Empathy—feeling what others feel—is widely treated as the foundation of morality. It isn't. It's a bias that systematically directs concern toward the vivid and the nearby, away from whoever actually needs help most. Feeling more doesn't make you more moral; it makes you more manipulable.
Intelligence doesn't make you better at finding truth. It makes you better at arguing. These aren't the same thing—and confusing them produces a specific kind of error: confident, sophisticated, and nearly impervious to correction.
We've engineered boredom out of existence and called it productivity. But boredom wasn't the enemy—it was the prerequisite for thinking. We've been optimizing away the one thing that lets us process experience and generate original ideas.