When you think you’re smart, you’re willing to take the chance to kick the can on a disaster to another day, to give you more time to solve the problem. Even if that means making the problem bigger and bigger each time, and even if there ultimately is no solution. Smart people know their strengths, but almost always overlook their weaknesses. That’s why being smart is not something to brag about.

There’s an argument to be made that the smartest people are what we might consider “sick” (I’d prefer to say aberrant), and they are a response to a society in crisis biologically attempting to solve an existential problem by increasing its available responses to the threat. If you’re born to act, it must be very difficult to solve a problem that can only be solved by a lack of action. Like solving pollution and emissions - we can’t keep kicking the can, we have to accept sacrifice and start winding down our industry. The greater our drive to overcome this natural limit, the greater our overshoot and fall.

Intelligence is a double-edged sword. I tend to pity those who wield it most.