It posits that smart people aren't happier because "living a good life" is a poorly defined problem and smart people aren't any better at figuring out poorly defined problems than anyone else.

And that may be fair. And I guess my conjecture is a bit in line with that.

Just because you know how the system works, does not mean you would be good at working the system. For instance, let's pretend that the easiest way to live a good life, it required you to do things that you felt were morally repugnant. Well, I'd have an unhappy life, because I won't do those things.

Or, let's say that you found out that in order to live a good life, you had to meet some physical requirement. Like, if you wanted to live a good life as a man, you had to be at least 6'0". I'd be fucked. And nothing I could do could fix it.

And in all honesty, there are a lot of factors that go into things like success and leading a good life. And while intelligence does help, it's not a guarantee. And I would think that intelligent people would also figure that out. And it's frustrating knowing that even if you do everything right, you could still fail through no fault of your own.

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