The precise relationship between happiness and intelligence is heavily conditional. If you put someone of considerable intelligence in the court of Urbino or in a yaji or a workshop in a Swiss canton during the Calvinist era, it's likely that they will be happy to a degree that less intelligent people may never reach, because these environments reward and select for intelligence.
If you put an intelligent person in a place or situate them in a time that does not value intellect - or, moreover, fails to value the kind of intellect they possess - then their happiness will undergo exponential decay, as they will feel simultaneously misunderstood and useless.
When one thinks of episodes like Russell going into Chartres cathedral in his 70s, whereupon a tour load of Belgian (or was it Finnish?) tourists noticed him and turned all their interest on him, it's clear that our age by comparison does not optimise at all for any intellect that does not know how to code. In this context, it's no wonder intelligent people are unhappy, particularly as there are also a whole host of relevant ambient factors (social atomisation, the increasing material difficulties of life in the West) capable of degrading happiness irrespective of intellect.
The precise relationship between happiness and intelligence is heavily conditional. If you put someone of considerable intelligence in the court of Urbino or in a yaji or a workshop in a Swiss canton during the Calvinist era, it's likely that they will be happy to a degree that less intelligent people may never reach, because these environments reward and select for intelligence.
If you put an intelligent person in a place or situate them in a time that does not value intellect - or, moreover, fails to value the kind of intellect they possess - then their happiness will undergo exponential decay, as they will feel simultaneously misunderstood and useless.
When one thinks of episodes like Russell going into Chartres cathedral in his 70s, whereupon a tour load of Belgian (or was it Finnish?) tourists noticed him and turned all their interest on him, it's clear that our age by comparison does not optimise at all for any intellect that does not know how to code. In this context, it's no wonder intelligent people are unhappy, particularly as there are also a whole host of relevant ambient factors (social atomisation, the increasing material difficulties of life in the West) capable of degrading happiness irrespective of intellect.