begin improvised rant:
The best way for me to think about it is to accept that the human race is still in its infancy and while we think we are so fucking smart and have created and achieved so many amazing things, we are really just a bunch of idiotic apes who are barely a galactic millisecond away from the days we were flinging shit at each other.
The hard reality is that all of our amazing accomplishments have been (and maybe will always be) created by about .0001% of our species and then the larger part just swoops in and takes credit for it. Also taking into account that most of our "accomplishments" are straight up lies, exaggerations, and parts of human history that we have absolutely no grip on (like the pyramids) and have no authority to draw conclusions from.
The reality of being a human outside of the median intelligence range is that it sucks balls because every aspect of our civilization has been sculpted to fit the "average" person. And from the perspective of the rare human born outside of the median intelligence range, the average person is a fucking retard.
People of high intelligence and people of very low intelligence are essentially going to have squeeze themselves into the standards of everyone else. So people who are actually smart as fuck as always going to be confused with people that are dumb as fuck, because the average person is too stupid to comprehend anything outside of their scope and they have the added benefit of believing they are the smart one. And since so many of other "smart ones" exists, they can all happily live in their majority-backed ignorance.
This is why people will say things like "OMG, you think too much!" and when you answer that thinking is not negative, they will just look at the person or people next to them and by default you will become the asshole.
This is the burden of having a brain. You will always be edged out. You will always be in a position to be ostracized and reacting (in any way) to this will always make you look worse and confirm the average assholes belief that you are the stupid one.
Lets kick some more reality:
a good percentage of the people around you are on some kind of dope: pot, alcohol, coke, etc... Or they are hung over from doing it earlier.
a good percentage of the people around you are on some kind of prescription dope: pain meds, uppers, downers, etc...
a good percentage of the people around you are in unhappy marriages and are in a perpetual state of unhappiness which they may or may not even admit to themselves
a good percentage of people are just straight up stupid, like "kicked in the head by a horse" stupid and this has no bearing whatsoever on their job, responsibilities, who or what they are put in charge of, their income, the amount of children they have, etc...
And I am not bashing dope here, but once again, only a very small percentage of people will be able to use it and not be retarded. So if a high-intelligence person smoked pot, that may just bring them down to the level of a decently aware media-intelligence human.
And think about it, I am very aware that every new sentence I type makes me sound more and more like an arrogant douchebag. Why? Because the idea that anyone can claim to be "smarter" that anyone else (particularly while anonymous on the internet) has been solidified as a dick move and will actually be used as proof by all the "medians" that I am actually an idiot. It is all a catch-22.
If I was "Bill Nye" or "Neil DeGrasse Tyson" then everyone would eat up everything I was saying. Even though the success of these two people indicates very little about their place in the REAL intelligence spectrum.
And what is the "real" intelligence spectrum. Well nobody fucking knows. Because it is an impossible thing to quantify.
Yet, it is UNDENIABLE that intelligence exists on a spectrum and that a small percentage of people have been born with a higher functioning brain. Our brains are like computers. Some people have had a better one since they were children and thus everything they collected and processed into it will come out on a higher level of thought than a person who has been collecting and processing flawed information into a flawed computer.
The truth is that there are 8 and 10 year old kids in the slums of India who are smarter and have more potential than members of our most esteemed human societies. Kids walking around with supercomputer brains, begging for bread. While some assholes in suits who are slightly smarter that Forest Gump make huge worldwide decisions for the rest of us.
Have you ever noticed how television shows portray "genius". It is very interesting because they portray the idea of genius in the most idiotic and misleading way possible because that is the only way the majority of humans will understand it. So they show it as a English kid in middle school who has a huge collection of books by the German masters. Or a 6 years old Chinese kid who is in high school and can compose Bach piano sonnets on the violin.
The point? This is the "cartoon version" of what genius looks like. And this kind of error is what makes kids who are actually geniuses think "well I am not THAT smart, so I guess I just the average idiot". Most people that are smart are actually full of doubt and it takes a lot of overcoming and particular life-experiences before a smart person finally realize that they are actually fucking smart. And this may happen in their late 20's, 30's, or later. Because most people who are smart never have that "aha" moment where they realize that the world was never made for them, and that is why a certain level of dissonance has surrounded every aspect of their lives.
And of course, every average idiot can also pretend to have this epiphany and then use mental gymnastics to justify why "it all makes sense, I have been a genius my whole life". And I am sure this is what I may even sound like.
And that is why we have these problems, because there is no way to talk about intelligence. There is no way to know who is talking about and if they are full of shit or not. At the end of the day, only other really smart people will have a supercomputer brain even capable of analyzing the truths found in the comment of another really smart person.
The world was not made for smart people and it likely never will be.