Horrors beyond your comprehension are mild compared to the horrors you can understand but cannot fix.

> Hell, “figuring out” what to do is pretty much all of life!

Only a smart (and often: modern) person would end up with that idea, and it's bad and sisyphean one. If that's what you think life is, of course you won't be happy. You'll never be done and you'll always be able to notice that you're getting something wrong.

Because we're depressed at being surrounded by stupidity.

Or at least I am; I won't speak for everyone else.

I live by "everything is grey". I am interestingly smart in some niche domains that I have a hard time communicating exists. I also insist on not fitting any template. Pretty dumb, right?

Because we are depressed by the realization of how stupid we are.

We aren't optimized for smart, for happy, or for truth - we are optimized for getting our genes into the next generation.

Lots of reasons, I suspect.

Smart people are smarter than stupid people, but not that much smarter. They are subject to thinking they’ve got it all figured out, when really they don’t. Warren Buffett spoke several times about this, saying that he’d much rather deal with a person of middling IQ and some humility rather than a person with very high IQ but not as smart as they think.

Then there are other attributes like discipline. A very smart person with little discipline could easily end up in a worse state than someone with good discipline and less intelligence. Sort of the Forest Gump model, if you like.

Superior intelligence is absolutely a gift. But not the only kind of gift, and not necessarily the best one. Ask someone like Stephen Hawking.

Intelligence is a slippery term, as plenty of smart folks have made dumb decisions. That said, I’ve noticed that many people who don’t understand why their choices are subpar tend to blame others, i.e. life happens to them. Someone more aware might internalize their failures. Plenty of mutations of this mechanism.

I think the essay has the implicit assumption that if you're 'better' at doing things, you'll end up happier. Since intelligent people aren't happier, the conclusion becomes that intelligence is mostly only relevant to a subset of well-defined abstract problems that don't represent the real messy problems of life.

I think the reality of human happiness is that being in better material circumstances, or being better at solving problems practical or not, doesn't necessarily improve long term happiness.

Adaption to circumstances, the 'hedonic treadmill', means most people aren't going to obtain some very high level of happiness and sustain it indefinitely, regardless of station.

[delayed]

Why should being smart make you happy?

"Ignorance is bliss" - Cypher

Maybe because they are not that smart? :)

Speaking only for myself: you can't be tortured by thoughts you're not having, and I, sadly, am having thoughts.

The golden ticket to happiness is having particular aptitude for some skill that there are supply constraints for and make it pay more than it ought to and being dumb as rocks beyond that.