Somewhere down the line I stopped caring about intelligence.
I think it’s because the intelligence which was “valued” in one’s entire education is a complete farce. Maybe if you ascend high enough in the academic tower so the memorization starts to mean something. But I never got that high. I couldn’t – toward the end of undergrad a despondency took over and it’s impossible to imagine ever bothering again.
If you ever want to talk about intelligence, then there’s only ONE single metric by which it’ll be measured:
How satisfied are you? Do you have what you want?
The “tortured genius” is all cope. Because our tortured compadre is failing the fundamentals: satiating or dissipating whatever ails you. If you’re miserable all the time, you’ve unresolved problems: what’s a better measure of intelligence than solving your own problems?
The whole function of existence is learning how to deal with these things and grow past them. If you can’t figure out how to make yourself happy – which is the case for the majority, and even myself – what does it mean to even be smart then?
This is why I try to not think about much. This is why my writings here are all so fragmented and have little to prove.
Still, I secretly wished I cared about these things. Maybe then I’d feel so ashamed about how little I know that I’d go fix that. Or you could convince yourself that yes, acquiring enough status and learning to never visit these quarters ever again would make things better.
But you know, it seems like the happiest people – a.k.a. the most intelligent – don’t think about much. Maybe they got some virtues. Maybe they aren’t soiled and screaming or caught in addictive loops because of a fundamental error in one’s cognition.
But I have this monster on my shoulder. It’s digging into the side of my skull. It keeps planting these sedatives packaged in simple words which seem to mimic monks, however degenerately.
You are already all you need to be. There’s no difference between sitting alone in a quiet room and sitting alone with a quiet screen, if, in either case, you’re content. Or that you never really had much control over these things anyway.