Loneliness. If you're smarter than the average person, your cohort of intellectual peers becomes vanishingly small. Without the support and community of people like you, or who can understand you, most humans get pretty depressed.
When you're a smart person, you see the world in a fundamentally different way. You can see both the grand beauty in the universe and our place within it, but at the same time it's impossible to escape seeing the whole world for the cruel and unjust place we've made it. It's profoundly sad to think about the richness with which you experience the world and knowing that most people don't get to see the universe this way.
When you're smart, you're capital-D Different. Fewer people relate to you. There are endless expectations placed on you. You're Other from most social groups.
There's also the deep dissatisfaction and despair of seeing with perfect clarity what the world could be if everyone would just get along.
It's all about being different and the loneliness it brings. It's about knowing that humanity can be so much more than what we are. The world is bad and small and lonely. There's only so much you can do despite having perfect clarity on how we can get to where we should be.
Something most everyone here can relate to is being a programmer or engineer in a room full of laypeople. You can try to explain what you're working on, but no matter how simply you put it, they won't ever "get" why you're excited or mad about some problem. It's hard to communicate our highly technical experiences to someone who just doesn't understand.
Think of how frustrating that is. Now imagine that every conversation is like this from the time you're ten years old to the day you die. Here and there you'll run into a group of peers and have a real conversation at your own intellectual level. But it's still an isolated group, the rest of your life is still explaining compiler optimizations or finite element analysis to your great aunt. It sucks.
When you're a smart person, you see the world in a fundamentally different way. You can see both the grand beauty in the universe and our place within it, but at the same time it's impossible to escape seeing the whole world for the cruel and unjust place we've made it. It's profoundly sad to think about the richness with which you experience the world and knowing that most people don't get to see the universe this way.
When you're smart, you're capital-D Different. Fewer people relate to you. There are endless expectations placed on you. You're Other from most social groups.
There's also the deep dissatisfaction and despair of seeing with perfect clarity what the world could be if everyone would just get along.
It's all about being different and the loneliness it brings. It's about knowing that humanity can be so much more than what we are. The world is bad and small and lonely. There's only so much you can do despite having perfect clarity on how we can get to where we should be.
Something most everyone here can relate to is being a programmer or engineer in a room full of laypeople. You can try to explain what you're working on, but no matter how simply you put it, they won't ever "get" why you're excited or mad about some problem. It's hard to communicate our highly technical experiences to someone who just doesn't understand.
Think of how frustrating that is. Now imagine that every conversation is like this from the time you're ten years old to the day you die. Here and there you'll run into a group of peers and have a real conversation at your own intellectual level. But it's still an isolated group, the rest of your life is still explaining compiler optimizations or finite element analysis to your great aunt. It sucks.