>>13596792It's fine, basically. And it's gotten better over time. Mensa-wise I'm 145+, I suspect I just get into that range, I'm far from the smartest person I know.
I've built up a friendship group of similarly intelligent people, but with varied interests and capabilities (from full autists, work-obsession psychos, creative loungers). I did the academia meme for a bit, which was honestly a good time, and made my acutely aware of the fine minds you can see at the top - to whom I'm most certainly a midwit. But it almost made me aware of differing capabilities, my skillset is in being able to move smoothly between fields, and easily understand their premises, underpinning thought structures, general outlook, and specific research. This made me good at cross-disciplinary research, and pulling ideas from the right places to solve the problems at hand.
I left the academia meme after a while, and tried the high-paid city job lifestyle. It wasn't particularly hard (like most things), I didn't find you had to work to death, but it was impossibly dull. I remember after about a year at it, I went to a Christmas party hosted by my old PhD supervisor, and it was as if I were breathing for the first time in months. The conversation, the people, the sense of humour - I quit and became self employed about half a year thereafter.
Since then I've been self-employed, I spent 25% of my time on fundamental research (visiting position enabling), which I just do for fun, and because I value it personally. 25% of the time is business management and development, which I also quite enjoy, and has enabled me to pull on board post-docs from a few fields. This is rewarding in of itself, new blood, new ideas, people with potential and shiny eyes.
The last 50% of the time I work on fee-paying projects that I find interesting, and that are commercially feasible. At the moment this is largely in QT, and it's a lot of fun.
So life is good, but I had to curate it.
