I breezed through university. I might have worked a little harder to get a 4.0, but I knew even then that barely anyone outside of academia cares about GPA, and that I didn't want to be an academic. So I did the math, and I even made some strategic decisions to not complete some graded assignments in my last year. I'm not particularly challenged at work now, either.

I'm not a very good employee. I have on several occasions had one of my bosses tell me not to do more than the minimum effort. Don't improvise. The company doesn't get paid more for excellence. Just do as you're told. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and that guy wants "Rock and Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter (aka the Hey Song) for the 50th time in a row rather than whatever crap it is that you would prefer to play.

I feel like I could accomplish very difficult tasks, but I also feel that the effort would not only go unrewarded, but that other people would actively resent me for doing them.

If society loved genius, it would pay more for it. I'm not even a genius. I'm either slightly smarter than the median, or just egotistical enough to think that I am. But now I'm just a mediocre, run-of-the-mill software professional on paper, because that's what companies around here are willing to pay for, and so I eased off my throttle far enough to pretend to be that for them. Being on HN helps a lot when I'm just filling a seat.

Naturally, this hasn't exactly produced a healthy relationship between me and the rest of society.

I think that maybe schools don't want to produce geniuses, because they are very disruptive, and hard to please, and it's harder to keep them in line with a load of BS. There may actually be a tiny kernel of truth in the conspiracy theory that public schooling intentionally dumbs down the smartest students or endlessly occupies them with useless busy work, even as it trains up the others to be more useful as workers.