In the Belly of the Bathtub Curve

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Everyone wants to be happy, but not everyone will be.

In fact, I think too much happiness would screw things up anyway, but that's not really my point. Not tonight, anyway.

Today, tonight, on this moonless night, my point is that Lisa Simpson – the spiky-haired, intellectual offspring of Marge and Homer - may have said something important. Lisa made a point worth considering when she graphed happiness against IQ and showed the ghastly inverse relationship that dooms our finest minds to lives of nibbling angst and eroding worry. My point is, happiness and intelligence may be inversely related.

It's not a new idea.

Of course there's a big difference between being intelligently unhappy and just being pissed off.

Animals exist in balance and harmony – they fight each other and they kill each other, but only as necessary. For them, that's where it ends. It's a simple system. But us, we humans, for mysterious reasons we take our formidable intellect and use it to smash everything in striking distance, leaving the smarter among us to worry about the long-term ramifications.

Personally, I can't be bothered recycling.

There are plenty of examples of troubled genius, of the angst that seems to accompany IQ. There are tortured artists like Van Gogh who cut his ear off and mailed it to a girl he liked. And popular music is littered with the corpses of its greatest contributors, who imploded under the weight of their own creativity. What internal hell must Einstein have lived with? Were those long nights in the workshop, spitting out a stream of inventions that would make General Electric blush, really about the unbridled joy of invention, or were they late-night exorcisms, violent rituals of self-purification to drive out the venom, settle the soul and buy enough peace to allow a few hours of sleep? Maybe.

Conversely, the Backstreet Boys always seemed pretty happy. Eminem pretends he's angry but I don't really buy it. I'll bet he's content. Of course there's a big difference between being intelligently unhappy and just being pissed off. You can be stupid and still carry a headfull of hate and rage. I think that's a different sort of thing. It's not about being aware of your own shortcomings and the myriad threats to yourself and your future offspring, it's more about being bitter that things didn't go the way you wanted. That's another phenomenon altogether.

We haven't got time to talk about that tonight.

Of course it's possible that the really intelligent aren't unhappy. Maybe Lisa didn't quite get the relationship right – maybe it's more of a bathtub curve. Maybe happiness falls as intelligence rises, up to a certain point and then it curves right back up as you start to figure stuff out, get stuff done, achieve your aspirations and build those funny little contraptions that you always sort of thought you might know how to make. Maybe unhappiness is confined to the damnable wastes of the intellectual mid-ranges. Those desolate, moonlit landscapes where the light of IQ is bright enough to illuminate the problems and reveal the distant outline of high, icy peaks of achievement, but isn't bright enough to show the way to their crystalline summits.

There may be some truth there.

Maybe, but on the same note, it's never the idiots that you see stressing out - it's the smart guy who works with them that is losing his hair. The idiots are content to bumble through their day and then go for beers. The cursed fellow with the mid-range IQ is the one who is running around screaming, trying desperately to make things work. His mind isn't on après office beer - it's on survival.

I had a boss once who was virtually impossible to stress out. He had all kinds of reasons to be stressed, given that he seemed to have no idea what his job was, but he didn't care. I once watched him eat his lunch, completely content, while the CEO verbally sand-blasted him through a speakerphone. While our corporate leader lost his mind over things that not only hadn't gotten done, but had never even been started, my boss rummaged around for napkins and ketchup. It was awe-inspiring. There he sat, in the eye of a trailer-park devouring storm, and his greatest concern was condiments. Eventually they fired him of course, but I'll bet he sleeps like a baby.

Intelligence and awareness are closely correlated. And awareness, dusty nomads, is pain. Of course, pain makes you strong and when you know that the train is coming, you have the option of stepping out of the way, but that doesn't change the fact that you are going to suffer for the privilege.

Might as well get used to it. Comfort is bad for you anyway.