Very interesting article. One thing that it makes me wonder about is if there's a mischaracterization of the concept of "immediate environment" with regards to the human mind in a modern society. Things like future job loss, reduced earnings, being forced to leave one's home, lifestyle and societal status downgrades, etc. may not be in the immediate _physical_ environment, but they are ever-present in our _social_ and _economic_ environments. For example, thinking about how you badly need to get rich sooner than later because ageism is likely to be a factor in the not-too-distant future isn't equivalent to thinking a lion may be in the room, but it doesn't mean the threat isn't just as - or in this case more - real. It's just that the scope of "immediate" and "environment" is shifted for those with high neuroticism. Something that could happen in just a few years is "immediate" enough to worry about.
As a practitioner of meditation and other things...
... could have told you that one.
Before I started serious practice, if I were to liken my mind to a computer running Linux: out-of-control processes exceeding available memory; processes that call each other and recurse in loops, getting into dead-locks and race conditions; hard storage filled with junk -- files, logs, random crap all over the place; layers and layers of different package management and manually compiled/hacked programs; worms and security exploits hidden all over the place.
And the ironic part: I thought I was doing good.
That's one of the big things I learned, that many of the mental thought streams and habits of the mind I thought were necessary turns out to be ... not. I had attached them to my identity, but they really were not serving me, my friends and family, and my community well.
And here's the kicker -- having spent a lot of time cleaning out my mind, I can tell when other people have their own dysfunctional processes. In even people you might consider well-adjusted, there lurks all sorts of unexamined things in the subconscious, yet leaks out if you pay attention and have the clarity of mind to see it.
I am quite neurotic. But if this is indeed true (and there are some indications that I am more creative than other people), then I think I would rationally prefer to stay more creative even if neurotic.
Some people think high intelligence is a burden (together with the above, it may also be the realism of skeptical thinking that makes people a little depressed). But I believe, even assuming it carries this burden, it is still a wonderful gift worth accepting.
There are some key insights that open up that path. The biggest one is that any thought that you experience in your mind is it's own thing (thought, distinct from concepts, which are much more subtle and ephemeral).
The reason is that for the mind to experience and process thoughts, the thought itself is carried by emotional streams. There is a wide-spread tendency in people with high intelligence to fool themselves into thinking they have high emotional intelligence, or don't need it.
These emotional carrier waves on which thought rides on have an affect on your ability to think on things, or decide on an action. One common neuroticism is when the thoughts start looping on each other. On the surface, those loops appear to chain rationally and logically, one to the next, but if you were to pull your awareness from the thought and go deeper into the emotion, you'll see it is actually the emotions in control.
Suppressing the emotions and awareness of the emotions will actually backfire on you. You get more stupid when you do. You cannot separate thought from emotions. (As I mentioned before: concepts and abstractions are more subtle, so it's possible to flash through them without a thought-stream).
You can't separate thoughts from the emotions on which thoughts rides upon. A lot of intelligent people with poor emotional intelligence will trick themselves into thinking they can. It does not help that accusing someone of being emotional has been weaponized.
Example: Most programming language / OS / design flame-wars are really people being moved by powerful emotions rather than a rational discussion, though the participants often trick themselves into thinking they are being rational.
tl;dr emotional intelligence will supercharge your existing intellectual prowess.
