I’m a very smart person.

This isn’t a brag. It’s just a fact. I’m a very smart person. There are some people who might disagree with that, but I don’t care. Those people aren’t smart enough to understand how smart I am. It’s no big deal to me, but the point is just that I really don’t care. I’m smart and I know it.

But in this society, there is a certain expectation on smart people that is entirely inappropriate.

Intelligence is supposed to make us elite.

Newsflash: We’re not.

We’re just different.

I actually envy the less intelligent sometimes. Because they are not smart enough to understand quite so much how life sucks. They can go through life like the world’s their oyster, and in general it’s just a really fun and beautiful place… to those not smart enough to understand exactly how it isn’t.

And being smart has done me no favors.

Because I have many, many mental blocks. I’m smart, but I have a very difficult time turning that into anything useful.

I have a lot of hobbies. But, let me give an example of how much intelligence sometimes does not work for me.

I’ve had a 3D printer for many years now, but I’ve done very little with it, because it’s one thing to understand how something works in theory, and another to turn it into something concrete. And I have many problems with the latter. It’s been this way my whole life. I learned many different things in high school, but I was absolutely awful at turning them into something concrete.

I don’t know why this is, but fixing it is a struggle. Sometimes it’s hard to do absolutely anything, and that just puts me into a spiral of depression, because I see all the stuff I want to do, and just can’t bring myself to do it without a lot of effort.

Put bluntly, intelligence really is only of limited use in making one a whole person, and it actually works against being happy.

I wish, as a society, we’d stop worshipping intelligence, or conversely, stop vilifying it. The intelligent people of the world have a role, as do the artists (and I’m unfortunate to be both). Everyone has their place in the world, and no one person is better than any other. Elon Musk, for example, has a role. He fills it very well. He’s not a very good person. Frankly, I’m not jealous of him, nor do I want to be him. His life appears very empty, unfulfilled, and full of unrequited searching. All the money in the world will never buy him what he’s been searching for. But he has his role, and I think he does a very good job at his role. I wouldn’t want it.

My 3D printer is in the other room churning out a part now. That’s good. I can get past it. It’s just hard sometimes. All the intelligence in the world cannot bring me happiness or motivation. And sometimes I’d trade all my intelligence for a shot at being happy.

But I can’t make that trade. And neither can any of the other high-level intelligent people of the world.

So much the worse.