Creativity, Intelligence & Depressive Realism

 From a Facebook post i made, a thought-provoking subject emerged.

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

Tina Harada likes this.

Amanda Gulledge
I frowned when I read that so I would feel more intelligent.

Candace Lynn Breaux
Is that why I am unhappy so much of the time? LOL


Jae Baeli
LOL. Amanda--you crack me up.Candy--probably, yes.


Victoria Bard
love it...so true!

Sandi Partee
hmmm...so does that mean I'm not intelligent? Cause I'm happy as a lark! LOL!


I understand Sandi's reply was meant lightly, but let me just address the topic of Intelligence and Happiness...

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, no. There are types of intelligence and there are always variables that affect outcomes. So I would say the quote is a rule of thumb, not an absolute. There is enough data to suggest trending toward intelligent people being unhappy. It has to do with logic, pragmatism, conceptual relativism and other concepts both in and out of the purview of philosophy and philosophical thought. In the most common, if not colloquial sense, though, unhappy intelligent people are more fact-based in their ideation. There is, as such, a condition known as Depressive Realism, where seeking the truth of things--including ugly things--can cause hopefulness and positivity to wane when it becomes apparent that survival is indeed hard, people are indeed cruel and evil, and life is indeed unfair. It's about rejecting the cognitive dissonance of optimism in the face of negative data.¹

The human brain understands the world through patterns. When a new experience appears, the brain wants to match it with a previous experience in order to understand it. Paradoxically, that's why there is a pervasive belief in society that creative and/or intelligent people are at least partially mentally ill. The pattern does, indeed, exist. But it can just as easily be based on a chicken-or-the-egg paradigm as any other. Does creativity come first, and then depression? Do depression-oriented people seek creative expression? Do intelligent people tend toward a need for creative expression? Clearly, creative people need expression of that creative impulse, they are compelled to communicate it. They also crave freedom and the leeway to think out of the box. Business people with regular white collar jobs, tend toward logic and pragmatism, and have to punch a clock and strive to fit in. This flies in the face of a creative psyche, and so more creative people are drawn to artistic endeavor than more sterile, clinical, restrictive lifestyles in the mainstream. So it might not be that artists are depressed, so much as depressed people fare better in the arts.  

The newest research in this regard points to this connection being myth. However, perhaps it is a question of semantics. Which type of intelligence are we referring to? Creative intelligence? Spatial intelligence? Emotional intelligence? Since there are also a great number of divisions in the intellectual paradigm, it becomes a bit convoluted when making an emphatic statement one way or another. For instance, historically, we have known that prolific and gifted writers, artists and musicians have a tendency to self-destruct, either through escapism behaviors like drug use and alcoholism, or, tragically, through suicide. (And this is rather frightening, considering I am an artist, writer, and singer-songwriter. But i think i dodged that bullet pretty well). Many have sought these counter-productive coping mechanisms due to some aspect of being overwhelmed. Whether the "overwhelmedness" is due to the aspects of creative processes, or the realism that reveals ugly truths, is debatable. I think if you have a combination of realism and sensitivity, which usually goes hand in hand with highly creative individuals, you have a Molotov Cocktail of potential destruction. If you know how ugly things are, how unfair, and you are also very sensitive, this can lead to the inability to cope in a healthy way. The burden becomes too great.


Additionally, creative individuals are often alone, since acts of creation generally take place in isolation, so loneliness is a feature within the social psychology of the paradigm. And new research published in the online journal Genome Biology has shown that loneliness can actually make you ill.²  In research of 20,000 genes of both lonely and nonlonely people, the chronically lonely individuals showed 209 changes that resulted in immune changes, inflammation and adversely affected response to infection.

In relation to intelligence, it can be surmised that individuals with high IQ experience a type of ostracization from society, in that they don't feel like a "normal" person. This can lead to depression, since feeling different and misunderstood can become a divisive aspect between an intelligent person and the less intelligent majority. Intelligent people also ruminate more, and analyze information more, so that it becomes easy to impose feelings of isolation on every situation and interaction. If you combine the conditions of being both highly intelligent and highly creative, the potion becomes a catalyst for depression on a larger scale.

Critics of this correlation among intelligence, creativity and depression will say that studies done  have been largely retroactive in that they diagnose well-known creative people of antiquity after the fact. And yet, we understand so much more about symptomatology in the psychological vein than we did when those creative and intelligent people were alive. There is some merit in applying new understanding to the previously misunderstood.

While there are exceptions to the rule, such as intelligent creative people who ARE happy, this condition is ameliorated, in my understanding, by some other coping mechanism; usually, in the form of some voluntary belief system that allows the creative and intelligent individual to ignore the farther reaches of edification--those that would suggest more reason for unhappiness. As a coping mechanism, this is usually very effective, though it could not be characterized as completely entrenched in stark reality. Thus, the individuals who can live behind the cloak of voluntary self-deception are at once more capable of maintaining contentedness. And often, their ability to do so is predicated on the lack of biochemical imbalance that makes positive mindset difficult if not impossible. Yet, there will always be those who cannot accept this postulate, simply because they are not able to experience it. Those who do experience it, will be the ones who have to accept the melancholy that comes with the package: intelligence, creativity, and the propensity, genetic or otherwise, for depression. These individuals might also be unable to reach that rose-colored-glasses posture, no matter how much they would prefer it to be otherwise. This is the quagmire of what is commonly termed Intellectual Honesty. The truth hurts, and some individuals will always be able to choose that mitigation over the often harsh verities of existence.
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¹this concept is addressed partly in one of my current books "Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology" Videos on that blog.

2 http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/why-loneliness-is-bad-for-you

Creativity, Intelligence & Depressive Realism

Tell Me About Yourself

When I'm single, and meeting new women, dating and searching for that special someone who will fit harmoniously into my life, I often come across women who say "Tell me about yourself."

I hate that question.

Not because i can't talk about myself, or am not self-actualized enough to be able to communicate my identity, but because it's like standing in a library and someone asking, "What's in all those books?"

I usually have the urge to refer them to my books, or blogs, or music or art.

Then they say, "I don't want to look at your art, or listen to your music, or read your books or blogs, I want to get to know you on a real level..." 

What they fail to understand is that anyone can get to know me almost utterly, through my creative outlets, and probably in a more detailed fashion, than they could ever imagine. My real level is manifested in what I create.

I put so much of myself into my music and art and writing. Even when it's difficult, or embarrassing, or unpleasant, or painful. This is what I mean when I say I am HONEST. Honesty is not always a ride on a pony. But honesty has its own rewards; some of which are, I don't ever have to worry about contradicting myself, or apologizing for who I am, nor about feeling guilty, or being accused of deceit.
So often, when faced with probing questions about myself, I say, "Just listen to that song, or read that blog, or just read this or that book." --Because after going through the process of shoveling and pick-axing my way down deep and unearthing myself so completely, it's a source of dread and even tedium to have to relate it all again, when I've already plumbed the depths of my psyche and shared it in the artistic, written or musical form.

This doesn't mean I don't enjoy long, meaningful conversations. It just means there is such a legion of data in my head and heart, that I never know which things to select for sharing with an inquisitive new friend. It's always helpful if they can ask me something specific. Not "What are your politics?" but "What are your thoughts about immigration?" Not, "What do you think about spirituality and religion?" but "What do you believe in, and what's important to you?" 

Because if they ask me something general, my first thought is well, that depends...and then my brain explodes with a thousand different possible responses, and I don't know which one to pick. And then I come off like someone who has far too much to say about far too many things, and their eyes glaze over, and they are then just as overwhelmed as I was when they asked that question.

Tell Me About Yourself

Put THAT in Your Pipe

What with all the new age channeling going on, (allowing non-physical entities to speak through them) I've had to decide how I feel about it. . .because, you know, there can be nothing in my experience left misunderstood. . .

Aside from the Channels who are obvious charlatans, I believe there are some who are authentic (a truth that crosses over many boundaries and into many situations). In my endeavors to understand this phenomenon, I've had to take the beliefs I had in place and add any new beliefs I've come to; and I've come to this:

I am a channel, too. But I don't channel Abraham or Ramtha, The Enlightened One. I channel my Muse. Each time I embark upon a creative endeavor, I channel. Each time I have an inspiration, I channel. Each time I understand something on a profound level, figure out one of life's great mysteries, or make a decision at the grocery about "paper or plastic," I channel. (okay, the last one was added for levity, I don't consider my choice of grocery bags an enlightened epiphany. . .)

But I channel. And you channel. And everyone CAN channel.

When I set about creating the things I create—whether in the area of music, art, or writing, or giving a massage, or helping a friend figure some conundrum out, I am tapping in to that channel that we all have as spiritual beings, having a human experience. When I get any inspiration, it comes from SOMEWHERE. Call it inspiration or Muse or non-physical energy or collective consciousness . . . it comes from higher self—from collective unconscious, from God.

Abraham or Ramtha or just smartness from a human brain or mind. . .are all pulled from the same Source. It is often referred to, as a matter of fact, as "Source." The only difference is its manifestation; how the information presents itself. If someone is seeking and meditating, and some other consciousness appears and introduces itself or names itself, that is Source. If someone is seeking and meditating, and has the experience of epiphany, that is also source. There really is no fundamental difference, other than how it manifests itself, and in what form.

For instance, I might take a lump of clay on a potter's wheel, and make a large vase or I might also make a plate; it really depends on what the inspiration is—it's still the same clay, taking different forms. It's still Source.

If this is so, then we don't need those "middle-men"—those 'tweeners who try to make us believe that we can have nothing of God or higher consciousness without them. In other words, a priest is not a conduit to God. WE are the conduit to God. We are, in a very real sense, GOD. We all come from the same Source, the same essence, and so we are all portions of that Source, manifested in physical form, in a particular time-space continuum.

Put THAT in your pipe, and smoke it.

Put THAT in Your Pipe