Why Smart People Hurt. Eric Maisel

This isn't a book about what smart is or how many people are smart or how many people are really smart. It's a book about the challenges that smart people face, however smart is defined and whatever the number of smart people. It is a book about the challenges that you face.

Smartness is a smart person's defining characteristic. Everything she thinks about the world—how she forms her identity, how she construes her needs, how she talks to herself about her life purposes and goals—is a function of how her particular brain operates. She is her smartness in a way that she is not her height, her gender, her moods, or her experiences. Her particular mind with its particular intelligence is the lens through which she looks at life, and it is also the engine that drives her days and her nights. It is her idiosyncratic brain, mind, and intelligence that determine how she will live—and why.

An aspect of her self-awareness is the knowledge that she is smart. She is aware very early on that she is a little or a lot different from the people around her, and this sense of difference—which can be experienced as grand (or grandiose), as alienating, as mortifying, as wonderful, as burdensome—is her abiding sense of herself.

She may also be smart and not quite know it. She may receive so many messages early on about “people like her” not being smart that she may not identify herself as a smart person—while at the same time being one. This painful situation, in which she doubts that she is smart because of her early experiences, is likewise a defining feature of her life. She may as a result make choices “below” her level of smartness while at the same time recognizing that the people who occupy “positions of smartness” above her are no smarter than she is.

We have these many different scenarios to consider. One smart person will be born into a family of smart people where his smartness is identified immediately and where smartness is revered. Another smart person will be born into a family of smart people who have always minimized their own smartness, dislike what they call “putting on airs,” and see it as their duty to put him in his place from birth. Each smart person has his own story to tell—and his special challenges to face.

What are those special challenges? Each person experiences different ones, but here are fifteen that many people have in common:

1 Living in a society and a world that disparages smartness

2 Living in a society and a world that does more than disparage smartness, that actually silences smart people (because the power and privilege of leaders is undercut by smart people like you pointing out fraud, illogic, and injustice)

3 Doing work day after day and year after year that fails to make real use of your brainpower

4 Possessing good ideas but, because of the power structure and practices of your work environment, not having a way to implement them

5 Falling prey to physical ailments and bad habits like jaw clenching, head scratching, and cigarette smoking that arise as you try to focus hard on an intellectual or creative problem

6 Feeling alienated from and out of sync with your culture, your family, and your friends

7 Getting trapped in a narrow corner of a field or discipline where you are forced to do repetitive work for a lifetime

8 Finding yourself in a culture that tracks children, thereby keeping late bloomers and children of poverty out of intellectually interesting professions

9 Dealing with a racing brain that, because it doesn't come with an off switch, inclines itself toward insomnia, manias, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions

10 Pining for productive obsessions (juicy intellectual or artistic problems to bite into) but succumbing to unproductive obsessions instead

11 Being smart, but not as smart as you wish you were or need to be

12 Defensively using your brain's ability to reason so as to reduce the anxiety you're experiencing

13 Loving language and getting trapped by certain words and phrases (for example, finding yourself chasing after the great American novel or the missing link)

14 Feeling sadder than other people by virtue of your ability to comprehend the facts of existence

15 Experiencing problems related to meaning because you see through traditional answers about the nature of the universe

This last challenge is especially poignant, which is why I want to introduce you to the principles and practices of natural psychology. For some years, I've been developing natural psychology as a way to update and expand ideas from classical psychology, cognitive-behavioral psychology, and existential psychology. Natural psychology takes as its starting point the question, what exactly is meaning? This is a question of real concern to smart people.

Natural psychology identifies meaning first as a subjective psychological experience, second as a certain sort of idea that we form, and third as a certain sort of evaluation about life that we hold. It then describes the profound shift that a person can experience from seeking meaning to making meaning and distinguishes between making meaning any which way and value-based meaning-making. It further identifies making meaning as the key to emotional health and personal satisfaction.

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