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!
I recall you saying you're pretty low in neuroticism, and in this piece, you showcase that you truly, deeply, don't understand what it's like to be high in neuroticism.
Something that's helped me is to accept that I experience quite a lot of emotions that can't be expressed to others, at least in their raw form. A significant source of torment for many, and for me, is precisely the pressure to always be cheerful. It helps with inner peace to discard that as goal.
That said, I agree with the central premise that attaining deep understanding does not necessarily entail being dark, brooding, and neurotic.
Then again, Jesus does not seem to have been cheerful: not once in the Gospels is he described as smiling or laughing, but there is the famous "Jesus wept".
You don't really engage at all in how knowing too much can make people reasonably miserable. Some truths just make it quite reasonable to brood.
For example, take plea deals. Plea deals sure seem like coerced confessions, you are threatening someone with a harsher sentence if they don't confess. The data shows that many innocent people do confess when given analogous plea deals for confessing to cheating in class. It's also often instrumentally rational to confess, in that your expected net loss from confessing is lower than your expected net loss from going to court to defend yourself, in part because of how costly going to court is and in part because prosecutors are often free to make the alternative to the plea deal very harsh indeed.
About 95% of criminal cases in the U.S. end in plea deals. Why does our court system rely so much on coerced confessions that often make it rational for innocent people to confess? Well, if just 20% of people insisted on a jury trial instead, it would take decades for the court to adjudicate each case. This is fundamentally because we have too many laws and too few lawyers. We have too many laws in large part because the people who get those laws passed (legislators, to some extent bureaucrats. and, yes, voters too) do not take seriously into account the costs of enforcing those laws. We have too few lawyers in large part because the professional organizations in charge of the licensing people to become lawyers are themselves run by lawyers, who have direct monetary incentives to reduce the supply of lawyers.
But notice that the above case only presents coerced confessions as a necessary evil in an unjust world (a world of ignorant political actors and greedy licensing organizations). Yet, if you make the case that our justice system primarily relies on coerced confessions, no normal person responds by saying "Yes, but coerced.confessions are a necessary evil!" They instead try to desperately deny that our justice system could be so blatantly flawed, probably in large part due to status quo bias but also just because of how unbelievably unjust it sounds when you look at the relevant facts above. Yet, in reflexively defending plea deals in principle, they are just selling out their rights to those unbelievable injustices in the world.
About a century ago, almost everyone, even the Supreme Court, agreed that plea deals violated our constitutional right to a jury trial. Their whole purpose was to punish people who insisted on a jury trial (and then lost) in order to disincentivize jury trials (and, in practice, this applies to both the guilty and the innocent). Obviously, if the government can legally punish you for exercising your constitutional rights, you don"t really have those rights. If your government's constitution gives you a right to criticize that government, but then they punish you for doing so, you don't actually have such a right.
Nowadays, the people at large have instinctively decided that it is more important to defend our criminal justice system as it is than it is to defend our (I would imagine, quite important) right to a jury trial, the right to insist on due process rather than coerced confessions. This is why no serious poltician brings up the issue as a significant part of their platform, even though (you might have imagined) that the people would actually care about whether they can be unjustly imprisoned after being coerced to confess. The people care more about the systems we have than the rights those systems are meant to protect.
I'm not Pangloss. I can't be cheerful at all that. I can look for other things which bring me joy, but it's perfectly reasonable to be broody about many terrible truths. Thus, if you are disposed to seek truths and end up often discovering quite miserable ones, it is quite reasonable to be disposed to brooding.