Smart people and there saddest truth!
Stupid people say your ideas are stupid because they just don’t understand them. Nobody really gets you, no matter how hard they try. You can’t even fully explain a complex idea before most people lose interest.
You can’t be honest most of the time, with most people, if you also want to be sensitive to their feelings. People often feel threatened, and defensive. You can see how to make everything ten times better with simple modifications, but you don’t have the power to get it done. I’ll say that’s my saddest thing, today.
The smartest people in history suffered from depression and various kinds of mental illnesses due to the impact their thinking habits left on their social life. The smartest people are the saddest people, and that’s evident if you survey the best and most creative people in history, regardless of their domain, whether it’s science or art or entertainment, all of those individuals who sparked additional intelligence and creativity rather than the rest of the crowd had to pay for it big time in social isolation, social bullying and social rejection, as children or grown-ups.
A smart person is relatively depressed, and you’d think if they are so smart, why can’t control their depression? But that’s the sad truth about depression, it’s superior even to intelligence and doesn’t care if you’re smart or not so smart if you’re young or an adult, depression couldn’t care less if you are prepared or not to handle it. If anything being smart can maximize your depression episodes to new highs because intelligence is linked to attention to detail and every confusion lies in details, not the big picture normal people see, so intelligence becomes your curse and worst enemy than a gift you can run with and see life from a special view.
The mind of a smart person is doing non-stop work and running endless cycles working out solutions to problems that don’t even exist! Even when they’re resting their mind works, in fact, that’s when their brain works the most, their sleep pattern is a mess, their social performance declines to very low alarming levels, and this ongoing cycle can be so brutal that it kills their will to live and eventually suicide in some sadly not so rare cases because in their mind every problem has a logical solution then they look at all the injustice and destruction around them without one working solution no matter how big or small the problem at hand is their desire to be part of society shatters then they seek even more social isolation.
Smart people are not very argumentative people, they have more debates and discussions inside their heads than they do with other people. So, if you ever get nothing but silence out of them know that they don’t see you as a match to get them to react. If you don’t grasp the fundamentals of the topic you are discussing or debating they won’t give you the time of the day and may just respond with a cold mini smile or a sarcastic but not offensive comment. Smart people are twice as defensive of other people than they are of themselves.
They are more than willing to sacrifice their time and sanity helping someone out than helping themselves out of the same particular situation and it goes back to a perfect psychological barrier system they created themselves which means you can only offend them if they let you, otherwise all you can do is try. So what this means is that they don’t get offended by the same things that offend other people, for example calling them “weird” is like giving them a compliment, they do like and enjoy being weird, and they naturally strive to be different than everyone else
If you get loud while discussing something with them they will write you off entirely. To them, getting loud is the equivalent to losing the argument so if you want to get them to be responsive make sure you stay calm and refrain from using complex big words because that also means you are not well informed on the topic you are discussing, you can fool many people and they may admire you for it but you’ll never be able to fool them.
Smart people won’t be standing in line waiting to get a best-seller book or attending a global phenomenal movie. While they may respect the intellectual effort of the writer or the movie staff, in their mind, only generic concepts can touch a vast amount of people so they seek unheard books, rare unheard movies or watch an old movie that has sentimental value or reminds them of their childhood.
This society labels smart individuals as “Nerds” and paints them with the most outrageous adjectives there are. A nerd according to our society is someone who is socially awkward, unpleasant looking, needs thick glasses to see, fails to function among a large crowd, is easily embarrassed and bullied, can’t get a date, and can’t get it together. Instead of crediting smart people by referring to them as smart, they’re called nerds and this is exactly how a troubled society operates by isolating the positively different and embracing the negatively influential individual simply because positivity needs effort, while negative is the default and needs no effort to be achieved.
The saddest truth about smart people is that the world around them speaks on their behalf, it speaks so loud and harasses them for being different and daring to be defined by their intelligence by sporting it in their social interactions and refusing to blend in if it meant acting as stupid as everyone else.
You’ll often find them hanging out alone with no friends either by choice or because others see their social behaviour as abnormal, they may wear a sweatshirt to a formal gathering and pay no attention to social etiquette. In their mind, these are all fake things people do to seem what they are not. They are observant, especially of their own behaviour and have a self-corrective system which always keeps track of any personality changes made just for the sake of blending in.
They beat themselves up at night if during the day they said something against their character just to get public approval and can dwell on it for days. Smart people are very moment-aware even if it may look like they aren’t paying attention to you they have already studied the room and everyone in it and decided that no one there is worth their direct interaction with, so they switch to hibernation until the function or gathering is over.
When I think intelligence I instantly think of Einstein, who spent years unsuccessfully trying to snag a faculty position at a university. Even after he came up with E=mc2, Imagine you’re reviewing a resume and rejecting someone like Albert Einstein. Every time an innovator showed moments of brilliance society rejected them, if you go as far as 100s years back when Giordano Bruno dared to think against the church teachings he was given the chance before he was set on fire at the stake by being told: take back your claims that the universe has no centre, and stars are suns, surrounded by planets and moons and you’ll be allowed to live, and he said NO, I won’t, Bruno decided to die and let his idea live (and it did) than live and let his idea die before him.
Throughout history, smart people have been tortured and abused not by society but by a whole complete systemic abuse that doesn’t approve of different individuals and sees them as inferior and a threat that needs to be eliminated.
The saddest truth about smart people is that they are smart people in a world that values and respects the stupid, a world that glorifies and fears dumb individuals and puts them in high ranks, as high as ruling a nation. Human psychology is so complex and impossible to understand we only just began decoding ourselves and there are things yet to be unravelled that as of now we are not prepared to understand, but decades later it will make so much sense and that’s what it’s like to live in the mind of a smart person.
They are here, but their minds are well ahead of their time, they have to be present, but their thinking is in the future, and while they do all that they have to deal with psychological discomforts and various painful episodes they collected as young kids from all the bullying they endured for just being special and different.
Overthinking is a minor, barely reliable sign of intelligence, persistent thinking is a more obvious, reliable sign. When you overthink you are practically stuck inside a loop and that’s not a smart thing to do, however persistent thinking until you work out a solution is a smart person trait. Being an overthinker can happen at any stage of your life especially if you are an average person. Overthinking to obsessive levels is mentally draining and can kill your potential and creativity, and that’s why it’s hard to say smart people are overthinkers because many have created and achieved life-changing achievements.
Not every smart person is depressed and not every depressed person is smart, however, the life routine of the smart can potentially lead to depression due to social disadvantages and also thinking habits and problems sorting.
One of the most false stereotypes is linking intelligence to doing mathematical calculations on the fly or solving complex Math problems faster than average people but you can be smart and not know how to do that and you can be average and know a couple of calculus tricks it doesn’t mean you are intelligent, we often set Math as the most reliable scale to determine if someone is Intelligent/Smart/Genius because of its complexity and randomness to achieve problems solving, but that’s one small factor of many.
It’s often said that: if you hire a lazy worker he’d find the fastest route to finish a given task at the least amount of required effort, and while math is far from static you can learn to hack it and master it and still not be one of the intelligent people.
One of my favourite examples of natural intelligence and gained intelligence is the difference between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Cristiano is a hard worker he trains non-stop, always working on learning and shaping his skills, but only one thing separates him from Messi, it’s called natural intelligence.
Lionel Messi just goes out there and performs like he created the sport, he only needs to train to stay fit and still be the best player in the world without having to try as hard as Cristiano does, however mastering one domain in life makes you an expert or smart in that particular domain, the kind of smart we are discussing here is the universal kind smart which is so rare but it wouldn’t be if teachers at schools paid more attention to their students than messing on their phones.
Our education system values grades more than it values education and that’s one of the main reasons we rarely hear of gifted smart people anymore.
This world is still not ready to respect and value the smart, as long as you see Kim Kardashian making millions of dollars know that we are not heading in the right direction, and we still have a long time to go as a species to develop and learn. As long as you see a scientific discovery documentary gather a thousand views and a famous model in a bikini video gets millions of views know that we are a generation to feel sorry for.
People get worked up debating hip-hop artists’ feuds all over social media and burn hours of their lives defending famous people who could care less about their existence. Luckily life is the gift that keeps on giving and there are more smart people yet to be born and bring outstanding innovations into the world, and hopefully, by then this world can learn to appreciate and embrace them, instead of making them feel like inferiors and harass them every step of the way. People are more likely to remember Einstein for his “crazy hair” than for his grand findings.
The “in their own mind genius” people are very common these days and they don’t have much that separates them from failures with that mindset, with all due respect to people who fail to achieve in life, no one enjoys or seeks to become a failure, sometimes life circumstances are stronger than our wishes and desires.
I can imagine myself building a spaceship that can take us to Mars in 5 Months but if I don’t start creating, submitting drafts, e-mailing and pitching ideas to involved people that means I accomplished nothing but being a “Genius inside my own head” which amounts to absolutely nothing if it doesn’t end up with an outcome people can touch and see.
If you feel like you have a revolutionary idea no matter how crazy it may sound, get off your seat and promote it to people in your region, on the internet, or anyone involved in the particular domain you feel inspired enough to revolutionize or improve. Never settle for “in-head drafts” and keep projects locked in there, they die with you and that’s a sad way to go.
Most innovators in history were considered crazy the moment they started thinking out loud and people ended up respecting them after seeing their achievements, the best ideas sometimes sound the craziest, especially to those who don’t want to see you achieve.