[SquishyPanda23]

> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode

That is probably true about being a little clever, but being really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart people often share few ideas and interests with others and spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.

[cm2012]

Nonetheless, IQ correlates to life outcomes like income really well. Averages are by no means destiny, but on average IQ makes life easier.

[SquishyPanda23]

Yes, that's true. If you project down to a linear relationship, more IQ is associated with more income.

Most of the data you see on that stop around an IQ of 125, which is about the average IQ of a PhD in the US.

But there's also a lot of research on people with very high iq and the links with depression, anxiety, loneliness etc.

If you want the easiest life possible, I don't think you want to maximize IQ. I think you want to go high enough that you're eligible for the high paying jobs, but not so smart that you feel like the other people in those jobs are idiots.

[dagw]

There are several studies that show that IQ correlates with income, at least at the extremes. However the studies I've seen found no correlations between IQ and overall happiness or contentment with how their life turned out.

[PeterisP]

"Happiness/contentment" is effectively a "balancing thermostat" of our motivation, a functional aspect that is used by our bodies to regulate our behavior and thus, if it functions properly (as opposed to certain diseases e.g. anhedonia in clinical depression) its long term average will be pretty much the same no matter how well you do, it's almost orthogonal to any metric of actual wellbeing. For example, studies show both winning excessive amounts of money in lotteries and sustaining major life-changing injuries (e.g. losing limbs or causing other disabilities) do not correlate with happiness in the long-term. Happiness effectively reflects (a) recent short-term changes to wellbeing; (b) momentary expectations or worries about future wellbeing; and (c) innate baseline happiness. It's not a reflection of how well someone is living; in essence, people living long-term in a literal gulag may easily have on average the same overall happiness/contentment as living in a nice first world upper-middle-class environment.

[SquishyPanda23]

The word "happiness" refers both to the temporary emotion and a long-term state of being satisfied with your life. Nowadays the long term state is often called "life satisfaction" in research.

Someone in a gulag would have low life satisfaction.

The original lottery winners vs accident victim study attempted to measure the long term state: https://www.talenteck.com/academic/Brickman-Coates-Janoff-19...

That study isn't the final word though. Other studies have found that winning the lottery increases life satisfaction, while still others have found that they don't.

[cm2012]

It's amazing how so many things in the human body work from a thermostat principle

[lukas099]

for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis