1. The fact that growing up smart, or being told you’re better or above average, leads to a burnout, anixity, and depression.

2. The ability to understand most possible outcomes and their consequences often leads to hesitation or inaction. As opposed to some who damn the consequences and just go for it.

3. It easily turns into how you identify yourself and can wreck your mental health. (If I’m not smart, what good am I??)

4. Smart people are good at identifying problems. Normally they are not able to solve them because of outside factors. Smart people live in a world where everything is broken and no one will allow them to fix it.

5. Being smart is a practice. You can have potential for intellectual aptitude but your mind must be exercised. Too many “smart” people from high school/childhood get out into the real world, are met with challenge for the first time, sink into their comfort zone, and then never do a smart thing again.

6. You might form your identity around and measure your self-worth by your talent, your achievements, and the praise you get from others… and that’s no way to live life.

7. Society will pave a golden path for above average people, but turn their backs on the ones who are exceptional, usually because those people rock the boat too much, see things the world doesn’t want to see, or are generally really awkward and weird as a result of never quite fitting in.

8. Most smart people never find meaningful application for their intelligence.

9. Smart people can often see the bad stuff coming and can also see that it really isn’t preventable unless people can be convinced to change their behavior and people can rarely be convinced to change their behavior. It’s depressing watching negative events unfold that you predicted. More often than not, being proved right is really depressing.

10. “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” – Ernest Hemingway

11. Just because you’re smart enough to see what’s wrong with yourself doesn’t mean you’re capable enough to change it.

12. Having high intelligence make you think a lot and very fast. Which is often good but if you get anxiety, now you have turbo-anxiety.

13. To paraphrase Socrates: Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.

14. If they ever admit that they are intelligent, they are automatically viewed as an arrogant asshole.

15. Smart people usually overthink stuff more than rather just do it.

16. That the truly smartest people probably (not always) won’t be recognised. The ‘smartest person you’ve ever met’ probably wasn’t actually the smartest person you ever met, they probably just conformed most to what you think being smart means.

17. Loneliness. Hard to find other people who think and/or feel as deeply as you do.

18. Being smart doesn’t make you immune to bad ideas, just better at defending them should you buy them.

19. Very often smart people expect the world to make sense and figure they will be better at working the system, which ever system that may be. Unfortunately the real world is very random, rarely makes any sense and is run by people that rarely are very smart.

20. They tend to overanalyze and obsess over minor details that most others would not have thought about, or cared about.

21. You can be smart and stupid at the same time. I used to be friends with someone who was incredibly clever academically, but managed to set herself on fire making toast.

22. The more intelligent you are, the less satisfying and more frustrating it is to interact with others.

23. Bosses are going to be threatened by your intelligence in many cases, partners are going to blame you for being an asshole when you attempt to explain things, friends will avoid you unintentionally in group gatherings since you don’t seem to fit in properly.

24. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you’re lazy as fuck.

25. A stupider person with a louder voice will get more attention.

26. Hard realization for me was that bring smart isn’t a virtue, it’s just luck. If you want to feel good about yourself, you’ve got to use that intelligence to perform actual virtues.

27. Target for bullying. You just blew the curve for the test. Students want revenge. Some take it out physically.

28. They know too much about how the world works and how terrible everything really is. No “ignorance is bliss” for them.

29. One thing I see pretty often is that dumb people tend to think they’re smarter than they are. Smart people don’t seem to realize how smart they are.

30. Smart is relative.