Give me the pill that makes me dumber. The amount of people I can have meaningful conversations with or find common ground with or can even, really, just communicate at all with is so limited as it is right now, that it's tough to get through life. Intelligence is a curse and I don't want it anymore. Thank god there's alcohol to at least make you dumb enough for a night to associate with regular people. I'd probably still sit ever alone in a room thinking (and thinking and thinking) if I hadn't discovered alcohol.,(reply>), @Clem No insecurities, no anxiety. In fact, people perceive me as very outgoing and extroverted and I don't avoid social situations. What they don't see is my internal screaming and my high level of frustration with every conversation feeling like my only purpose is to politely push and shove and repeat the same simple concept in a bunch of different words from a bunch of different angles until the penny drops. To most people, it's a normal conversation, to me it's a waste of time and effort and stands in the way of having the actual conversation.<br><br>I want to talk about the third LOTR movie without explaining, in detail, what the first two were about to someone who hasn't seen them.<br><br>I've had a friend who was in the same boat, except he really did suffer from all kinds of mental health problems and that ultimately took him out, so not only am I able to consider that conceptually, I've also got first-hand experience with it.<br><br>And just to be clear, I'm not an alcoholic, I keep my consumption well inside the normal, I just have a different motivation to drink than the people I drink with.<br><br>Also, not to sound condescending, but it's a wild assumption that mental illness would have never crossed my mind. Since you didn't go "Yeah, nice talk, lying internet person", I assume you at least cautiously believe my claim of intelligence, which begs the question why you'd assume that I wouldn't have put even any amount of thought into the biggest issue I'm facing in my life with all the supposed mental ability that I have.<br><br>Then there's the fact that there really aren't many very intelligent people and that a fair amount of the few that there are do in fact have tremendous troubles interfacing with other people. We often put that up to some form of mental illness and that may explain it, but an alternative hypothesis might be that it's very hard to correctly identify the level of understanding another person is capable of when your perspective comes from you understanding most things immediately and not only the internal qualities of these things, but how they relate to the abundance of other things you know. How is someone like that supposed to get a feeling for what someone else's understanding is like to whom the function and relations of these things not only don't reveal themselves to effortlessly, but who instead require an explanation of the nature of the thing itself?<br><br>You would not expect the question "Why are your clothes wet?" if you just burst through the door trying to escape a decade-record thunder storm. You would assume that whoever is in there makes the connection, and not by hard thought and maybe even conversation, but immediately, intuitively, like a basic bodily function. That's what it's like to have conversations. "Why are your clothes wet?". Because it rains.<br><br>Now we can continue that analogy. That question can mean many different things. "Why are your clothes wet, if you could have taken an umbrella?" Good point. We both know that the car is at the mechanic and that the umbrella is in the car.<br><br>"Why did you not take the umbrella out of the car when you left it there?"<br>Because I did not know that the umbrella was in the car.<br><br>"Why did you not ask me where the umbrella is before bringing the car to the mechanic?"<br>And so on.<br><br>Now what's the point with this? The point is that there are lots and lots of information that can reasonably be expected to be known to both parties of the conversation, and taking that as a basis, that eliminates, by deduction, a lot of possible meanings behind the question. The problem is just that someone else might simply not be smart enough to have considered all these known information, so I logically eliminate the possibility of meaning behind the question that they actually intended. They thought nothing of it, to them it's a reasonable question, to me it's either a meaningless question, because it can be answered by the one asking it with available information, or it is a question about something superficially completely different and that's where I lose people. Or where people get lost, to be more accurate. How am I supposed to communicate with someone who doesn't think far enough to relate what he's saying to what is known? I can't understand them, they can't understand me. In the literal sense.,(reply>), Maybe you have some other issues like social anxiety or insecurities. There are many very intelligent people that have absolutely no problem connecting and talking to people, and they don't have to become alcoholics to do so.