Intelligent People Would Rather Die Than Be Simple-Minded

There is a less innocent symptom of having a quick brain than producing a bad case of doctor’s handwriting

Here’s a thought for you; take away the very basis of someone’s passion from them entirely, and now can it be truly said that they are still the same person afterward in any meaningful sense?

For to be something which you fundamentally are not is draining and miserable, but likewise, to become a husk of your former self is a horrifying idea and terrible reality for those that succumb to the likes of dementia.

Passion and obsession can often get intermingled with each other, for passion inevitably produces a certain flair of obsessive, intense concern in the level of interest and emotion put into something that one truly cares about.

A bodybuilder, for instance, has to be passionate about building muscle, training regimes, dietary intakes, and the human psyche itself all-in-all in order to seriously attain the recognized results of hard-earned bodybuilding, those shredded gains don’t wake you up with breakfast in bed or hand you a participation trophy while you stand 50 meters away from the winner’s podium.

The fact is of course that the legitimate bodybuilder has this passion, this obsessive flair for bodybuilding which gives them subjective purpose and satisfaction in their lives.

Now, let’s say that the Intelligent person logically has Intelligent concerns and Interests otherwise how could they even be identified as Intelligent in the first place? , wouldn’t it then be fair to suggest that taking away their capacity to even care about these specific concerns and interests be of subjectively devastating personal consequence?

Legitimately Intelligent people do in fact have a passion and subsequent obsessive and intense flair for thinking, for critical evaluation, their Intellectual curiosity forms a core part of their own character and it is what they personally find a lot of meaning in.

See the thing about having Intelligent concerns is that — by their highly enigmatic/nuanced nature — they flat out require a sustained intensity of obsessive interest in order to get anywhere with them fundamentally, a common misconception about smart people is that they can seemingly figure out mind-bending shit on the fly, I'm sure Einstein’s mummified fly on the wall would suggest otherwise given that he spent years and years progressively working on his grand theories.

And so it follows, The intelligent person is likely to be an intense character of some varying sort and intense characters HATE mediocrity when it concerns what they are interested and personally invested in, go figure.

We concern ourselves with what we have some chance of achieving, an Intelligent person has at least the capacity to achieve intellectual feats through hard work, to pursue meaning through their intellect and so progressively build an identity around that righteous personal struggle of theirs.

Books, Philosophy, Astronomy, Poetry, Computer science, …Writing on Medium?, and about 10 million other taxable Intelligent interests are beyond the serious concern of the honestly simple-minded and comfortably ignorant.

Because if there is one thing that smart people, that passionate people, indeed that anyone who strongly identifies with anything simply cannot stand, it is the absolutely horrifying idea of no longer caring about what it is that is their honest-to-whatever passion, for to lose that is to lose the very idea of themselves entirely, for their identity as they personally understand it is gone, vanished.

You arguably might as well be dead than to be an unrecognizable stranger in your own body, I at least want ME to be associated with ME and not something completely alien to ME as I think would be the case with anyone (Intelligent or not) else.

Sure, there are very strong pragmatic reasons for any person to continue living regardless of how passionate they are about the thing(s) they care about — which is now an ability forever lost — and how much of that makes up their identity, such as to still be around for their children for example.

But go and tell the intellectually inclined mathematician — Who finds their own subjective meaning in being intensely concerned with the likes of detailed formulas — that they shall now be perfectly content forevermore with spraying chicken feed on a field and observe, in all likelihood, what grief envelops upon the eyes of the one whose future prospects are an objectively good life; that of being a content human being, but yet is of subjective hell relative to what they understand themselves to be, base themselves as having been and what they simply do not want to be considered by others.

The unexamined life is not worth living — Socrates