might start our exploration by looking at what happens right from the beginning of life when a bright child is born into a family or society where being smart is underappreciated or disparaged. We might begin by trying to get a handle on what sort of thing being a smart person is by looking at some of the threats that come from a racing mind—threats like mania, insomnia, obsessions, and addictions. But I'd like us to start with the meaning instead. Here is a report from a client who nicely illustrates our existential themes. Jeanette explained:
My first negative experience of being too smart was in fifth grade. I had gone to a rural school (a tiny village on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge) in a three-room school that combined grades since there were very few of us. I was in the largest class (five students). Whether it was intentionally progressive or not, we had stations and were free to roam the room and read or do arithmetic or work on puzzles as we chose. It was heaven.
Then my family moved to a Portland suburb, and I was in a regimented fifth-grade class with a Nazi teacher who made us sit with our hands folded if we finished an exercise before the others, which I always did. I learned how excruciating boredom can be; I began to eat sugar to soothe myself, and I acted out. I was in trouble a good deal of the time from then on.
I have always associated my intelligence with a propensity for boredom, for hypervigilance, for hypersensitivity, and a frustrated quest for meaning. Into adolescence, I learned that drama was an antidote to boredom, and then I discovered alcohol, and for the next twenty years, lived in drinking and drama as well as bad relationships that enabled both. However, I do credit my intelligence with helping me to be a highly functional drunk (graduate school, PhD, jobs as a professor, and an ability to look good while under the influence).
When I found myself in a treatment center, the staff apparently had a pool on how long I would stay. Their experience was that the very intelligent were the least trainable into the twelve steps and sobriety. However, I beat those odds and have been sober ever since. However, I still struggle with boredom, with food addiction as a soother, and with workaholism to stay engaged. Fortunately, I found painting and fiction writing as partial answers; and the idea of the necessity of making meaning has been the real lifesaver.
We hear in Jeanette's story many of our themes. We see how boredom arises as a special, terrible problem for smart people. A smart person has a lively brain; that brain wants to work; it is primed to think; and if you give it nothing to do, it will do nothing for as long as it can bear to do nothing, but it will not be happy. It will be bored and, worse, begin to doubt the meaningfulness of life. It will say to itself, “Golly, is this what life is all about, doing a boring job and then maybe watching some television?” A bored smart person is a person smack in the middle of a meaning crisis.
If you were to find yourself in that situation, isn't it reasonable to suppose that you might engage in something at once exciting and soothing to deal with this painful state of affairs? Mightn't you start drinking a lot? Mightn't you drive fast around town? Mightn't you gamble? Mightn't you seek out as much sex as possible? It is easy to see how sadness, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions arise as a response to meaning crises where you find yourself under-occupied, bored, and bereft of the experience of meaning.
We begin to see how, for example, addiction might arise in a bored smart person as a reaction to a meaning problem rather than as a medical problem, a genetic problem, a psychological problem, or a problem with willpower. For example, quite a number of our Nobel Prize–winning novelists have been alcoholics. Is it more likely that they share the same medical problem or that they share the same problems with smartness, boredom, and meaning?
Meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience. A smart person is more likely than the next person to be aware of its absence and to be affected by its absence. He is more likely to get bored, to experience meaninglessness, to begin to see the extent to which neither his society nor the universe are built to satisfy his meaning needs, and to then hunt for soothing or exciting meaning substitutes that ultimately reduce his freedom.
Meaning is a smart person's most difficult challenge. In natural psychology we say: look to a meaning problem before you look to a medical problem, a psychological problem, or a so-called mental disorder. If you are smart and you do not know what to do to handle meaning crises when they arise, you are in danger of living in perpetual pain.
As a creativity coach and a natural psychology specialist, I talk to smart people every day of the week. I chat with lawyers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters, businesspeople, and folks from every walk of life. They include folks settled in a profession as well as folks struggling to find an outlet for their intelligence and looking for work that will allow them to be as smart as they are. They include individuals who are successful in their careers and those who, because of the realities of the marketplace, struggle to achieve success.
Virtually all of them are bothered by the sadness that dogs so many contemporary intelligent people. Virtually all of them are afflicted by anxiety that is connected to their very ability to think. Many have had to deal with addictions, and many still must deal with them. Some are not strangers to mania, and many live in that strangled calm state that smart people cling to so as to avoid actual mania. What they have in common is that they are smart—and in 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 . . .