It sounds paradoxical, doesn't it? It is somewhat of a commonly accepted view that highly intelligent people have it all – they are successful in school, find good jobs, develop professionally, have a wide range of acquaintances, receive feedback from others that they are good at what they do, etc. If everything is really going well for them, it is to be expected that they should be happy and content most of the time. However, in practice, there are a large number of highly intelligent individuals who simply cannot find happiness in life. Regardless of the fact that they have achieved success in almost all areas of life, they constantly feel that "something is missing", and this feeling simply destroys them from the inside.
What does science say? Research that has studied human intelligence and happiness in life has still not been able to come to any unambiguous conclusion. Namely, it is still not possible to say with certainty that our high intellectual potentials guarantee that we will spend most of our lives happy and satisfied, unlike those intellectually inferior lithuania whatsapp data individuals who do not have them. Considering how complex human aspects we are currently discussing, this is completely expected. I would just like to mention one of the recent meta-analyses that found that intelligence has a positive effect on happiness in life, but it is so small that it is almost insignificant.
Why then do people with high levels of intelligence often feel dissatisfied?
We have too high standards and expectations.
Highly intelligent people are very ambitious and know what they want, and they rarely compromise. They simply refuse to go below the high standards they have set for themselves. This is why they often find themselves dissatisfied with what they have achieved, no matter how much it is objectively a great success. We want a great job, the right partner, good friends, perfect looks, and a whole host of other things. Even when we achieve most of these things, it is still not enough.
Moreover, these standards of ours can sometimes be so high that over time they de facto grow into having an idealistic picture of the world, which, of course, can never be realized. It often happens that things do not turn out exactly as we imagined, and when something is not in accordance with our expectations - there are bad emotions.
We analyze too much.
One of the characteristics of highly intelligent people is that their minds are constantly active, with a large number of thoughts running through them at any given moment. Why did our boss give a critique to all the team members this morning? Why does this work assignment have to be done exactly this way? Why is our friend acting strange today? Why did something happen to us that we didn't expect? Why can't we do something the way we planned?
When our minds are “poisoned” with thousands and thousands of such thoughts every day, it is to be expected that we will eventually become dissatisfied, or even frustrated. When we have high intelligence, it is simply “in our blood” to rationalize things around us, to find a reason why they happened, to control even that over which we have no direct influence, and to give an explanation to the inexplicable. All of this is fertile ground for the cultivation of negative emotions.