["New Brainland" by Unit Seven; full-size image here]

Do you think people with higher IQs tend to be unhappier than those with lower IQs?

I don’t know. I’m smart, and it feels really uncomfortable saying that. I would feel much safer enumerating my many imperfections. But amidst the detritus of my personhood, there is: intelligence. I’ve also struggled with acute bouts of misery for many years.

Sometimes it seems like most of the people I know with clinical mood disorders or addictions are (or, in their lifetime, were) quite unhappy.

That’s all purely anecdotal, of course, although there are a number of articles on the subject. Who knows.

Do intelligent people think themselves into depression? A blessing turned into a curse? Dr. H has also pointed out that when you are a precocious child (e.g., intent on memorizing Hamlet’s soliloquy at age ten) with a large vocabulary, adults tend to mistake that for emotional maturity and a preparedness to take on adult responsibilities that in reality you are just not ready for.

Thinking about this makes me grateful for the great diversity of human beings. As a species, I daresay we’d be paralyzed if we possessed on the whole too much or too little intelligence, too much or too little melancholy.

Agatha Christie puts it more neatly (and much more amusingly) than I do in the Poirot mystery Dead Man’s Folly:

Alex Legge remained serious. “I should like to see every feeble-minded person put out—right out! Don’t let them breed. If, for one generation, only the intelligent were allowed to breed, think what the result would be!”

“A very large increase of patients in the psychiatric wards, perhaps,” said Poirot drily. “One needs roots as well as flowers on a plant, Mr. Legge. However large and beautiful the flowers, if the earthy roots are destroyed there will be no more flowers.”