pain.
What they are not necessarily smart about are the challenges of being smart. As likely as not, they have never thought about the fifteen challenges I listed above and therefore have never considered using their native intelligence to meet these challenges. They tend not to realize the extent to which being smart produces its own problems. That is often a considerable part of our work together, laying bare the shadow side of smartness.
It's a difficult territory to talk about because it connects to many cultural taboos. We aren't supposed to talk about who might be smarter than whom or what challenges might flow from that smartness. The whole intelligence debate is a minefield. But smart people wonder about such things. They wonder, if they are physicists, if they are smart enough to do the big thinking required of them to break through and make a real contribution to science. They wonder, if they are novelists, if they are smart enough to hold all of the themes and threads of their novel in their head. Individuals wonder about these matters even if as a society we can't discuss them.
It certainly isn't the case that smart people as a group have it harder than other people. Smart people are more suited for and more likely to grab society's highest-paying jobs, from doctor to academic to stockbroker, and have a better chance at material ease than other people. We could name countless ways in which smart people have it easier than, or at least no harder than, other people. Nevertheless smart people encounter many special challenges that can cost them their equanimity, their self-confidence, and their emotional health.
Among these challenges, and the one that I want to explore first because of its vital importance, is the challenge of meaning. This challenge manifests itself in all of the following ways:
Spending years searching for meaning, not realizing that meaning must be made and not sought
Never quite ascertaining what meaning investments to make or what meaning opportunities to seize, leaving us with the sense of going through the motions in life
Doing the work of making meaning but periodically experiencing the meaning drain right out of our activities and enterprises, causing an acute meaning crisis
Dealing with repetitive or chronic meaning crises via self-soothing activities that turn into obsessions, compulsions, or addictions
Feeling guilty and upset about engaging in activities that aren't provoking the psychological experience of meaning, not realizing that life does not have to feel constantly meaningful or that a certain amount of time can be lived in meaning neutral without detriment
Prematurely abandoning activities that might have provoked the psychological experience of meaning down the road
Experiencing malaise and angst, not realizing that a meaning crisis has struck, and pinning on a convenient label provided by our culture, a label like clinical depression or attention deficit disorder
And many more . . .
The primary challenge that smart people must deal with is making sense of meaning. Natural psychology suggests that the best answer to this problem is donning the mantle of meaning-maker and engaging in value-based meaning-making. Your answer may be different, but you must still face this challenge. No smart person is immune to this problem. In fact, it is the most significant emotional issue for our smartest 15 percent.
Do you understand what meaning is, what it isn't, and how to create it? Do you know how to organize your day around meaning investments and meaning opportunities? Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? As long as you continue to experience meaning as a problem, you are bound to suffer from the smart-ache that plagues so many smart people.
We've begun now. I hope I've given you some food for thought. If you'd like to continue thinking about the themes I've raised in this introduction, following are some questions for you to answer.
CHAPTER QUESTIONS
At the end of each chapter, I provide a few thought-provoking questions. If you want to do a little writing on the issues presented, choose one or more questions to address.
Even if you tackle only one question, you will learn a lot about your situation and point yourself in the direction of answers. Remember that answering a question is not the same as taking action. If in your answer you identify certain work that you ought to do, then by all means, do it!
1 What are your first thoughts about the challenges I've identified and how they do or do not apply to you?
2 Do you agree that a smart person is at greater risk for meaning crises?
3 How do you interpret the phrase value-based meaning-making?
4 Since meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience, what do you suppose you can do to create more of it for yourself?
5 How might the very idea of meaning that you create help you deal with meaning crises?
1
SMARTNESS DISPARAGED
Countless infants are born into a social class, ethnic group, religious group, family of origin, or other set of circumstances or environmental factors in which their native intelligence either counts for little or is held as a negative.
Only a few theories of personality, primarily those influenced by Marxist economic ideas, have taken into account the challenges to personality development and expression created by these environmental circumstances. Yet that disparagement and negativity are hugely significant. If you have a good brain and the world you grow up in demands that you shut it down, you are bound to suffer.
Imagine the following sort of day in the life of a young girl with lots of native intelligence. Her household is in chaos, the kind of chaos that poverty, acrimony, addictions, and unfulfilled lives produce. Surrounded by threats, impulsivity, and zero tolerance for free thought, she somehow manages to get to school—and into another anti-thinking environment.
At school, more chaos prevails and, despite the idea that school advocates for thinking, she is confronted with a shrink-wrapped, fact-based, topic-based, and test-driven curriculum that no adult with the freedom to leave would tolerate for an instant.
After school, she goes off to parochial instruction and gets a narrow religious education that demands obedience, allegiance, and more thoughtlessness. Her evening involves her in more chaos, and to escape it she shuts her door, if she is lucky enough to have a room and a door, and finds some stress relief and some self-soothing by watching hours of ready-made, low-level television programming that further numbs her and dumbs her down. Finally she sleeps, only to awaken to another day just like this one.
What will happen to her brain potential in these circumstances? We can imagine. Likely, the best that she can do is bury herself in her books and become a good student, a grade seeker, a dreamer, or a mini-expert in some niche area of thought like spelling or puzzle solving, all of which is a far cry from becoming the deep, free, satisfied thinker she might have become in other circumstances.
That's probably a best-case scenario. More likely, she will not think much, even though she has the ability to think, and when confronted by tasks that require her to think, she will find herself too anxious and too unprepared to meet the rigors of thinking. As a result, she will fail, disappoint herself, dream small, and begin to form an identity
