You wouldn’t understand

Jk, I’m dum af

Depends on what you mean by “high.” I have scored between 130-140 on IQ tests I’ve taken of various quality, which is considered high by most. Idk how it would be different from anyone else’s experience of the world. I did extremely well in school and I work as a chemical engineer with a focus on machine learning implementations and capital expansion. I don’t know if I would consider myself “smarter” than the average person, just better at certain types of tasks. I also grew up in a stable two parent upper middle class household that valued education and academic success, which is a huge leg up that can’t be ignored.

It’s tough having a high IQ. Most people don’t understand the world and the flaws of humans, at least at the level I do. As such, I find it hard to connect to other people. Most people are morons. I feel deep sorrow in knowing the direction the world is going and that the inhabitants of the world are mostly idiots.

…

Why do so many people (in this thread) unironically feel this way? “Intelligence” is a socially constructed and often useless idea that includes and excludes many things seemingly at random. For example, chess is often thought of as something that’s very intelligent, but skill at chess is (just like nearly anything else) based on practice & experience. Just because you’re good at chess and did well in school doesn’t mean that you alone can understand the problems in the world at a deeper level than an average Jo.

Everyone should read “What Is Intelligence, Anyway?”, a short excerpt from Isaac Asimov.

I’ll paste the part I think is most important, but the whole thing is worth reading:

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Thanks for asking this question. I have enjoyed reading the answers people gave you.

You don’t feel smart, but everyone else appears extremely dumb

Awful. I wish for ignorance in a very “Flowers for Algernon” type way, and often dull my senses with intoxicants just to try and get my brain to cease.

Imagine looking at the world, seeing all of the evils and horrors that lie in the hearts of man, and knowing you are powerless to stop all the terribleness that is happening as just one person. You try to explain it to other people, you try to get them as impassioned as you are at fighting the awfulness of the world…and they look back at you blankly. They don’t understand the connections, they don’t think on a global scale, and they question why you do. “Wouldn’t it be so much easier not to worry about that? It’s not like it affects you personally, something like that could never happen here.” So you just get to live in a world that you know is fundamentally wrong, feeling like you are wrong for rejecting it.

That has been my experience having a 168 IQ, though it says nothing of the weight of expectations that were cast on me as a child or what all I missed out on by skipping past so many grades in school.

I had my IQ tested when I was 12 and it was high, but alas, not high enough to understand Rick and Morty

Jokes aside, I’ve been told that I catch onto things quicker and I’m good at solving things in creative ways!

Frustrating.

The rate at which I absorb information is disgusting. Yes please finish your sentence I already have a response why are you taking so long. How did I learn that? I picked up the manual and did it. Developing new skills? Learning Rust right now and its going well, failed out of highschool because I learned too easily and didn’t need the homework to learn (so it didn’t get done).

It comes with imposter syndrome: I knew the problem, I had the pattern figured out, why did I still fuck everything up (plot twist I probably didn’t).

It comes with a superiority complex: I learned this in 10 minutes from looking at a Sci Journal, why has it been hours and yallvstill don’t get it? 🙄

It comes with accidentally hurting people: frequently I say things thinking something hould be obvious when it is not, while unintended, it often hurts my partner who is usually in the line of fire when I let some dumb shit outta my mouth and insult someone’s intelligence.

Anyway I hate it I’d rather be dumbsauce ignorance is bliss

Very depressing. We’re social animals, and being highly literate and informed while also socially apt, you really realize just how far apart you are from others, which is alienating, frustrating, and tiresome.

Probably the thing it’s get a little mad because you need to explain multiple times things you think are really easy or stop hearing some people when start explaining things because you know you can catch what they are saying anytime. It’s really shitty, I dont whant to be this way. Also people treat you different because “you can so it better”, no I can’t.

It’s very tiring having to start off every conversation by letting people know that I’m more intelligent than them, but it is necessary.

The details of my life are quite inconsequential, but since you asked…

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it.

I’m 128, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s high enough or not.

Generally, I am successful in my studies and pursue career in science. I am not a high earner, and doing mental work still drains me heavily. I take a few hours of dumb physical work every week to reset. I am more or less satisfied with my life, I do have a romantic partner and generally find it easy to navigate social situations, but I’m introverted and need to recharge. So, you can say I have a high burst productivity all-round, but I’m not good at a long game.

This is just me though, and one thing to remember is that there is no objective metric for intelligence, and it can be divided in many different ways. Some people are great at solving math problems, but are dead stupid in social situations. Some go vice versa. Some have a gift for certain areas of knowledge or skills where they are way above average, while having underwhelming performance with the rest.

For example, I excel at disciplines that require me to connect many diverse data points (my area of interest is microbiology), but I’m not that good at following logic through many layers of calculations and linking it back to source (as in physics/math; I’m still able to carry out calculations I need for my work, but it’s exhausting). I acquire language skills quite readily, and have good auditory perception overall, but have high reaction time and struggle driving or doing competitive sports/gaming (no, higher intelligence doesn’t mean faster reaction).

Overall, I’m just a normal human, fairly smart, fairly capable, but nothing supernatural and sometimes straight up underwhelming.

It vastly depends on everything else.

You can be a dude with a normal life, who just makes conclusions faster and you’ve learned that everyone likes how smart you are and you enjoy this.

You can be a restless mess, because you’ve known all your life that there’s nothing to compete with and it’s difficult enough to find someone to even have a somewhat decent conversation on your level with. These people come with or without the arrogance you’re thinking of right now. Some are just genuinely kind and thoughtful, but always a step ahead without even really appreciating their ability much.

You can be an absolute underachiever, because being smart was never rewarded in your life. Maybe you even learned that “You’re not special” so much so, that you punished others for not being able to draw the same conclusions as you in the same time, because you always thought they were just being lazy on purpose.

You can be entirely unaware and may say funny things like “I don’t think we’re all that many really smart people in $techplacewithclearlysmartpeople. I talked to most of them and I don’t struggle at all”.

Source: High IQ myself, working with other people who increasingly talk to me openly about this and their overall situation. So much of who we become is about what our parents do to us and if there’s understanding and love and support on that end.

Obviously there’s the whole spectrum thing as well. I don’t think a higher IQ means “more autism”, as someone suggested. I think it increases your chances of struggling with a regular (neurotypical) kind of life, for example because you are supposed to be interested in 1 subject (to make a career), but - similar to people with ADHD - may care for all the subjects.
If you think about what is neurotypical though, you can classify people with a particularly high IQ or people with particularly high sensitivity as neurodiverse in just the same way you do that for people with Autism or ADHD. Now if you think about humanity as a whole, we may all to some degree be diverging from the norm in any or all of these ways, but still be more or less free of struggle, because it’s not by much, while for the more extreme cases, they stand out for better or worse.

It’s being like you