THE PRICE OF GENIUS

 I am sure you’ve asked yourself this before: What is the price of genius? The answer is a simple one, genius has no price. But I can’t stop here now, can I?

Genius is considered a gift, but for the world’s most renowned geniuses, it was also a curse, and I am going to tell you why.

What price do geniuses pay for their extraordinary abilities? Let’s explore the hidden costs of brilliance.

I consider myself a lifelong learner, with interests spanning philosophy, physics, law, economics, literature, and beyond. Every time I take a book, I come out of it with two insights: I’ve gained a few mental years, and the profound impact that these geniuses made to our world.

Out of all those great men, I have my list of the ones that I admire the most. These great men existed over a wide span of time, and all were geniuses in their respective craft. Socrates (easily the greatest man to ever exist), Alexander the Great (the name speaks for itself), Isaac Newton (the father of physics himself), Albert Einstein (who doesn’t know him?), William Shakespeare (that fine playwright), Martin Luther King Jr. (black excellence right there), Ernest Hemingway (might be debatable but I like my writers as wretched as they come), Billy the Kid (I don’t know why but the kid was top tier), Nikola Tesla (a plain genius), Michael Faraday (whose boss, Sir Humpry Davy said he was his greatest scientific invention), JD Rockefeller (robber barons too), you see the list is endless, and we haven’t even talked about Da Vinci and Van Gogh.

Let’s pivot back to my question; what is the price of genius? Some of these geniuses lived great lives, but most of them lived mediocre lives, especially the philosophers and the writers. As I like to say, ‘philosophers think so that we don’t have to, and we live so that they don’t have to.’

For writers like Bukowsky, Hemingway, Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby was heavenly by the way), Edgar Allan Poe, and the likes, they spent most of their waking days immersed in drink. And that is why I always ask concerning Hemingway, “Was he a genius because of alcohol, or was he trying to escape his genius?” I guess we’ll never know.

We have others who never ever got married even though they had relations with multiple women. All the way from Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, Henry David Thoreau, Ludwig van Beethoven (look him up, he’s very interesting), to Nikola Tesla. I have no issue with being unmarried but I’m just wondering why these men chose not to take that path. Maybe they were too concerned with their craft?

Suicide is also served in plenty in the genius world. Why would someone want to escape from a life of genius? Is it that the societal pressure is too much? Well, we will have to ask these geniuses if we ever meet them: Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and Alan Turing. I actually have a lot to say about Hemingway considering he is still my most loved author of the last century.

We have geniuses who died in literal poverty, yes that’s right. Geniuses can die in poverty too, so maybe get off that high horse if you think your genius assures you of great material wealth. It is just that sometimes, humans are slow to recognize talent and greatness, so the burden is usually left to the next generations. Franz Kafka, that celebrated writer, died a penniless man; Edgar Allan Poe, the writer of the poem Anabelle Lee, struggled with poverty and alcoholism for most of his life; Nikola Tesla, that struggling inventor of alternating current, died a penniless man in a hotel room in New York.

I like to focus on Nietzsche on his own because he had a genius that was way ahead of his time, and ours too. He told life’s hard truths, raw and unapologetically. For him, life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’ as Thomas Hobbes loved to say. He said hope is a fool’s errand since it only prolongs human suffering. He was never married, and he mostly lived his life in solitude, and suffered mental illness later on in his life.

Let’s talk about Shakespeare and Alexander the Great. It is said that Alexander, the greatest military leader the world has ever seen, wept when he realized that there were no other worlds left to conquer. What a man? He was filled with paranoia and depression towards the end of his life, and died at 32, which is pretty young if you ask me (for you and I of course, for geniuses it’s fine).

William Shakespeare, the man, the myth, the legend. He lost his son, Hamnet when the boy was just 11 (might be Hamlet was his dedication to him), he had a complicated relationship with his wife, he was mostly immersed in deep work, and people doubted his works for sometime because they were so extraordinary. His depiction of dark human emotions (obsession, jealousy, betrayal), was so out of this world and he might have paid for it with his own peace of mind.

Before I forget, Socrates! That great man who taught Plato, who then taught Aristotle; an empire of thinkers, huh? He liked to say that Athens was a sluggish horse and he was the gadfly that forced it to behave. He was executed at the end, and he didn’t really have much on his name, as he was mostly concerned with the truth. He was perhaps the only genius who believed he knew nothing! It is said of him that he is a man that you can look for way back in the past, and way into the future, and you’ll find none like him.

So, I ask again, what is the price of genius? I said it doesn’t have a price, right? Well, going through this journey with you has changed my mind a little bit. While genius is priceless, I think geniuses pay handsomely in other metaphorical ways. Having to carry the weight of life’s most sacred truths on their shoulders, they are forced to look at life differently. They see life for what it really is; a complete shit show, and I think this weighs in on them.

The trick, of course, for those of you who are geniuses, is not to ask the difficult questions of life too often; although if you don’t then you are not that great, are you? Just know that either way, you’ll have to pay nature back for that eternal gift of genius, as it is accorded a few, and denied most.

Genius is like walking in the park and drowning in the sea next. While it gives you the third eye to look at the world differently than the normal person ever could in a million years, it also cushions you from ignorance, and that is when the pain comes. You’re forced to acknowledge life’s hard truths, you’ll have to swallow its bitter pills, and sometimes it consumes you whole, or in part.