Amar mais do que a si mesmo. https://youtu.be/2nF6AShMqOc?si=Zty02-wU1edRdOFm
People talk about intelligence as if it’s this sparkling gem—a golden ticket, a backstage pass to an exclusive club where life makes sense, where problems are solvable, where suffering can be explained away. That’s a lie. Intelligence is something else entirely. It isn’t a blessing; it’s a kind of slow, grinding curse, a doorway to seeing the world too clearly. And the truth is, the more you see, the less you want to be here at all.
See, intelligence doesn’t just hand you answers; it hands you awareness. Razor-sharp, unblinking awareness of everything: the cracks in the world, the quiet despair of people around you, the futility laced through everyday life. Being smart means understanding the weight of things, the way joy can be just a brief flicker in a dark sea, how suffering is so often unearned, and how justice is almost never as clean as we wish it were. Intelligence makes you a witness to it all, and witnessing—really seeing—can hollow you out from the inside.
There’s something you start to understand when you’re truly awake to the world: life doesn’t care what you know. In fact, the world seems to grind harder against the people who can see it clearly. It wears at them. Because the truth—the ugly, jagged truths—is that most of life’s systems, the social contracts, the institutions, the things people hold dear, are just thin coats of paint on rotten wood. The whole thing can collapse with a single push.
Most people walk around every day, blissfully unaware of just how fragile it all is. The ones who do see it, though? The ones who understand that life’s foundations are cracked and crumbling? They carry a weight. They’re holding up something invisible but crushing—a knowledge they can’t share, a sight they can’t unsee. It’s the burden of clarity. And clarity is lonely.
The worst part about being smart isn’t the knowing itself. It’s the dissection, the endless internal autopsy of life and the human condition. You can’t help but take things apart, turning every thought over, examining each piece for meaning. And what you start to find is that meaning itself is a shifting, slippery thing. You hold it in your hands, and it changes shape, like mercury. Just when you think you’ve nailed it down—ah, this is what it’s all about, this is the point—it dissolves.
Intelligence doesn’t give you purpose. It gives you questions. Endless, relentless questions. Why are we here? Why do we suffer? Why do the innocent so often pay the price for the guilty? And, in the end, who will remember any of it? If you’re smart enough, you realize there are no answers, or at least none that can satisfy. You stare at the puzzle long enough, and you start to see that maybe there wasn’t any picture on the box in the first place.
It’s a harsh truth, and it leaves a cold emptiness. You can fill it with things—work, money, love, distraction—but at night, when the distractions fade, the emptiness returns, staring back at you from the ceiling in the dark. Intelligence is a mirror that shows you the vast, indifferent void behind life’s illusions.
Being intelligent means noticing every bitter detail, the ones other people get to overlook, gloss over, dismiss. You see the unhappiness in people’s eyes, the fractures in relationships that look perfect from the outside. You understand that the laughter at parties is often hiding something hollow and that behind every polished Instagram photo there’s a story that probably isn’t as pretty.
And it’s not just that you see these things in others; you see them in yourself. You feel every flaw, every insecurity, every time you fall short of what you could have been. Intelligence gives you a level of self-awareness that’s almost unbearable. It shows you the limits of your own mind, the places where even the sharpest thought can’t bring relief. Knowing is a kind of slow, self-inflicted pain, a wound that doesn’t close.
It gets worse: knowing all of this doesn’t change a damn thing. The world rolls on, indifferent. People suffer. Cruelty persists. And here you are, awake to it all, bearing witness in silence.
This is where intelligence takes you, eventually: apathy. You become so aware of everything that you just… shut down. At first, you try to make sense of it, to find meaning in the suffering, to fix what you can. But the world’s problems are vast, endless. And the harder you try, the more you realize that your mind, no matter how sharp, is still just a single candle against an endless night.
So, piece by piece, you let go. You stop caring about the things that used to matter. You retreat. It’s not because you’re “too good” for the world, or because you’re bitter. It’s because caring, truly caring, would tear you apart. You start to understand why some of the most intelligent people in history—Nietzsche, Kafka, Plath—spiraled into despair.
Intelligence is a magnifying glass, and the closer you look, the more you see the flaws, the fractures, the meaninglessness of it all. People around you will wonder why you’re distant, why you seem indifferent. They don’t understand that indifference is your last defense, the only shield left when the weight of understanding becomes too much to bear.
So, is wisdom a blessing? In a way, yes. It gives you a kind of superpower, the ability to see the world as it really is. But there’s a price. Intelligence isolates you, digs into your mind like a dark splinter that can never be pulled out. And while everyone else seems to drift along, laughing, loving, forgetting, you remain—awake, staring into the void.
What I mean is wisdom gives you clarity, but clarity brings despair. The intelligent and the sages, the ones who see the world clearly, they’re often the ones who seem lost, who can’t find a way to make peace with what they know. The mind is sharp, but the heart bears the wounds. And in the end, the world rolls on, indifferent to it all.
To know, ultimately, is to drive solo, in an empty and infinite road, that gets nowhere and haunts with putrid truths most people will never see. And maybe that’s a blessing.