A fixation on trying to “solve” yourself is part of the problem, at least in my experience. What would it mean to accept that you might be lacking skills in the EQ area, or more generally, are unhappy right now? And instead of immediately trying to change it, just sitting with it? Does it terrify you to sit with the possibility that this unhappiness may never change, that this might be who you are?
I think for people who are used to using their “intelligence” to move through life, the real change comes from moving slower and accepting, or at least not rejecting, uncertainty. And then seeing what emerges.
Agreed, starting from the premise that 'you are broken and need fixing' on one hand lends itself to negative emotions that contribute to misery in a self-defeating way - but on the other hand can be a realistic recognition of your issues and the first step towards taking responsibility and making a change. A bit of an unresolved contradiction for me.
Why do I recognize problems and choose not to solve them immediately? Habit maybe? Choosing what's easy over what's difficult? Emotional skills exhibit reinforcing feedback loops - when things go wrong it's easy to spiral deeper into self-sabotage. But it also works the other way: when you improve the small things in your life (meditate, clean your room), it gets easier to work on the bigger problems.
Does it terrify me that I might never change? Absolutely haha. When I'm down in the dumps I sometimes picture myself at 30, 40, still struggling with these feelings. But I've been through enough personal change in my life to recognize I don't have to identify with the misery, that one day I'll look back and the emotional turmoil of today will feel like a half-forgotten nightmare.
Moving slower and developing acceptance seems like a great place to start :)
this is a brilliant perspective, and one that really spoke to me as someone who essentially had the "gifted kid" role forced onto him throughout my elementary and middle school years and never wanted it in the first place. really, really enjoyed this one
“I’m realizing I’m unhappy because I overvalue IQ and achievement, and undervalue EQ and the components of happiness — connections, contentment, purpose.”
This. This part right here. Sure, you (the general you) can memorize facts in a textbook. You can recite them no problem. And heck, you can do really well on tests. But what does that get you in the real world?
It’s not a “you” problem so as much as it’s a societal problem. I see in corporate every day. We overvalue technical skills and undervalue intangible ones, so much so that we demote intangible skill to “soft” skills. But no one is going to care about someone’s ability to code or their MCAT scores in the apocalypse.
tl;dr: This is great self-aware, self-reflective essay.
I love this essay. Honestly it's so true, I see it so much in Gen Z and first generation people. It's what has pulled me down too. Thank you for sharing this 💜
Long comment ahead, but I wanted to try recording my thoughts for the first time.
Great writing—you put into words what took years of school for me to understand and appreciate.
If intelligence is the ability to get what you want out of life (e.g. the correct answers on a multiple-choice test, and deriving fulfillment or meaning out of relationships), then a lot of these metrics show their shortcomings in external validity in becoming context-dependent.
I liked your breakdowns of happiness, as these definitions coexist even if some parts are seemingly contradictory. The idea of the 3 S's in college (studying, sleep, social) parallels Blackburn's definition (achievement, health, happiness). Unlike the S's, I don't think you're limited to only 2 of the 3 in life of course.
Cate Hall's article was great too; it's so important to take time to reflect on whether you're approaching your problems the way someone else would. I'd imagine the eudaimonia follows naturally as you see your students grow.
All interesting to think about while preparing for the MCAT now. (Reading Substack is CARS practice, no one can tell me otherwise.)
I'd forgotten about the 3 S's - a good way to illustrate the tradeoffs in values. When you value one thing higher (study or sleep), you automatically devalue the other (socials). Personally, I believe it's possible to achieve a balance, but it's extremely individualized - what works for someone else will not work for you.
Reading Substack is absolutely CARS practice. Good luck!
this was an awesome read, and a lot of it resonated with me - even the happiness parts. have you tried a daily gratitude practice? i’ve found that much of the time i thought i wasn’t happy i actually *was* happy, i just didn’t appreciate the things around me. starting a gratitude journal changed a lot for me
Yes I've tried daily gratitude - it's part of my nightly routine but has fallen off lately. I guess part of 'better decision making' is to keep up the practices that keep me grounded i.e. meditation and gratitude
Gifted kids are usually pretty emotionally healthy. It's the environment that isn't. The problem isn't with the high IQ people; it's with the average people who are envious and petty. It is *they* who cannot handle their own emotional lives, and so they create a delusion and live in it together. Crabs in a bucket.
People jeer and thrill inside when they read that a gifted kid has had a hard time. Gee whiz, who wouldn't thrive in a world like that? The targets of the green eyed monster.
Those of very high intelligence know better than to think that becoming some whitecoated brainwashed Rockefeller fake-medicine creep equals success. Whitecoats are actually failures. They failed to self-actualize. They failed to get out of that high school headspace where all they care about is getting to feel superior at the class reunion. They failed to see that they are ruled and led by their overblown egos, and that they have sacrificed their true selves on the altar of feeling "better than". Ironically, this automatically makes them worse than those who've figured it out when they refused to.
The highly intelligent do what it takes to gain independence from the system, often by working for themselves or finding some unorthodox arrangement. A job is a job, but the high IQ person is a philosopher, an artist, an oracle, an iconoclast, an open end.
The average and the dull can pump their fists, feeling vindicated that the gifted kid they envied never became a vassal, and instead struggled financially. Those people are pathetic, mean-spirited, and total wastes of life. They are nothing and no one, and they will be forgotten the moment they die. They know this, and they hold tightly to anything that makes them feel better for a second ..because that takes far less persistence than working on their own character. Mention to them that many of our most loved historical figures spent the majority of their lives unknown and destitute, and they glitch glitch glitch like the short circuited robots they are.
They'd be flabbergasted to know just how many opportunities to make big skrill the highly intelligent turn away due to their MORAL FORTITUDE, their refusal to sell out their own values for some paper. The one who says NO to stepping on heads is the one who is more likely to have a hard time of things.
Let the whitecoats prance about the halls of the sick care centers. Have a laugh at their expense. They fell for the faustian deal. Silly lemmings.
Do not discount the possibility of ADD or ADHD. Undiagnosed it is a life fail optimizer. It is very easy to diagnose because you know right away if the meds help. So go get screened already.
You say “I’ve tried meditation, affirmation, gratitude and dedication — everything short of medication.”
So, what is keeping you from trying medication? I must admit I relate to a lot of your struggles, and i’ve tried most of the interventions. i have used medication in the past, as have my friends. when nothing else works, or the other stuff is really hard, sometimes pharmacology can give us a boost (it doesn’t need to be a permanent fixture)
so I guess I have some internal resistance to the idea of medication, probably part cultural, part personal. I understand that it can be used as a temporary crutch to lean on and very helpful to many people. Part of me is afraid of addiction and another part feels that taking medication is akin to admitting weakness or 'defeat' (I recognize the cognitive distortion here). I guess I don't have a good reason.
I just wrote a longer post around this topic, and I'm right there with you. Medication for these things isn't scoped specifically to the "problem", so we worry that it will cause significant damage to a part of us that we felt was important.
If I am trying to get rid of some weeds in my garden, I can take the time to carefully pluck them out, and it doesn't get too bad. If my yard is overrun and interlaced with weeds, they will probably start cropping up again before I make my way through it all, and it'll be harder or impossible to disentangle them with the parts I want to keep. Chemical intervention can be a first pass - a cleansing fire, a roto tiller, glyphosate. None of these "kill" the weeds, but it can act to temporarily pare back the foliage, at a broad cost to everything... but things will grow back.
You still have to work at digging out the roots of the pieces you don't want, so the parts you do have space to bloom. It's easier to keep up with the maintenance if you find a way to do a deeper cut.
I appreciate this piece, Danny, and a lot of it resonates, not least because I (wary of the danger of pride) believe myself to belong to a similar class, and subject to a similar problem. I’m skeptical, though, of a secular framing here. Personally, I wasn’t ultimately satisfied of it. If, in seeking my own happiness, seeking my own share of love directed at me, look at relationships as a skill to master, as a type of work to invest time in, and expect a transactional payment—love given for love earned—what’s the point? There’s an allegory about everyone doing someone else’s laundry. All the labor sums the same, so what’s the difference? Such a system is artificial—shared delusion producing “love.” I offer this up, either so you or some other reader might correct my error if there is one, or in the hope it proves useful in some way. I’m glad you’ve found some joy in teaching.
I agree there is a danger in seeing social relationships as purely transactional i.e. I'll give you love to feel loved in return. Ideally love would be given freely without expectation. But I also think it's important to recognize that doing things for others *is* a surefire way to find meaning in our own lives, that a purely self-centered worldview surely contributes to misery. Is this still transactional (I do things for you to feel good about myself)? Maybe. But if everyone doing each others' laundry makes us all feel better, more connected, more fulfilled than each doing his own laundry, I don't see the problem with this 'shared delusion'.
To have a happy life you need a good sex life. How’s that working out for your generation? Because of the spiritual and psychological value of sex for men. You’ve been taught it’s supposed to feel physically good, amongst other lies. The psychological and emotional equilibrium it produces is sacred. But y’all fucked up. It’s all psychobabble, “porn” trauma and imitation of the feminine.
A fixation on trying to “solve” yourself is part of the problem, at least in my experience. What would it mean to accept that you might be lacking skills in the EQ area, or more generally, are unhappy right now? And instead of immediately trying to change it, just sitting with it? Does it terrify you to sit with the possibility that this unhappiness may never change, that this might be who you are?
I think for people who are used to using their “intelligence” to move through life, the real change comes from moving slower and accepting, or at least not rejecting, uncertainty. And then seeing what emerges.
Agreed, starting from the premise that 'you are broken and need fixing' on one hand lends itself to negative emotions that contribute to misery in a self-defeating way - but on the other hand can be a realistic recognition of your issues and the first step towards taking responsibility and making a change. A bit of an unresolved contradiction for me.
Why do I recognize problems and choose not to solve them immediately? Habit maybe? Choosing what's easy over what's difficult? Emotional skills exhibit reinforcing feedback loops - when things go wrong it's easy to spiral deeper into self-sabotage. But it also works the other way: when you improve the small things in your life (meditate, clean your room), it gets easier to work on the bigger problems.
Does it terrify me that I might never change? Absolutely haha. When I'm down in the dumps I sometimes picture myself at 30, 40, still struggling with these feelings. But I've been through enough personal change in my life to recognize I don't have to identify with the misery, that one day I'll look back and the emotional turmoil of today will feel like a half-forgotten nightmare.
Moving slower and developing acceptance seems like a great place to start :)
this is a brilliant perspective, and one that really spoke to me as someone who essentially had the "gifted kid" role forced onto him throughout my elementary and middle school years and never wanted it in the first place. really, really enjoyed this one
“I’m realizing I’m unhappy because I overvalue IQ and achievement, and undervalue EQ and the components of happiness — connections, contentment, purpose.”
This. This part right here. Sure, you (the general you) can memorize facts in a textbook. You can recite them no problem. And heck, you can do really well on tests. But what does that get you in the real world?
It’s not a “you” problem so as much as it’s a societal problem. I see in corporate every day. We overvalue technical skills and undervalue intangible ones, so much so that we demote intangible skill to “soft” skills. But no one is going to care about someone’s ability to code or their MCAT scores in the apocalypse.
tl;dr: This is great self-aware, self-reflective essay.
I love this essay. Honestly it's so true, I see it so much in Gen Z and first generation people. It's what has pulled me down too. Thank you for sharing this 💜
Long comment ahead, but I wanted to try recording my thoughts for the first time.
Great writing—you put into words what took years of school for me to understand and appreciate.
If intelligence is the ability to get what you want out of life (e.g. the correct answers on a multiple-choice test, and deriving fulfillment or meaning out of relationships), then a lot of these metrics show their shortcomings in external validity in becoming context-dependent.
I liked your breakdowns of happiness, as these definitions coexist even if some parts are seemingly contradictory. The idea of the 3 S's in college (studying, sleep, social) parallels Blackburn's definition (achievement, health, happiness). Unlike the S's, I don't think you're limited to only 2 of the 3 in life of course.
Cate Hall's article was great too; it's so important to take time to reflect on whether you're approaching your problems the way someone else would. I'd imagine the eudaimonia follows naturally as you see your students grow.
All interesting to think about while preparing for the MCAT now. (Reading Substack is CARS practice, no one can tell me otherwise.)
Thanks for engaging with the ideas!
I'd forgotten about the 3 S's - a good way to illustrate the tradeoffs in values. When you value one thing higher (study or sleep), you automatically devalue the other (socials). Personally, I believe it's possible to achieve a balance, but it's extremely individualized - what works for someone else will not work for you.
Reading Substack is absolutely CARS practice. Good luck!
The beginning of this essay pulled me right in - I feel like you have such a talent for that as I’ve read your other pieces. I love it!
thank u!
“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” Ecclesiastes 1:18
the r in perma worked, i restacked this essay.
Well written and relevant to so many of us. Thank you.
Love this essay
ty :)
I hope your financial situation gets resolved soon!! You’re a talented writer 🥺
this was an awesome read, and a lot of it resonated with me - even the happiness parts. have you tried a daily gratitude practice? i’ve found that much of the time i thought i wasn’t happy i actually *was* happy, i just didn’t appreciate the things around me. starting a gratitude journal changed a lot for me
Yes I've tried daily gratitude - it's part of my nightly routine but has fallen off lately. I guess part of 'better decision making' is to keep up the practices that keep me grounded i.e. meditation and gratitude
it’s a hard habit to stick to! i used to do it on my notes app or journal nightly but kept missing days. having a dedicated gratitude journal with daily prompts really helped me - i use the cheap $10 one on amazon https://www.amazon.com/Gratitude-Journal-Affirmation-Productivity-Mindfulness/dp/B09NPVVKWR
"You're smart but emotionally incompetent."
Speak for yourself.
Gifted kids are usually pretty emotionally healthy. It's the environment that isn't. The problem isn't with the high IQ people; it's with the average people who are envious and petty. It is *they* who cannot handle their own emotional lives, and so they create a delusion and live in it together. Crabs in a bucket.
People jeer and thrill inside when they read that a gifted kid has had a hard time. Gee whiz, who wouldn't thrive in a world like that? The targets of the green eyed monster.
Those of very high intelligence know better than to think that becoming some whitecoated brainwashed Rockefeller fake-medicine creep equals success. Whitecoats are actually failures. They failed to self-actualize. They failed to get out of that high school headspace where all they care about is getting to feel superior at the class reunion. They failed to see that they are ruled and led by their overblown egos, and that they have sacrificed their true selves on the altar of feeling "better than". Ironically, this automatically makes them worse than those who've figured it out when they refused to.
The highly intelligent do what it takes to gain independence from the system, often by working for themselves or finding some unorthodox arrangement. A job is a job, but the high IQ person is a philosopher, an artist, an oracle, an iconoclast, an open end.
The average and the dull can pump their fists, feeling vindicated that the gifted kid they envied never became a vassal, and instead struggled financially. Those people are pathetic, mean-spirited, and total wastes of life. They are nothing and no one, and they will be forgotten the moment they die. They know this, and they hold tightly to anything that makes them feel better for a second ..because that takes far less persistence than working on their own character. Mention to them that many of our most loved historical figures spent the majority of their lives unknown and destitute, and they glitch glitch glitch like the short circuited robots they are.
They'd be flabbergasted to know just how many opportunities to make big skrill the highly intelligent turn away due to their MORAL FORTITUDE, their refusal to sell out their own values for some paper. The one who says NO to stepping on heads is the one who is more likely to have a hard time of things.
Let the whitecoats prance about the halls of the sick care centers. Have a laugh at their expense. They fell for the faustian deal. Silly lemmings.
Do not discount the possibility of ADD or ADHD. Undiagnosed it is a life fail optimizer. It is very easy to diagnose because you know right away if the meds help. So go get screened already.
You say “I’ve tried meditation, affirmation, gratitude and dedication — everything short of medication.”
So, what is keeping you from trying medication? I must admit I relate to a lot of your struggles, and i’ve tried most of the interventions. i have used medication in the past, as have my friends. when nothing else works, or the other stuff is really hard, sometimes pharmacology can give us a boost (it doesn’t need to be a permanent fixture)
so I guess I have some internal resistance to the idea of medication, probably part cultural, part personal. I understand that it can be used as a temporary crutch to lean on and very helpful to many people. Part of me is afraid of addiction and another part feels that taking medication is akin to admitting weakness or 'defeat' (I recognize the cognitive distortion here). I guess I don't have a good reason.
I just wrote a longer post around this topic, and I'm right there with you. Medication for these things isn't scoped specifically to the "problem", so we worry that it will cause significant damage to a part of us that we felt was important.
If I am trying to get rid of some weeds in my garden, I can take the time to carefully pluck them out, and it doesn't get too bad. If my yard is overrun and interlaced with weeds, they will probably start cropping up again before I make my way through it all, and it'll be harder or impossible to disentangle them with the parts I want to keep. Chemical intervention can be a first pass - a cleansing fire, a roto tiller, glyphosate. None of these "kill" the weeds, but it can act to temporarily pare back the foliage, at a broad cost to everything... but things will grow back.
You still have to work at digging out the roots of the pieces you don't want, so the parts you do have space to bloom. It's easier to keep up with the maintenance if you find a way to do a deeper cut.
Thanks for your perspective. I will keep this in mind.
I appreciate this piece, Danny, and a lot of it resonates, not least because I (wary of the danger of pride) believe myself to belong to a similar class, and subject to a similar problem. I’m skeptical, though, of a secular framing here. Personally, I wasn’t ultimately satisfied of it. If, in seeking my own happiness, seeking my own share of love directed at me, look at relationships as a skill to master, as a type of work to invest time in, and expect a transactional payment—love given for love earned—what’s the point? There’s an allegory about everyone doing someone else’s laundry. All the labor sums the same, so what’s the difference? Such a system is artificial—shared delusion producing “love.” I offer this up, either so you or some other reader might correct my error if there is one, or in the hope it proves useful in some way. I’m glad you’ve found some joy in teaching.
I agree there is a danger in seeing social relationships as purely transactional i.e. I'll give you love to feel loved in return. Ideally love would be given freely without expectation. But I also think it's important to recognize that doing things for others *is* a surefire way to find meaning in our own lives, that a purely self-centered worldview surely contributes to misery. Is this still transactional (I do things for you to feel good about myself)? Maybe. But if everyone doing each others' laundry makes us all feel better, more connected, more fulfilled than each doing his own laundry, I don't see the problem with this 'shared delusion'.
To have a happy life you need a good sex life. How’s that working out for your generation? Because of the spiritual and psychological value of sex for men. You’ve been taught it’s supposed to feel physically good, amongst other lies. The psychological and emotional equilibrium it produces is sacred. But y’all fucked up. It’s all psychobabble, “porn” trauma and imitation of the feminine.