Over the years i’ve been thinking whether having a high intelligence is a blessing or a curse. Humans, who supposedly have the highest intelligence over other living creatures on earth, seems like having more stress than other living creatures.
With those high intelligence, human make a lot of innovation and one of them is electricity. One of the benefit of electricity is that electricity enable human doing activity at night, and that can cause some problems, one of them is lack of sleep. With electricity, we can even be productive at night which can cause us to forget about sleep or rest in general. When we lack of sleep, our performance will drop the next day and often times can cause some trouble during day-to-day activities. If we don’t address our lack of sleep, it will cause us some health issue.
The point is, with every innovations human made, human life getting more complex. For example, electricity enable us to do activity at night easily which make us need to keeping track of time so that we can have enough sleep. I’m sure there are some people who is counting how much they get to sleep before actually sleeping and in turn make those people anxious about oversleep which make their sleep not peaceful.
Those complexity in human day-to-day life make me thinking, is having a high intelligence a good thing or a bad thing? For example, i’ve never seen an animal having lack of sleep and even if there’s an animal with lack of sleep, those animal probably in the minority. Let’s take cat for an example, have you ever see a cat keeping track of time when to sleep? Personally, i’ve never seen that kind of cat before. The kind of cat i’ve seen is the one who sleep whenever they want.
It’s like human trying so hard to make their life better at a cost of their freedom. I know that living in total freedom can cause a lot of problems, but that does not mean we should give up on our freedom. For example, with the innovation of instant messaging app like whatsapp, we can get an instant feedback when messaging someone. Matter fact, because of those instant messaging app, a lot of people expect we respond immediately after they send their message which can cause anxiety for some people. Let’s say you are already clock out from work at 5 PM, and then you want to enjoy dinner with your friends. In the middle of dinner, you get a message from your boss asking about some details of the project you’re currently in. Some people have the authority to ignore those kind of messages outside of working hours, but most people don’t. The point is, because of instant messaging app, the distinction between working and non-working hours almost non-existent because a lot of people expecting a fast response for their message. Yeah you should quit from those kind of company, but then again, most company do that and slowly those kind of things become a norm. It’s especially hard if you met a hypocrite who say “you should have another activity outside of working” and then the next thing they do is message you with “please submit a report for project X before 10 PM today” at 9 PM.
That’s why i keep thinking, “is having a high intelligence a blessing or a curse?”. If we compare our life with cat’s life, our life seems more miserable than a cat. Most of the cat i’ve seen enjoying their life to the fullest without anxiety of the next day, unlike most human.