Drawing from my own life experiences, the more I learn the more things I worry about that could go wrong. This worry creeps into all aspects of life and becomes the norm. This creates a sense of dissatisfaction which can be a form of unhappiness.
Smart folks get aware of environment/challenges etc much sooner than others and maybe that creates the pathway to erosion of happiness.
You can easily flip this perspective on its head and postulate that being smarter helps you come up with more complex and logical rationalizations for your unhappiness in a way that totally orthogonal to its source. You could view excessive worry about things outside of your control as a pathological case of a certain kind of intelligence.
A lot of very intelligent philosophers written about how to lead a good/happy life over the centuries and none of them to my knowledge encourage a focus on problems outside of your control.
My personal opinion is that grades are one aspect of a filter that decides which college and subsequently which network a certain individual will have access to. It has a high correlation with intelligence but not linked via causation.
Every generation has struggled with it, except now it’s discussed heavily on social media and other forums. Hence the impression that it’s unique to this generation.
Are there challenges today that didn’t exist for previous generations? Yes! Are they more complex compared to what the previous generations faced? No!
Nothing wrong. The person I responded to seemed to suggest there’s something wrong with the system when it might simply be a gap that the child has to close.
I don’t have any background in finance, but what is stopping these companies from creating their own index and promoting it heavily? They have the market cap and the capital backing to do it I presume.
Because that doesn't force tons of passive investment dollars to participate. Being a part of the S&P500 doesn't require heavy promotion, they'd just get a slice of the investment from the millions of people who auto-invest money each month in retirement programs that buy S&P500 funds (among other things). There are already other indexes and funds where you can invest in high-tech/growth companies, but the people who are interested in that level of risk are already investing in them. These companies want to slip into the S&P because they'd get investment from people who are not specifically investing in high-risk/high-growth companies.
I was initially very surprised to see "The god of small things" in this list and even more so to see it at 32 in the list. But then, this is a list voted for by authors, critics and academics who are probably the only set where such books are popular.
