Don't Be Deep, Dark, and Brooding

Don't have your self-image be as the emotionally-troubled, intellectually complex protagonist

The Bartimaeus trilogy is a delightful series by British writer Jonathan Stroud about demons who like to use footnotes.

Or, more precisely, about demons, at least one of whom likes to use footnotes. He’s the main character. In the book, magicians are in charge of the demons and are high-status, presiding over the everyday workings of society and government (you may have guessed by now that the genre is not a biography!). One of the things that the trilogy describes is that the wizards who most heavily invest in the kabuki theatre—billowing capes, a great flowing beard, and so on—are generally the weakest. The most powerful magicians look like well-dressed government bureaucrats in suits and ties.

I think a similar thing is true intellectually. The people who spend the most time meditating over their status as intellectuals and make reading books a core feature of their personality tend not to be the most impressive people intellectually. The really high-level wizards, like Michael Huemer, don’t go on endlessly about the books they read or the deep thoughts they have about those books which induce routine existential crises. Rather than indulging in prolonged and tedious metacommentary about their deep thoughts, they instead just tell you the things they’ve been thinking. And those things are clever and interesting.

There are a great number of philosophically amateurish dilettantes who make their love of philosophy something of a core feature of their personality. Similar things are true of English literature—many make their love of it a kind of aesthetic performance—but literature isn’t my field, and so I find such people’s uninformed prancing less noxious. They spend a lot of time thinking about how deep they are because they think about deep questions, and little time actually thinking about deep questions. If they ever came across a genuinely impressive work of philosophy—written in plain, ordinary prose—they would not recognize it. The only philosophy they appreciate is the kind that has enough jargon and rhetorical flourishes to send a troop of leopards into a coma.

These people profoundly overestimate their own depth. They are hopelessly confused on nearly every question. But this, on its own, wouldn’t be so bad. Lots of people are hopelessly confused. The real tragedy is that it makes them pointlessly miserable.

Very smart people are often cheerful. Brian Caplan is probably the single most cheerful person I know. But unfortunately, the idea of a DeepThinker(tm) in the public consciousness is of someone melancholy and reflecting, someone whose reflection on ideas causes them profound and existential angst. Someone who sees more, who seems at every moment ready to break out into Oppenheimer’s “I am become death,” monologue. Lots of people know Nietzsche, few know Kripke.

For this reason, of the people who think of themselves as very deep, for a great many of them, their self image is of a certain kind of person who is very miserable. For them to demonstrate their profound intellectual seriousness they must not be cheerful, nor can they read the things they enjoy. They must read various classics—the more Russian, nihilistic, and depressing, the better. They must, at every juncture, show that they are more morose than you.

Geniuses are supposed to be tortured, after all. Van Gogh cut off his year. To establish that you are like Van Gogh, so too must you. Many of the great historical geniuses met an unpleasant end. The people who lived out a happy life in the fields do not have dramatic tales written about them. For this reason, there is an association in the public mind between being impressive in a field and being brooding.

But this notion is bullshit! Geniuses aren’t actually consistently brooding, and even if they were, being brooding is not an automatic shortcut to being a genius. Geniuses are sometimes tall, but that doesn’t mean that getting leg-extensions raises one’s IQ. You are not the main character in a book. It is generally good—both for you and for others—if you are happy and pleasant to be around. Your aim in life should not be to have maximally interesting emotional turmoil, but instead to have maximally little emotional turmoil.

You should not be brooding. You are not an Eldrazi—you do not need to brood.

The two smartest people I know are both quite cheerful in ordinary conversation. Neither seem tortured. Ed Witten and Terrence Tao, two of the smartest mathematicians alive today, are perfectly good-natured. You can be preternaturally clever without having the humor and fashion sensibilities of a ghost.

We have been mislead by fiction. While the most interesting characters in the books you read as kids are depressing, such is not true in real life. I recall one of the main characters in Deltora Quest—the second book series I ever really enjoyed—was quite literally named Doom! As those with a detective’s mind might be able to guess, he did not have the demeanor of daisies in summer!

But real life isn’t like that! The people who most go out of their way to showcase their alleged emotional depth are generally the most intellectually shallow. The more smoke and mirrors there are, the less substance there tends to be. Those who brood tend to become unemployed, pot-smoking, nirvana-listening art majors rather than Einsteins or Newtons.

So go out and be cheerful! Do not think of yourself as being like Van Gogh or Beethoven. You will be no more clever, and quite a bit more miserable, if you have the persistent mannerisms of a graverobber! Do not center your personality around vainly signaling your intellectual depth, especially not if the way you do that is by being a giant buzzkill! Just be cheerful!