This is so so true.

The misery comes from otherwise smart people clicking on the comments. The people who are making the comments are morons, but there's no reason to think they are miserable.

I doubt anyone could reasonably argue that ignorance can lead to happiness, but if we could theoretically choose to be less intelligent, could that make us happier? I have no source at all other than my own experience of humanity but it seems to me that the more intelligent you are the more emoional problems you have to deal with, on the whole.

Oh no emotional problems!!! You realize that unintelligent people either live off the government or work their buts off trying to pay the bills right? The former maybe ok for some but the latter is far worse the problems of the truly intelligent imo.

This may be true, but it does not speak to the elusiveness of true knowledge. Is it not also true that false knowledge can impede adaptability. What about the man that suffers for his learnt/false God.

Working hard is a problem if it causes stress or a lack of fulfillment - ie emotional problems.

Suicide isn't a leading cause of death because emotional problems are irrelevant.

This is an example of a person who is learning less rather than more. A person who is learning more also learns about the many other religions as well. However, I prefer to see this problem not as a matter of - 'what knowledge you should learn' - but rather of 'what sensory input you should look for'.

If you increase your sensory input of quality information - such as reading books, scientific and technical papers etc., and reduce the sensory input of non-quality information such as celebrity magazines, TV and other more trivial forms of knowledge, you will automatically begin to produce more quality thoughts, and your adaptability will increase accordingly.

Now, when I say 'sensory input', I don't only mean the input that comes from the single sense of eyesight (reading) but also the inputs you hear (e.g., from the peer group/friends you keep, the movies or shows you watch) and so on.

Think of the brain as a kind of computer input-output system. The more quality input it receives, the more quality output it produces.

They are complaining usually. That is a reason to think they are miserable.

Perhaps they might be happily complaining, but I've yet to meet a person who does this entirely successfully.

People (at least in America) like to express their political opinions. Some may be whiners, some may be ragers, and some may be misers, but the truly miserable are usually those who have to endure other people expressing their political opinions.

If you increase ignorance in highly targeted ways, assuming this is even possible, then of course you increase happiness. But let's put that aside. Think of a child between the ages of, say, two to eight years old. Give 'em a sound position in Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you've typically got a pretty happy-go-lucky little person, especially relative to the adult version, and I think vast pockets of ignorance play an important role. Come to think of it, many adults deliberately try to recreate some form of this state from time to time, using immersive fiction or fantasizing or other pleasurable entrancements to push the dirt of reality away, to escape, to forget, to embrace magic.

I think the rather common thought process that is OP is a rather silly one, as it doesn't declare a range for where this is true. If it is indeed true, does that mean I'm cursed for knowing to put food in my mouth when I feel hunger? If not, where is the line drawn? As soon as one looks at it in this matter, they start to focus on specific devitations of thought, rather than assuming the ridicolous notions that there's some negative linear relationship between ignorance and happiness, and that 1 unit of knowledge= 1 unit of knowledge and therefore, should stop learning/thinking and start celebrating stupidity.

And even if it was proven that in some realistic range that increased knowledge was correlated with decreased happiness, I'm not convinced that this would mean for those in that range it would be best for them to change their ways to be like those in the lower percentile.