Tests have placed me in the top 1% of intelligence - I am also a very very happy person. I have a lot of friends who score in the same range on such tests - most of them are happy, but for a lot of them it took a long time to get there. I think intelligent people find happiness in different ways than most, and they need to find their own way - that might be difficult.

On the contrary. The middle class in the netherlands are continiously bitching about everything the think is done to them on purpose, like vaccins, maroccans, crisis, etc. Intelligent people are mostly happy people until a half dumb person comes pissing them off. It's the dumb people that pollute the most, socially as well as environmentally.

Just proves that old saying "Ignorance is bliss", might be that if you dont know about the certain issues with starvation in the world, poor living conditions, environment going to hell, etc etc you can go about your life without a care. OR the fact that an intelligent person has poor social skills. IE some of the prodigal children who loss it after a certain age. There are ALWAYS exceptions to the rules.

Smart people may be more cynical. Does cynicism destroy happiness or is it a construct to preserve happiness? If you are smart you have the keys for control of your life. This, it seems to me, is a prerequisite for happiness. Unless you are bipolar.

I dunno, I've been tested as 1 of 50,000 by a psychiatrist, and I am unhappy. I'm currently unhappy because I don't think that the world deserves anything that it has, I mean what good have people done? And I know this sounds megalomaniacal, but the world is too cruel to deserve humility.

The unhappiness comes from not being around people you can hold a good conversation with. Since the majority of people are average, it's much easier for them to find others of similar intelligence, and easier to hold meaningful conversations - conversations that bore anyone on either end of the spectrum.

According to recent research (Yowon Choi and Ruut Veenhoven Erasmus University Rotterdam), there is no overall correlation between intelligence and happiness. "Studies among normal people show no correlation between scores on tests of intelligence and happiness. Studies among exceptional people also do not show the expected difference. Gifted people are not happier than average, but people with learning disabilities are. At the macro level, we assessed the correlation between average IQ and average happiness in 59 nations. At first sight, the correlation is positive. Yet the relationship disappeared when poor and rich nations were considered separately and also when culturally similar nations were compared. One interpretation of these findings is that intelligence does not affect happiness; another is that its positive effects are counterbalanced by negative ones. Future research should look for such negative effects."

That said, highly intelligence individuals can be unhappy due to lack of like minded people to associate with, due to a greater understanding of the world's problems and the difficulties involved in solving them, due to a skeptical outlook that prevents them from accepting the prevailing mythologies, religion or prejudices of the general community thus leading to social isolation.