If consider yourself one of those people who are smart, but not happy, ask yourself these questions:
Would you sacrifice a portion of your intelligence for an equal (whatever that might mean) portion of happiness?
There are people that you would consider very dumb and very happy, do you desire to swap places with them?
And finally, would you sacrifice all of your intelligence for eternal bliss?
If the answer is no to all, then you simply don't value happiness that much, which is totally fine. Society/culture might force you to think that happiness is the ultimate goal, but you don't have to accept that.
YMMV, but what worked for me is accepting happiness as a resource, same as food or sleep. You don't need too much of it, just enough be healthy and get through without dying.
I wish this view would gain more currency in the zeitgeist. Who do we grow up idolizing? I can't speak for everyone. Maybe somebody grows up looking at a Bob Ross or Tommy Chong or someone who seems to be happy all the time and thinks that is what they want to be. Not me. I was watching someone like Michael Jordan win over and over again, dominate competition, achieve at the top of his field. Did it make him happy? As far as I could tell, no, but so what? Happiness is incidental to your personal temperament, not the point in itself. The point is to win. Set goals and achieve those goals. Maybe it's a nice afterthought if achieving those goals makes you happy, but just achieving the goals at all is the objective of your actions. It's at best orthogonal and maybe even counterproductive to the extent that being too happy risks making you less driven. The world's greatest winners all seem to hate losing more than they enjoy winning.
Is this really supposed to be a bad thing? The humans in WALL-E all seem pretty happy. The central premise of Brave New World is everyone is happy. Yet these are seen as dystopias. Why? Clearly, humans value other things more than happiness, and these other values have driven us to dominate the world and build civilizations. So why does so much of our self-actualization literature seem to assume happiness is some kind of supreme value and the ultimate goal of all other action? It isn't.
Evolution seems to explain most of it. There's humanity as species, where decision making process is quite primitive, hormones drive most of it. And then there's humanity as civilization, where decisions are supposedly driven by culture and obtained knowledge. For millions of years hormones were the only tool for decision making and evolution was the only tool at our disposal for progress.
But now those two are at conflict, and the winner is clear. We are way past those times where evolution has any noticeable effect on our species. More has changed for humanity in the last 100 years than in 50,000 years somewhere in the middle of our history.
With this mindset, treating happiness as the ultimate goal seems ancient and barbaric. We're not cavemen anymore, it's no longer cool.
That said, it does give an easy meaning to those who can't choose the meaning themselves. If you don't have any purpose in life, happiness is the inherited factory default setting.
I decided I don't want to be a boring human being with factory default settings. I'd rather be wrong than boring.
Would you sacrifice a portion of your intelligence for an equal (whatever that might mean) portion of happiness?
There are people that you would consider very dumb and very happy, do you desire to swap places with them?
And finally, would you sacrifice all of your intelligence for eternal bliss?
If the answer is no to all, then you simply don't value happiness that much, which is totally fine. Society/culture might force you to think that happiness is the ultimate goal, but you don't have to accept that.
YMMV, but what worked for me is accepting happiness as a resource, same as food or sleep. You don't need too much of it, just enough be healthy and get through without dying.