Why Solitude Is Preferable For Intelligent People

Jan 30, 2018 by apost team

There are some signs you could easily look for that would point toward the fact that you're an intelligent person who prefers a certain level of solitude and quiet in his or her life. Do you prefer to live alone, or do you fantasize about living alone if you never have? Have you ever taken it a step further and daydreamed about what it would be like to live completely isolated from society? If so, you might have the sort of intelligence that pushes you toward those locales and situations.

Most intelligent people would claim they prefer the relative quietness of a rural sprawl over the clamor and urgency of a city. This ideal can usually be extrapolated to the rest of the life of such a person. They might prefer staying home and reading a good book to attending a boisterous party. Members of their family might vocalize concern about a lack of social interaction.

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The good thing is that you can rest assured that such a desire to live alone and away from the rest of the world isn't necessarily an inherent negative. Such a desire points to exceptionally high intelligence, and some even throw around the word 'genius' when discussing such individuals.

Studies have shown that those whom society can markedly measure as overtly intelligent, or what most might consider geniuses, often have a difficult time in social situations. This is due in part to the fact that such people can't relate to others, or at least they feel as if they can't because of the disparity between their intelligence and that of others. Instead of deriving pleasure from social interactions, as most people do, highly intelligent individuals will see such interactions as frivolous and unnecessary. They prefer to avoid situations in which they feel they have to 'act' a certain way in order to be accepted by societal norms. 

Most studies work by measuring the relative levels of happiness experienced by intelligent individuals in different living situations. They found that happiness increased for intelligent individuals the further away they were from population centers and the less interaction they had with other people.

What this shows is that intelligent individuals who interact less with others are happier due to a lack of confusion and stress associated with communicating on a level that doesn't come naturally to them. They are far more focused on important issues, so their socialization tends to fall to the wayside, but that is how they like it.

Of course, this also shows that people really don't like making small talk and performing other expected yet tedious societal behaviors. However, what this really shows is something much deeper. From a psychological standpoint, people interact with others for one main reason, and that reason is approval. People generally create a sort of mental image of themselves and their place in their social world, and socialization is a way to seek and gain approval from others for your internal image of yourself.

This sort of behavior is typical in humans that want to blend in with the herd. They'll offer surface-level approval of others in the hopes that they'll receive some level of approval in return, regardless of the sincerity of that approval. It's very much a give and take system, but in the process of trying to get as much approval as possible from as many people as possible, the internal identity starts to get replaced with what that person believes the rest of society wants them to be.

What this means is that those who socialize regularly tend to adapt personalities that they feel will make them as worthy of approval as possible, whether or not that personality is representative of their true nature. You'll begin to lose what made you unique as you blend with the rest of society to form a singular self-reflective societal standard of what would be considered 'optimally social'. For the common person, this homogenization is not only standard practice, but it's actually desired. For the genius, this is a problem to be avoided.

When someone with superior intelligence chooses to be alone, they are doing so to help preserve what makes them unique. It might sound selfish, but these sorts of individuals don't care about the approval of others, so they don't feel the need to seek it out or work for it. This attitude inherently removes them from the typical societal collective, at least from their own perspective. As they remove themselves from society, their alone time starts to become even more precious.

Solitude is the cornerstone of the way of life of an intelligent individual. If you can't stand to be alone or disconnected from the world, you might want to ask yourself why that is the case. Gaining internal perspective is one of the most intelligent things you can do for yourself.

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