This almost seems like a cliche or a troll. I think smarts also lead people to miss the world around them and trivialize anything that isnt a "challenge". To some very smart people I know -- chill out and laern to enjoy the absurdity and mundane as well as the challenge. Be bored once in a while. Know satisfaction in the simple.
I think there's really something there that can't just be dismissed as "Just learn to enjoy the mundane". Go spend some time around people significantly more mentally challenged than yourself, like young children, and make an effort to enjoy their recreational activities in the same way that they do directly, and I think you'll find some things they genuinely enjoy that are just too simple for you, like watching a single youtube video on repeat dozens of times in a row.
There are definitely some relatively simple and mundane things that you can learn to find satisfaction in, but that doesn't apply in reverse; it doesn't mean that everything dismissed by someone as "too simple and dumb and boring for me to care about" is actually something worthwhile and valuable for every human to invest effort in learning to enjoy.
We can certainly debate over the details of precisely which activities might be more satisfying than expected when dismissed by someone for being insufficiently intellectual, but can we at least agree that there really are things that are too boring to enjoy, and that this set of things can vary between different people?
It makes the world a more-interesting and more-beautiful place for different people to have different interests and enjoy different things in different ways. We don't make the world better by insisting that everyone must learn to enjoy precisely the same activities.
> Go spend some time around people significantly more mentally challenged than yourself...and I think you'll find some things they genuinely enjoy that are just too simple for you...
Speaking as a non-smart person of boringly average IQ, so perhaps I'm inflicted with the myopia of someone without the raw intellectual horsepower of a 2-3 standard deviation smart person. But I do have an insatiable curiosity about the universe: for context, having the capabilities of a Banks'ian Culture Mind would be really neat to me.
My theory is people get bored because they self-select what interests them. That is, out of all inputs pouring in through their senses, their mind too-aggressively prunes the torrent of data, and they're left with a paltry amount, and as a consequence correctly declare that curated trickle as "boring".
Take your example, "watching a single youtube video on repeat dozens of times in a row". On the first pass, the video repeats over and over, what is there to counter that it isn't boring if you remember all the details? But do you really remember all the details, or are you fooling yourself? See if you can predict tiny details of the presentation in the video, for instance. Say you have perfect photographic recall, and you really can recall with perfect precision and clarity every moment of the video. Wouldn't that be sufficient cause to claim it is boring to watch it over and over?
Peel back a layer, and wonder about say, what would have motivated someone in the video to pursue whatever it is that they are displaying in the video. What kind of training would it take to say, balance a spoon on your nose? What kind of time commitment?
Peel back a different layer, and wonder about what specific details the young child is capturing with each pass. Talk with them about if they noticed some detail in the video after a certain viewing pass. Ask them what they like about it, in specifics.
Peel back yet another layer, and wonder about the implication upon cognitive neuroscience research. Are there pleasure hormones that reinforce repetitive learning better than without those hormones? How does that impact our understanding of machine learning?
Once you start looking around you this way, the details you can uncover go recursive and fractal. Lots of old religions and mysticism have expounded upon this way of perceiving the universe. If it helps to visualize in more modern concepts, then I sometimes liken this approach to "playing computer", except pretend the computer is the one that runs the simulation of our reality, and imagining all the details and principles that would get expressed in the simulation "software", right down to the quantum level. There is literally not enough time in the universe for a human mind running on chemical connections to run out of entertaining lines of thought this way.
To me that doesn't sound like the curse of the "smart" people, it sounds more like the curse of the arrogant people.
Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there. Usually the reason is not that everyone else is too stupid. The problem is usually that people have conflicting interests, and there just isn't a simple solution.
1000 times this. Raw brain processing power doesn't have all that much to do with one's disposition to the world. Wise people realize that the smartest human is still hopelessly incapable of really understanding the universe. Smart people can come up with better models of reality, but they are still subject to the chaotic nature of the universe just like the rest of existence.
Forming and dwelling on a belief that society wasn't created for you is something that can happen for a variety of reasons. The healthy thing is to accept the things you can't control and figure out how you can best get along in the environment to which you are subject. For the very smart, there has probably never been a better time to be alive in terms of applying ones gifts.
> Wise people realize that the smartest human is still hopelessly incapable of really understanding the universe.
Still the best theories that physics has to offer are the best that humankind has found in recorded history. And they were only found because there were people that did not tolerate this situation (being incapable to understand the universe).
> Smart people can come up with better models of reality, but they are still subject to the chaotic nature of the universe just like the rest of existence.
The moral should rather be: Because of this fact, sit down and develop better mathematics that will lead to us understanding this kind of chaotic situations much better in, say, 50 years.
> Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there.
Understanding that there is a reason (which is often that it was made as a political compromise in a distant past) does not imply that one tolerates/accepts it. As I hinted understanding the reason can also mean that one gets a much deeper hate for the rules.
And that can be the case just as much even if there is no simple win-win solution to the problem.
One can hate the rules -- for their injustice, ineffectiveness, abstract immorality, etc -- and at the same time realize that the rules are an inevitable result of the complex system we inhabit.
As a student of history and humanity and a free moral agent, you can recognize the reality we live in, acknowledge that it contains many no-win situations, and still hate the status quo even if you don't have a solution for how to fix it, because it deserves to be hated.
