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DeVliegendeHollander comments on [link] The surprising downsides of being clever - Less Wrong Discussion
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One of the reasons I don't really understand how intelligence can mean optimization or goal-seeking is that I too have seen it negatively correlated with happiness. Happiness can mean many things but probably one big chunk of its meaning will be a felt reward for goals achieved so this disassociation does not really go well with it being an optimization or goal-reaching ability.
You have probably heard the Bertrand Russel quote (1951) "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision." if there is any truth in it, the issue is that intelligence causes worrying and thus stress and unhappiness.
I may be a pessimist but often it felt unavoidable to me, the smarter you are, the more ways you can imagine how can things go horribly wrong.
Of course it is possible that it is another factor, let's dub it with a (not very) random variable name D, the D factor making you invest your mind into making up negative outcomes, not positive outcomes. Perhaps very intelligent people with very low D factor exist who can imagine a hundred ways how a plan can work better than expected.
But, alas, it seems smart people worry more than utopianize, come up with more negative outcomes than positive ones.
I wonder if there is a method to force your brain to imagine a potential positive outcome for every imagined negative one.
If people choose goals according to their ability to achieve them, then ability and success in achieving those goals will be uncorrelated. Where a correlation would be expected is between ability and achievements, not between ability and the difference between achievements and goals.
Intelligence is a puzzle-solving, dealing-with-complexity thing, the measure of how complicated a picture can be broken down to elements (understanding, analysis) and reassembled (model, prediction). At least this is how doing the Raven tests feels like. What puzzles me about intelligence-as-goal-achieving-ability is that is this really the bottleneck in so many goals? In my experience very few goals require dealing with complexity, and the most succesful people I personally know are rather simple-minded, their success lied in choosing a goal and then never, ever ever giving up, having a bulldog-like determination. Complexity was usually not a part of the picture.
Gratitude journaling is a good evidence-based way to put more of your attention on positive outcomes.
Doesn't it have a failure mode where if you have low self-worth issues, inferiority complex issues, then being aware of lucky things happening to you just makes you really feel you have not deserved them? This is the main reason I am wary of trying it.
I think you might lack a concept of what gratitude is. It's an emotion. It makes you feel warm. That in turn quite often leads to higher feeling of self worth.
Most people internal sense of self worth does get updated when they see evidence indicating that they actually do deserve something because they get it.
If I ask a woman out and she agrees than my self-worth rises. If she rejects me my self worth might drop a bit. In either case I might still question the wisdom of her decision and not base my complete self worth on one interaction but if over time interactions do effect my feeling of self-worth.
Isn't gratitude a deep, heartfelt thank-you to others, to life, to the universe, but not to yourself, because it is based being thankful for getting something you were not owed? Because if you get something you was owed, why feel this? And if you earn something yourself, it is not like getting an un-owed present from yourself...