The High-IQ Trap

This came to me over a delicious plate of Eggs Benedict.

I’ve been thinking a lot about intelligence. The idea of it and the various types.

There’s a peculiar kind of intelligence… a high-IQ mixed with emotional acuity, strategic depth, and a predisposition to relationship-building that helps you build a life of wealth, status, and impact. But this high-intelligence simultaneously makes it easier to fall into the trap of never knowing when to stop pursuing the things that high-intelligence afforded you.

You start with good intentions. You set out to create freedom, joy, and comfort for yourself and the people you love. Maybe you want to escape instability or financial anxiety. Maybe you want to prove something to yourself or others. Maybe you just want to live an awesome life.

But in order to reach those goals, you have to become someone else… ambitious, cunning, relentless, etc. You begin optimizing, planning, pushing your career and money goals. You learn how to delay gratification today to increase your size of the pie tomorrow. You project a version of yourself you believe is required to pursue this pie.

And, since practice makes perfect, you end up becoming very, very good at all of this.

Eventually, though, that version of you… the one you project and polish to become successful… becomes you.

Somewhere along the way, the original goal gets replaced entirely and often unnoticed.

“Freedom” simply becomes the fuel for the identity you’ve built around being productive, important, exceptional, and “successful.”

The plot is lost.

Your work becomes your purpose.

Your purpose becomes your performance.

And your performance becomes who you think you are.

It’s not a lack of intelligence that leads to this…. It’s the exact opposite…

It takes a high cognitive, emotional, and strategic IQ to succeed at modern life. But it takes a sort of meta-intelligence… a kind of spiritual and existential clarity that stacks above the cognitive and emotional layers… to recognize when the path itself has quietly replaced the purpose of the path — to simply get to where you are going.

That moment when you realize you’re still sprinting long after the race has ended, long after everyone’s already gone home. You were so deep in the zone that you didn’t realize the lights are about to be shut off for the night.

“Oh but the path is the journey. And it’s the journey not the destination.”

Exactly what the highly intelligent will say. Of course, there is truth to that old adage, but which path? Which journey, exactly? The path you’re blindly on just so happens to be THE path?

When you don’t have that clarity, you tell yourself comforting lies…

“I’m honoring my potential.”

“I’m setting an example.”

“I’m solving problems.”

“Just a few more years, a few more ideas, and I’ll exceed my goals and build a bigger cushion.”

“I’m building a legacy for my family.”

All noble ideas, sure, until they become excuses to stay trapped in a cycle you no longer need.

A cycle that’s only still turning because you’re afraid of what happens if you step off the wheel.

And the most seemingly reasonable and legitimate excuses are exactly what the highest IQ people are great at making. So good that they convince themselves even more than they convince others.

And the system loves this. It rewards this.

It elevates the over-identified as role models. It turns overwork into virtue. Ego into excellence. Performance into purpose.

We celebrate the so-called “masters of the universe”.. CEOs, tech moguls, “disruptors” and “innovators”… not because they are free, but because they’ve become perfectly adapted to the machine. They are not symbols of liberation, but of complete integration.

And so we follow these people emotionally and sometimes spiritually.

Not realizing that we’re not being led toward freedom… but more towards a cage.

This cage is plated with ambition and “winning.”

It’s so easy to frame this cynically as an argument against capitalism, hard work, or ambition writ large.

It’s not.

It’s more of a reflection on how easy it is to lose the plot.

High IQ people can forget what they actually wanted.

They can become so fluent in the frenzy of their own lives that they forget they created it to serve a function.

The realest tragedy isn’t just getting trapped… it’s becoming so good at the trap that you don’t even notice it anymore.

You just keep performing. Keep building.

Long after you’ve already won.

But the clock is ticking the whole time.

And if you’re lucky — or unlucky — enough to see the cage… and notice that it was open the entire time…

It’s often too late to walk out and actually live that life you wanted at the beginning.

VEO out.