Why Aren't Smart People Happier?

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?

Intelligence sounds pretty great. Who doesn’t want to “catch on” and “make sense”? Hell, “figuring out” what to do is pretty much all of life!

All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier. I think there’s an important lesson here: if solving a bunch of well-defined problems did not make our predecessors happier, it probably won’t make us happier, either.

Naturally, people with more of this mental horsepower must live happier lives. When they encounter a problem, they should use their superior problem-solving ability to solve it. Smarter people should do a better job making plans and getting what they want, and they should learn more from their mistakes and subsequently make fewer of them. All of th... See more

I wish we knew more about how to make that bright green line go up, but we just haven’t yet defined the problem of “living a happy life”. We know that if you’re starving, lonely, or in pain, you’ll probably get happier if you get food, friends, and relief. After that, the returns diminish very quickly.

People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test they can take that will spit out a big, honking number that will make everybody respect them.

Google “smartest people in the world” and most of the results will be physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and chess masters. These are all difficult problems, but they are well-defined, and that makes it easy to rank people.

One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem.

If you’re stuck trying to solve poorly defined problems with your slick, well-defined problem-solving skills and you’re lucky enough to have a grandma like mine still on this Earth, my god, go see her. Shut up and listen to her for a while. And once you’ve learned something, maybe ask her if she needs help with her TV.

There is, unfortunately no good word for “skill at solving poorly defined problems.” Insight, creativity, agency, self-knowledge—they’re all part of it, but not all of it. Wisdom comes the closest, but it suggests a certain fustiness and grandeur, and poorly defined problems aren’t just dramatic questions like “how do you live a good life”; they're... See more