Notes

I supposedly have an IQ higher than that. Did it make my life easier? Nope.

I suppose that if I had had a different attitude towards balls-to-the-walls learning, a more demure mindset towards authority and teachers, I might have had a slightly easier time in med school or law school or whatever else supposedly smart people try first before they crash, burn, and turn to a dual major in English and Philosophy on their parent's dime.

Instead, I figured that smart people belong somewhere else. If not, as originally planned, as bass players in a death metal band, then at least in a job where hands and dogged determination are more important than being able to whine nine-syllable medio-hellenic loanwords on command. My IQ did little, there. Getting up at 5am, perseverance through hard work, and a decent liver to labor on whatever I put into my body, that's what mattered.

When I started school in Amsterdam I tested for Mensa. Got in, too. Gosh, did I have not a shred of respect for the people in that org. Give me five guys with a limited grasp of English who never once attempted to get laid by quoting some Scientific American article on Quantum Physics and never watched Doctor Who. Guys and gals who will, with ease, deflect and survive anything life throws at them. I'd prefer that. Because, alas, it seems that the one thing "intelligent" people can't deal with is life itself. Its ups and downs, its demands.

I couldn't either. A coddled prodigy, a kid who had everything thrown at him at his slightest behest, because he was "smart." Who could weasel and talk and coerce and coax himself out of every shithole he just dug himself into. Who turned setting his parents barn on fire while secretly smoking his first cigarette into getting laid for the first time, because that's what smart people do. Once those stabilizers were gone, the support of people who had to be conned, convinced, and requested into assistance because I, the smart guy, had no freaking idea how to actually confront life, I had to learn.

That's why we build these safe spaces called universities and stick them all into their own little protected ivory tower. We coddle and protect our brains because if we'd ever completely expose them to life, the life that 90% of their fellow locals and 99% of all people in the world deal with every day, they'd wither and turn into fetally positioned heaps of whining, crying, and demanding.

People with a high IQ don't have it easier. They're actually robbed. Society takes from them all that comes with coming of age, with really living. We manget them, we stipend them, we give them places where they do not have to deal with adversity. We lure them into thinking that academic discourse or a bad word is that adversity, the worst form thereof. We give them PTSD from Tweets and depression from getting a grade worse than an A+. We take our brains and let their defenses wither away so that we can milk them some more for something smart.

Life, the thing that happens outside their double pane glass windows, would crush them. Not because they're weak, but because we never, not once, forced them to confront the storm and learn to walk in it.