Wondering about the link between intelligence and meaning

I think modern society suffers from a lack of life philosophy. I don't think it gets much better than ancient greek philosophy. There are no new fundamental insights into the human condition in 3000 years. Epictetus talks a lot about tranquility, which is neither happiness or sadness, but staying centered. It doesn't matter how you feel, feelings are just an appearance in consciousness. What matters is that you move forward with your purpose, something you define outside of the day to day grind.

Happiness and sadness are fleeting for most people. If you chase happiness to the exclusion of boredom and fulfilling a greater purpose there will be a reciprocal crash where there can be no happiness. This is why Epictetus cautioned us to always view happiness with just as much skepticism as sadness. Not to become boorish, but to maintain a state of being that you can rely on every day.

To that point, intellectuals have always had this struggle. When you value mastery over purpose and you don't find a point of tranquility in your life there will always be a struggle. Intellectuals and smart people often spend a lot of time worrying on externalities they can't control. It is the curse of high awareness / intellectual capability. There is only so much you can possibly change and influence. This is why being a billionaire doesn't drastically alter your happiness. Even with billions of dollars you are still stuck in a mortal shell with the same brains and bodies as the rest of us.

Also, MENSA is a self selected group and I have never held a high opinion of it.

> Their giftedness as potential group consisted of 198 members of Mensa. Membership in Mensa is granted to individuals who score at the 98th percentile or higher on recognized standardized measures of intelligence.

And almost exclusively sought by those lacking in other forms of achievement or sense of identity. Doesn't really seem like a sample that would be generalizable in the way the article presents it.

It feels good to learn something at the intro/hobby level. It provides an easy dopamine hit.

In order to become an expert in the population it requires a mastery that is hard. It requires a few orders of magnitude more effort with less and less reward as you become more and more competent.

Collectors of basic intro knowledge could be looking for something they enjoy but there are a large portion of people who do it because it feels good to learn. This is a trap for smarter people and I'm sure everyone knows the career academic with a multitude of academic degrees or a friend with a new hobby every month.

I think everyone should try to be a in the top 1-10% of some pursuit at some point in their lives to see the amount of effort and planning it takes to be at the top of something. You don't have to stay at the top. It makes you appreciate the people at the top of things more because you more easily recognize the effort it takes to be great. Too much of society is focused on the natural ability or luck involved to be at the top. It could be argued that a PHD is this, but I believe that its sort of forced because there are economic and structural motivations that are available that aren't the same as only having a personal motiviation.

I've found that this 'crisis of meaning' is driven by having personal values that are based on extrinsic criteria.

That is, when you value things that are based on things outside your control e.g. social validation, financial success, you will struggle to be happy.

When you value things that are intrinsic e.g. integrity, contribution, creativity, you will have a much better shot at staying happy.

The problem with 'intellectuals' is that they are more often pulled into the rat race where you are chasing extrinsic things. Also, they often value 'intelligence' itself, which makes you feel bad when you realize that the world is filled with smarter people. Also, intelligence deteriorates as you age.

As someone who works in tech, the misery I feel on a fairly regular basis is experiencing first hand the disconnect between the stereotypical "change the world for the better" Koolaid narrative and the reality of what I was actually working on and enabling, which is not necessarily 1) purely good for the world and 2) always that "innovative".

The happiest employees I see (at least outwardly) are those that fully buy in to the Koolaid and do not consider the nuance of what a company or technology enables.

I'm not sure the lack of meaning here would just apply to intellectuals. It talks about finding a job in the world that is something that makes them happy. That would seem to apply to everyone, and I'm not sure has much to do with intellectual ability.

It talks about expectations placed on gifted children and what that 'might' do, but failure for anyone else can be terrible too.

I'm just not sure when you get to the outcomes being gifted or intellectual or whatever term they want to use, is all that different from anyone else.

Everyone is really, most just can't map their emotions to a mindshare or set of words which accurately describes the condition.

You've got a large number of people looking at their lives and seeing that this whole system that has been constructed around them seems to do more to stifle any attempt at meaningful change or self-determination.

Seeking a change of career outside of minimum wage gets locked away behind expensive licensure. Attempts to improve one's space gets locked away behind permits, and tax reassessment, and other bureaucratic hurdles.

Looking back at history one can't help but feel a bit of envy that somehow our ancestors were more free. Or perhaps just less prone to despair due to a naturally more tightly bound worldview.

I'm not making any comments on the objective truth or falsehood of historical circumstances, just pointing put that many feel helpless in the face of the sheer size and breadth of the waves and problems that can seemingly pop up out of nowhere at a moment's notice.

This extends to the meaninglessness of work. You can try to advance a cause, say environmental activism, but actually end up being able to objectively measure that you're doing more harm than good in the process of being able to just get people to admit there is a problem.

The scale of modern problems are just so large it seems like the only winning move is not to play at all, over and over again.

Here you go intellectuals - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#MeanUse

Intellectuals often have a "crisis of meaning" because they are dancing in that space of what things are and how they relate to each other. When you maintain a practice of doing that, you often can't help but apply that same process with yourself as the object. You can shred your identity quite quickly if you have some mental ability, and if you mess with your identity, you mess with what your life means ... i.e. how you wish to be used.

Obviously they are, just look at Philosophy. After Nietzsche and nihilism the whole Anglo world turned away from the continental school to the analytical school. Everything became mechanical. The whole meaning of life in essence became production and consumption... which is followed by an aura of doom and gloom. People stopped having children because they can't balance their needs of consumption with need of taking care of other people. They became isolated again for the same reasons.

For anyone looking into it, the book 'Bullshit Jobs' deals with some of the underlying issues in this article like meaning in life not being reflected for a full 8 hours of you day.

Whole Mensa concept is based on the abuse of a tool. IQ was deviced as a method to discern - excuse my language - idiots from normies, not to identify geniuses from a general population. I don't doubt those that pass Mensa gauntlet are not fast, but a high IQ is a very narrow and barren method define giftedness.

The fact that it has been used in that specific usage time and again does not really vindicate it in any way.

But ok, so the sampling is of Mensa members in general. That's fine, like the article states the targeted population is difficult to sample as it is.

> "Having high levels of cognitive complexity doesn't assure that one will actually be motivated to utilize their cognitive ability. High achievement is more likely to be associated with high levels of motivation."

This pretty much sums up my life. Times where I have had motivation, I have succeeded greatly. Times where I have not, I stagnate and don't move forward.

Unfortunately, motivation is fleeting. It's as though my brain is hyper sensitive to novelty. If I can find something I find interesting, I am granted immense motivation and focus. But that quickly dwindles.

If I reflect upon the life outcomes of the truly gifted people I have kept up with, I can divide them into a few broad categories:

-A few went on to have stellar careers in academia, science, medicine, law, IT, engineering, or other fields.

-Some had more modest aims and settled for more ordinary work--big fish in small ponds.

-Some got stuck closer to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder--some are creative types and/or have a history of addiction and self-destructive habits.

I don't think there is any question that highly intelligent people learn new things quickly and grasp complex, nuanced, abstract concepts better and more readily than most other people, but the connection between intelligence and achievement, much less happiness and mental well being, is far from clear. An awful lot of very bright people simply fall through the cracks, and we will probably never know how many.

I would guess that most profoundly gifted people are pretty lonely. There just aren't enough of them around, and at times it must be like seeing colors nobody else can see.

> This finding highlights the critical difference between happiness and meaning in life. While happiness and life satisfaction has more to do with getting what you want and feeling good, meaning is more related to developing a personal identity, expressing the self, and consciously integrating one's past, present, and future experiences.

Even happiness and satisfaction isn't permanent. Their volatility and inconstancy are the perpetual attraction of "doing things". That's one reason that even some ultra-high-quality people feel boredom: if you don't have anything to do in the next day, you won't be proud of yourself. Be it simple goals ("I have everything, so I want a bigger yacht, buy exclusive clothes from that small door in that small street, have a dinner at the top of the Eiffel tower"), that money can buy, or something that your next-island-millionaire-neighbor has done and you haven't.

"Their most striking finding was substantially diminished levels of meaningfulness and subjective well-being among the giftedness as potential group compared to both the giftedness as achievement group and the control group. Also, in comparison to the giftedness as achievement group, the giftedness as potential group reported more demotivating experiences in school, and they perceived work as much less meaningful and joyful."

If you assume "achievement" is based on "giftedness" plus luck, this seems to imply that perceptions of meaningfulness and well being are based essentially on luck. I suspect that there is something wrong with our success-fascinated culture.

Or, possibly not. Promoting success by emphasizing it might be worth the cost to those who just didn't happen to succeed.

> Their giftedness as potential group consisted of 198 members of Mensa. Membership in Mensa is granted to individuals who score at the 98th percentile or higher on recognized standardized measures of intelligence.

I have always been curious why a group like Mensa International is relevant in today's society. Does an IQ test like the one Mensa requires has any relevance or correlation with performance in real life career or society?

If anyone is suffering from a lack of meaning I would recommend "War and Peace" by Tolstoy, specifically the plot around Pierre Bezuchov.

Intellectuals suffering from a crisis of meaning should ask themselves a sincere question: do I rely on relative intelligence as the core of my identity? When you frame the question that way, a number of obvious problems with that identity come to the surface:

- You will never be the smartest person in the room in every subject. There is simply too much to know, you'll never know it all, and others are better at learning different things.

- Being smart is no guarantee of success. To be successful, it's more important to learn how to interact, influence, delegate, etc.

- Any kind of identity based on comparison with other people is doomed. You will age, your ego will take a hit when someone else seems better, etc.

Everyone needs a stable identity. A more sure identity for intellectuals is to define yourself as someone who cares. As an intellectual, you probably enjoy solving problems and you are probably capable of great empathy. Build up those qualities in yourself without comparing yourself to others. That's a way to happiness.

I'm impressed that people with IQs of 150 are 4X more likely to suicide. That's sobering. I'd like to know how this has trended over the past century. And if it applies to other forms of talent than just IQ.

I also like the OP's division between giftedness as potential vs as achievement. I've know far more gifted folks who belonged to the first group more than the second. That dichotomy nicely captures the importance of drive to the full expression of any natural gift. Far fewer gifteds are comparably hard chargers, in my experience.

It's likely that before today's "age of quantitation", fewer gifteds were as aware of the gap between their talent and its lack of expression. Or maybe their attention was focused elsewhere -- on family, duty, or other life endeavors that were unaffected by the gift.

> Every powerful state relies on specialists whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just and, if the weak suffer, it is their fault. In the West, these specialists are called "intellectuals" and, with marginal exceptions, they fulfill their task with skill and self-righteousness, however outlandish the claims, in this practice that traces back to the origins of recorded history.

-- Noam Chomsky

> If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. [..] After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.

-- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

> Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy - or even two orthodoxies, as often happens - good writing stops.

[..]

> No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower", no pious platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with the community", can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

-- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature"

I wonder how those who have the ability and know-how to transition jobs and roles, who stay in their current situation that doesn't have an impact.

It is something that haunts my mind. How can you sit, working in a location that you know is not furthering anything, has no fruitful outcome, and is not going to change or push the needle in any way. The ship is sinking and you refuse to budge, but it's not your ship. You have no ties to this ship. The are others reaching out a hand saying, hey, look, our ship is actually stable; making change. Yet, the person still decides to stay aboard against all intellectual odds. Is it fear? Is it stubbornness or pride?

I'll never know.

Note: This only is about those who can change careers or jobs easily, in high-tech locations, where it occurs frequently. Against that, they stay, on a sinking ship. This post only refers to them, as I can easily understand others in a similar situation but with no way out or the ability to create a way out due to circumstance.

As a self-proclaimed "slight smarter than average" human being the biggest challenge I face on a day-to-day basis is a tendency to become jaded. I have no idea how to fix that but it makes daily life suffocating in many ways.

I recently started going to church again and I've been enjoying it. While I still have issues with it (as do many who go), I think mainstream culture has thrown out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to religion as it does provide a good framework for finding meaning in your life.

I don't think I'm alone either - Jordan Peterson's rise to popularity is testament to people craving the kind of moral wisdom that is contained in the bible. I've also come to like the idea of original sin; we all make mistakes and as long as you recognize them as mistakes, you can still be a good person by trying to do right.

Do stuff you're proud of until you die. What's more to think about?

That we ever felt certain we knew what things meant was the problem that’s being cured.

I am optimistic that the subculture of memes attempting to produce inspirational and philosophical thought, although now perhaps mostly mired in cliche, is the grandest crowd-sourced thought experiment in history. It will evolve as the lowest common denominator is raised in complexity and I think will eventually surpass in intellectual insight all previous systems of thought by virtue alone of the number of people contributing and contemplating its output.

I've concluded that the question we are trying to answer is "What's the meaning of life?", but there is no reason for us to assume that that question is the ultimate question. Most probably, there are more important questions we are not yet aware of, and one can find meaning in the search of such questions.

I definitely identify as an intellectual. I spend a lot of time reading books, especially the classics and older philosophy texts, and I definitely identify with this article and the general premise.

For me personally, the hard thing is reading the thoughts of Plato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, etc. and then trying to understand how we had such amazing thinkers 2000 years ago and that we don't seem to have moved any further at all in the year 2018. Yes, of course science and technology have progressed, but our human behaviors have not improved. In fact, we seem to have regressed and now have Donald Trump as President and Theresa May in the UK, trying to pull the country out of Europe due to rampant xenophobia.

Anti-intellectualism, anti-science, anti-vaxx, climate change denial, rampant capitalism at the expense of our souls. It seems like the default goal of the Westerner is to get rich enough so that they can narcotize themselves against all the pain and fear of the future which is underlying our society.

Southern California, where I live, is a place where your instagram "image" seems more important than whether you're actually a good person. People spend more of their time glued to their screens scrolling on Insta or Facebook seeing other people's portrayed lives and obsessing over their likes and follows. Working long days so you can afford the next step up on the car ladder or housing ladder, so you can get some temporary satisfaction before that fades and you start the ladder again.

I think if Socrates or Plato or Aristotle were to time travel to this future, Socrates would be sharing his hemlock with them before they committed group suicide.

Intelligence can stop you from believing in something obviously false, education in science can cure some of the naive and false methodology and epistemology of common sense, but neither can be a substitute for philosophy.

All they need is a small dosage of existentialism. Life is indeed meaningless by itself, we are born to reproduce, meaning is what you choose to attach to it.

In the common parlance, it is often said that power corrupts, but this generally applies to people who are personally unstable and spiritually undisciplined, and so once they escape the corset of social obligation, they act out their suppressed inner fantasies with deranged results. The flip side of power is that it teaches a form of compassion, a "tough love," that comes from the necessity of motivating people, because motivating people is both a matter of strict external force and gentler internal reward. If you're going to lead people into battle or business or a volunteer effort, you need to show them that their task is just and there is no other way, but also make them feel a sense of empowerment and world-remaking importance in their job, so that they see it as not only necessary but beneficient to society and self.

People are raw material. They come to you a mixed bag: they have strengths, and weaknesses, and fears as well as ambitions. Most of them do not know how to channel their ambitions, so if not given reason to think otherwise, will become egocentric and either seize power, or disclaim it entirely and retreat into personal worlds of amusements and fetishes. On the other hand, if their ambitions are given a clear path and a reason to exist, they can exponentially increase their productivity and acumen simply by the fact of being inspired toward their task. Among other things, this explains how throughout history small groups of men and women have changed the world radically, and how sometimes a smaller army or business can crucify its competitors: its people are more focused and believe in their task more than the opposition.

Although amplified by the modern world, throughout history most people have spent their day to day existence in a state of slight depression. The simplest reason for this is that very few of us get to live a life where we are a constant focus of attention, and so we labor mostly unknown except to a few close friends and our families, whose praise means a lot to us, yet, we would prefer to be more widely influential. Further, because life is a long and winding road in which it is necessary to make errors in order to learn the foundations of successes, all of us will have some failings and embarassments lurking in the past. We prefer not to mention them in public, but whenever we consider our next move, doubt arises in the form of these past memories, much like beating a dog with a stick when it soils the carpet will convince it in the future to remember pain and associate it with that act. Our own histories literally condition us to depression.

What amplifies this depression in the modern time is the sheer size of our society, and its general course downward, which even the dumbest among us seem to have noticed. We notice such things on a subliminal level more than an articulated one, since to understand the situation in structure and words requires knowing more of it than most lives will see let alone analyze. Since our society is huge, and seems so far beyond our control or even understanding that it is inexorably going to do what it does, most are slightly depressed by their lack of influence on changing a worsening situation. Among the intelligent, it is recognized that masses of morons will undo whatever they achieve, or worse, turn it into a dumbed-down version of itself, missing meaning but preserving appearance. This keeps even the best among us depressed.

The catalyst of change for this situation can be a seemingly miniscule change in belief. People now believe they cannot change themselves or the world, and that things will continue as they have been; if given the knowledge that not only are things invisibly changing, but that the future favors this change, and that they can be the implements of such alteration, people will become inspired and find belief in the future. The same energy that fuels their depression can propel their hard work and brilliant invention in remaking the world. Another way to view this is that depression is the result of one's energy having no outlet, thus it works against the individual by creating internal chaos. Give people an outlet that they believe will have positive results, and they will move the world. It is for this reason that stubborn assholes such as this writer believe that as has happened in the past, a small group of determined people will change our world yet again. People of the world, your time is coming.

And time is on our side. Every day we grow stronger and more disciplined, the errors of society bear it and its lackeys further into oblivion, crushing them under the weight of a design which is doomed by its own contradictions to failure. Each day that we do not give in and do not parrot their rhetoric, ours is seen more clearly by others, and more respected. And with each passing day, more of the failures of our current civilization come to light, and more people look for alternate answers, perhaps not to act on directly but to support covertly or simply as vessels for their hope of a better future. When people become inspired, they gain a nearly godlike status in their ability to think clearly, act decisively, and make each choice correctly the first time. In this state, the errors and stumbling confusion that hampers us in daily life is minimized, and replaced with a state of pure function that comes of a lack of spiritual doubt about one's course. People of earth, your fortunes are changing.

If you've got a modicum of intelligence, you are probably depressed, and you were probably born depressed: society is against you, as it wants to dumb down every aspect of its function to the point where you will be a misfit and your best efforts will not be appreciated even when successful. You are surrounded by idiots, and thanks to democracy and consumerism and popularity, they do have greater power than you - for now. You have no faith in the rotted process of our society, or its calcified judgment, or even life itself, perhaps, for it has delivered you to this state. Yet this is changing, and the same force of life - call it nature, God, or chance; your pick - has brought this cycle toward the beginnings of a close. You must have faith in the process of living and the change it can bring, because at that point, you can see yourself as an agent of this change. As a wise man once said, "I don't know if what I'm doing will make things better, but I feel better working toward something in which I believe." That outlook requires leaving behind the comfort of feeling you cannot change anything, so contenting yourself with distractions like television, drugs, novelty music and social pressures.

We live in a world of a lack of absolutes. We cannot "prove" what we're doing is right any more than those who oppose us can, but we can make a firm stand with statements of personal experience and wisdom such as "I prefer" and "I believe."

they have been, since ancient Greece..

It's just us millennials who lack meaning. The whole intellectual thing is just arrogance.

Nope. Their problem is narcissism. The system told them they were gifted, and they grew up to find out the world isn't a blowjob parade. How anyone handles that defines their character.