“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ~Ernest Hemingway
Was Ernie right? There’s a lot of data that goes back and forth on this platitude. Some psychologists say that depressed people seem to be more realistic and less susceptible to self-serving biases. This objectivity seems to be an important quality of intelligence. Other studies show highly intelligent women as being the most identifiably depressed group. Again, there seems to be a correlation.
So is there? If so, what came first, depression or intelligence?
I assume that the majority of people on this board are of above average intelligence for obvious reasons. Does anyone here suffer from depression? Do you think it has anything to with being particularly intelligent and/or educated?
I think Ernie was right, but I’m of the opinion it’s not intelligence that causes unhappiness, rather unhappiness causes intelligence–it can, anyways. As I see it unhappy people are more motivated than those who are content to look inwards and outwards for the causes and a remedy to their unhappiness. It’s like an itch some people try to scratch by trying to understand the world around them.
This is interesting. I’ve always “felt” the opposite, but this makes sense too.
I suffer from clinical depression, but it isn’t that severe. I’ve always told people I meet to avoid two things: philosophy and the Smiths. Those things will seriously and irreparably fuck you up. I always felt like philosophy has made me nihilistic. But then again, I delved into it because I initially felt restless. It seems to be complimentary. First comes boredom, a glimmer of revelation or excitement, then nihilism. Fucking-a.
Yeah, this is one of those platitudes-that-ring-true-but-aren’t-necessarily. I’m just curious if other people on this forum have firsthand experience that legitimates or illegitimates the myth.
In your case, anon, you can simply give a personal spiel. You seem like a pretty content person. Is this because of or in spite of your intelligence?
Depression that is not chemically induced (and a great deal is), is caused by the belief that one’s hopes are destroyed and that subtle, if not obvious, threats are assured.
Intelligence is the ability to resolve one’s threats by identifying hopes.
A low intelligence entity can not easily ensure its hopes, but then it also cannot easily identify its threats. So a stupid person might be happy merely because he cannot recognize his futile doomed situation. That is certainly the goal of governance.
A high intelligence entity can more easily ensure its hopes, but it can also more readily see the distant futility in jumping from the frying pan into the fire. And thus a person might well be depressed because of what he can so easily see as his true hopeless situation.
In general the real situation is what determines whether the intelligent person is going to be more depressed. But there is no hard line between being intelligent or not, so more intelligence does not mean more realistic perception of the situation. A little more intelligence can hamper more than help.
If it is true that globally the truly highly intelligent people are more depressed than others, I would have to conclude that it is because the real situation is far more hopeless than the others realize. The salvation from which could only be from the notion that an extremely intelligent resolve is merely being overlooked by those intelligent people. And that is the very foundation for acceptance of Faith.
Faithful people, when not being attacked, are happier than doubting people, whether intelligent or not, because by faith they maintain the hope that prevents depression.
I think it’s more of “some of depressed people trying to see oneself being intelligent”.
Although I saw the tendency to criticize and also to fear one’s lack of ability among some depressed people, I saw the self-aggrandising tendency, too.
I guess the conflict between two opposing self-evaluation can be contributing to the depression.
Depressed people are at least intelligent enough to think a bit, for sure, and also intelligent enough to recognize some contradiction, too, I think.
But they are usually not geared (or even willing) to see the nature of their deadlocking logic between logical/rational thought and emotional reaction/evaluation.
I think they prefer to remain in the depression rather than breaking emotional attachment to certain value/belief (especially about oneself).
It’s like someone starting to walk (think), but something (emotion, beliefs) is holding one leg. So, the person is held, struggling.
And I don’t see depressed people as highly intelligent (or logical/rational, to be more precise). Maybe they are mildly intelligent, compared to some people who are very happy with illogical/irrational beliefs (like religious people), though.
Dumb people have it easy - they just run around without any sense of responsibility for what they feel or think, watch tv, eat donuts and go to shooting ranges. They easily ventilate any frustrations they feel emerging in their gut, and dont stop to think there may be some existential reason for these unwanted feelings. How different is the horrible fate of the intellectual artist type of man, the person who is aware of his own mind, never succeeds in dealing with unwanted feelings so easily, and irresponsibly. He takes credit for them, and tries to reason them away. Sadly, in 99% of cases, approaching a frustration consciously feeds that feeling and increases it’s grip on the personality.
The best way to deal with depression, I’ve personally found, is doing totally mindless things, which require banishing self-reflection because you cant do them while reflecting on what it is your doing. As soon as you’re on the shooting range and blasting away at towelhead-dummies and find yourself hollering when you blow the suckers skull two neat halves, you’re on track to anihilate the cause of depression. This works only if in full consciousness, you look down on the term ‘towelhead’ as well as on the jubilant state that occurs in the primitive mind when seeing a head explode.
This is really weird, but depression could cause higher intelligence.
I was diagnosed with major depression about two months ago, but I was severely depressed for about a year and a half before that. I had a lack of motivation for school, but when I would actually put in some effort I would get higher scores than I had the previous year, in harder classes. For example, I took a Behavioral Neuroscience class last semester. The most I would study for a test would be reading the chapters the morning before, while laying in bed feeling like shit. When I would actually even do that I’d get higher scores on my test than the average. Even when I wouldn’t look at anything, I’d still make average scores. Now that I am finally coming out of my depression I have a much stronger interest in learning. My depression made me appreciate human intelligence and now I strive to gain as much knowledge as I can.
Could be nothing, could just mean that I’m instinctively good at Behavioral Neuroscience. And it could be that because I saw how awesome my brain was I decided learning was awesome and that is what led to my appreciation of intelligence. Just a little odd.
It could just be that intelligent people acknowledge depression because we think about what we are feeling, whereas unintelligent people just live without thinking. Intelligence is the product of thought. Maybe the more intelligence you have, the easier you are to succumb to depression.
Whatever contentment I experience is definitely a consequence of my own intelligence, and the intelligence of others who I respect and learn from. By intelligence, I don’t mean the ability to solve complex math problems, or something similar. I think specific mental abilities such as those are neutral with respect to depression.
It seems reasonable, and it’s taken as an unquestionable fact by many people, that there is a genetic component to depression. But just as with diet, genetics can’t tell the whole story here. I think that certain ways of thinking and acting will reinforce underlying tendencies towards depression. One is an attitude of seeing oneself as independent and isolated - special, for whatever reason. This attitude leads to a sense of alienation, which is fuel for depression.
I feel like there could be some legs to the intelligence causes, in my experience… It was pointed out shortly after I started frequenting this board actually. After reaffirming the relative speck of matter and knowledge I am, I found myself very depressed for a good couple of weeks… I don’t think I have fully worked my way back out of that funk. I seem to have adopted a more pessimistic attitude towards aspects of life that weren’t necessarily the case prior my submersion into the depths of Philosophy… The need to come here was born out of the relative vacuum I had worked myself into regarding intellectual stimulation… Prior to reading the various threads I had really numbed myself and was only concerned with the reality that appeared on the surface, and in that state of mind I feel it’s difficult to really be depressed. When you can surround yourself with mindless activities, One has little time to realize whether they are depressed or not.
It is unfortunate that man must at times, “just do, don’t think”. It causes problems of knowing when to do how much of each. But they are largely exclusive because of the limits of the mind. If the mind were greater, the doing would just increase such as to require more mind (much like PCs). The end result is the same situation of “just having to have faith” until there is time to think again later.
On the other side of that coin, it might be precisely that that leads to the depression in the first place; doing those totally mindless ‘unaware’ things that pull us closer and closer into the darkness.
Constant introspection is it’s own form of depressive insanity. At some point, one has to step away from self and simply go about doing whatever - just to be doing without constant analysis. It’s OK to take the world seriously, but we need to be careful not to take ourselves seriously inside of that lest we begin tripping over our self importance.
I sort of think that the intelligence came first. As our brains were evolving and intelligence within them, we may have been too busy trying to figure out what this wonderful tool actually was, and how to best use it to serve us, to have the time to allow ourselves to be so caught up in depression.
Of course smart people get depressed more often, they spent their whole childhood curled up in some corner of the playground with the big kids’ boots attached to their ass.
And if they are so intelligent, Tabby, I just thought of a cute little kitty, what’s keeping them from using that intelligence to realize that they are not children anymore…at least at some point, and to know that that cannot ‘touch’ them, unless they allow it to. Well, at least to work on that.
And don’t the ‘not so intelligent’ ALSO get the boot attached to their rears when they are young? hmmm? hmmm?
I just thought of a cute little kitty, what’s keeping them from using that intelligence to realize that they are not children anymore…at least at some point, and to know that that cannot ‘touch’ them, unless they allow it to. Well, at least to work on that. 