I do not mean this comment as a brag. Far from it.
I am one of these people - I tested with an incredibly high IQ (nearly 200 at the time, though I know that fades). I graduated with a 4.2 GPA, and a 3.9 average (because on semester I chose to 'punish' my mother who was taking credit for my high grades, and got a D just to prove it)
I have a very hard time with life in general. People bore me to tears. You have to repeat and dumb down everything for them all the time. Most jobs are mind numbingly dull.
Unlike the people in this article, I had support. My grandfather was similar to me, and taught me some basic coping mechanisms. They have largely worked, and I've learned how to survive with a nearly perfect memory (oh god the horror, I wouldn't inflict it on anyone) and what I like to call an incredibly high idle.
I make enough to get by, and the company I work for seems pleased with me. Been there 16 years so far, always resistent to anything beyond a simple lead type position. Thank god my management usually recognizes that I am VERY bad at dealing with people, and lets me get back to solving problems in my very quiet and dark office.
The coping that works for me is split attention. If I'm simultaneously listening to two or more musical pieces, working on different problems on different computers and screens, and fiddling with something (like a pen or something), I can get through a day.
If for some reason I'm restricted down to a single source of input (like just a laptop), I basically go completely mad. My mental energy level is far too high, and the frustration of waiting for the computer to keep up causes me to get angry beyond reason.
My life is a fucking hell, and I also spend a lot of time contemplating suicide. The imaginative and interesting methods help occupy some cycles.
I do this also.
A little unsolicited advice. I know it's a throwaway, so i don't know if you'll see it. but here it is.
Maybe you want to go skydiving, or visit petra, or build a farnsworth fusor. You're going to have really bad days or maybe years. I know it sounds hollow, and in the middle of those bad times it's a pretty flimsy support. But please consider promising yourself to follow through on one dream before you follow through on a plan.
Make sure you're really done. Make sure there's nothing in the whole world that's interesting that you want to learn about. Because, when you follow through, you're really done.
It's ok to ruin your health and credit rating to do something crazy if you're on the way out anyway. Jump out of the plane. Travel the world. Build the machine. It's your life, and you should live it as you see fit. But that extra bonus time in life can be pretty nice. Please please try everything out before you decide you're done.
They were bright, of course, I wouldn't quibble with that, but they were also really lousy communicators. It wasn't so much that everyone around them was just a dum-dum, but that they weren't very good at explaining things. They seemed to misattribute those folks not understanding them to people being dumb, not their inability to express ideas.
Or do you simply not bother?
When a person has spent their entire life trying to communicate whatever they were excited about to people who are only interested in the fad du jour, they don't develop the skills to communicate well once they do find people bright enough to understand.
For example, go walk around MIT, Harvey Mudd, or Cal Poly and see how poorly freshmen do with their initial social gatherings.
You personally are probably extremely smart (this is HN after all, where I seek refuge from the total fucking paste eaters of the world) - but that just means that you were dealing with someone who had never had an opportunity to learn those communication skills. Unlike you, presumably.
But also those who spend too much time thinking to themselves without taking the time to slow down and verbalize those thoughts to others form thought patterns that make no sense to anyone except that person. I think it is a common trait of high IQ people to be able to think far, far faster than your own internal verbal monologue can follow. When I'm solving a computer problem in my mind I'm not thinking in an inner monologue voice. My thought process is bouncing through voiceless mental shortcuts (macros if you will) that only make sense to me, and any attempt to keep up with a verbal explanation just wouldn't work. Other people don't have the same macros you have in your head.
But when in a work setting I am pairing with a fellow engineer (one of the duties of my team lead role) rather than just working alone I am force to slow down and verbalize my thoughts so they can follow and understand. This can be very annoying on a surface level, but also enlightening for my own self. When I look at a problem and within seconds know the answer there are two things I could do: just tell them how to fix it, or slow down and force myself to explain in more detail to fix it and how I came to that conclusion. The latter approach is not a chore for me, but a puzzle actually, and I get a great feeling of accomplishment from being able to verbalize and explain my inner thought process to someone who isn't in my own head.
It's especially difficult if you have people expecting you to succeed, to make astronomical amounts of money or get perfect grades, or whatever, while you don't feel motivated to achieve these sorts of things.
It was difficult for me being isolated intellectually, that there wasn't many I could talk to about Complicated Things. A grade school math teacher is not prepared for this sort of thing. At least today there's ways of getting in touch with actual experts in the field and digging deeper into topics that used to be completely off limits.
I've learned to zen out, that it's not imperative to be productive all the time, that not every "cycle" is wasted if not doing important stuff. A little meditation to calm the avalanche of mental activity can be profoundly helpful.
So I've read books on dozens of random topics, I've learnt to keep my mouth shut, people don't like that I know all that stuff they see it as threatening to their own self-worth.
My previous GF was a physio and mentioned she was writing a training course on compartment syndrome, she was astounded that I knew what that was and responded with "Why would you need to know about that you just program computers?" as though there was something intrinsically wrong with been interested in things, we broke up soon after because "We are too different in outlook" which was fine.
Current GF is a Hungarian (I mention this because she has commented several times that there is a fundamental cultural difference in how my culture (England) and hers approach education) with two degrees and working on her third in shipping, she has pretty much exactly the same outlook on life as me and her pile of books next to the bed is as varied as mine, She also knows way more about lots of things than me which is frigging awesome.
You might need to find a new doctor. The good ones that I know, including one of my parents, read medical papers all the time to stay up to date on studies which are obviously relevant to their job. There are numerous inventions that have come about because of inventive strategies applied by doctors. Maybe this doesn't apply to all doctors, but the ones I have interacted with (in the US) are quite intelligent.
I tried modadinil a couple times (it's very easy to get online) and realized my reaction to it was not like others told be about, there was no high or buzz, but I was suddenly very aware of the world around me and it was easy to funnel attention and interest exclusively into one thing at a time and the results of doing so was amazing. Adderall is even better to me, and somehow even socializing becomes more appealing and interesting after taking it. You'll still be smart as hell, but it's different. worth experimenting if you're stuck, assuming the risk of harm can be minimized sufficiently (ie, you don't have a heart condition or seizure disorder)
Not many brilliant people ever become rich. To become rich takes not just cleverness or even genius, but the ability to convince others to invest in it and not simply fuck you over.
For myself, I'm just not interested in inventions. I'm far more interested in math and geology, so I spend most of my free time just being amazed by the earth. I'm no better at inventing a million dollar idea than the next guy. Probably worse, since I have literally spent hours investigating the wear patterns and flaking on a rock outcropping and considering the forces involved in it.
Uh, normie here, so the following question likely has an obvious answer, but it sounds like you are bored not because of a lack of interesting problems, but a lack of capability to tackle interesting problems in your preferred problem domains. To my knowledge, we don't really empirically know what the earth is composed of beneath the crust. Could there be open problems that might happily engage you in the area of determining/cataloging the math behind using say, neutrino interactions with various types of geologic matter to put in the theoretical foundations to an empirical experiment to establish what we really are standing on top of? If not neutrinos, then perhaps you could work on other ways we might be able to harness what we know of particle physics to interact with the matter beneath our feet?
As beautifully weird and wonderful as the universe is, and as fractally complex as it reveals itself the more we look into it, I can't even imagine having the intellectual firepower you have and being bored. I'm constantly frustrated that I'm not smarter, and unable to absorb new material faster than I currently able; I could literally access and integrate new material like Data in Star Trek and still not be satisfied, because there simply isn't enough time to enjoy it all.
http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html
Perhaps this Anders would be interested to discuss the particular brand of paint you enjoy watching dry [0].
[0] Which if one has any fascination at all with viscous fluids or amorphous solids, one really must try sometime.
I got to know Anders over 20 years ago, he was clearly crazy intelligent, and great fun, because he would always go off in funny what-if scenarios. Checking his blog confirms that he's still doing exactly this, and still thinking very hard about it. :-)
I went to a world class university, having done math a year early and winning contests.
It's very, very easy for me to find something I don't understand. There's always some course or wikipedia or something that I can't just pick up and understand. So how could I ever be bored?
You mean socially bored rather than intellectually? These days it's not that hard to find other smart people, is it?
From your testimony and Throwaway's it seems most of your problems are due to externalities of other's comparative stupidity. An 8-foot tall man feels out of place in a world built for 5'10 people, through no fault of his own but also through no fault of the comparative midgets. We may have done a disservice to smart people by attaching such stigma to Mensa and other high-IQ societies. A sufficiently selective club or workplace seems like it would solve most of your problems. It also strikes me that once we can select for high-IQ alleles, it might be best to narrow the bell curve even as we raise the mean past your and Throwaway's level.
There's no stigma around getting together with people to "make" or hack or do math or write an intelligent blog or do whatever smart thing you enjoy.
I'm a decidedly not smart person, but through some good fortune I work with some extremely smart people. I work in aerospace as a technician and many of my coworkers are Engineering/CompSci/Math/Physics people. I frequently pester them with all sorts of questions that to them must be very mundane. Unless they are really good at humoring me, which is entirely possible, I get the feeling that many of them genuinely enjoy explaining things, even when they have to dumb it down, to me.
Unfortunately, being a genius has little to do with being a good person. Given the mad scientist archetype, there may even be a correlation between douchebag and genius.
One of the problems of being intelligent is learning how to tolerate and accept boredom. I used to rebel against being bored and being ahead of the class. I would think: "this is all so easy and why isn't anybody interested in anything interesting?"
Once I learned that dealing with boredom is basically the price you pay for fitting in things improved a lot. I deal with a lot of friendships that are profoundly boring just so I can have people to talk to and socially interact with. I don't complain. I don't patronize. I just go through the motions so I can cargo cult my way to a social life. I lowered my expectations on everything and everybody to absolutely nothing and it works great.
I overhear other people's conversations and I think to myself: "how can these people even put up with that level of conversation?. They must be pretending to be entertained!" Then I remember all about the boring world out there where people go about their daily lives talking all day about boring stuff.
After all this boring interaction I'll occasionally go to a Deep Learning study group and we'll read the latest paper. Very smart people will analyze the paper and leave me a little disconcerted that there are people that I can engage with intellectually and be challenged and entertained by in a sincere way. Anyway, that's just my two cents about the world for the disgruntled /r/iamverysmart crowd out there, whether you actually are or not. :)