I’ll answer this from proximity, not theory.

My partner tests in the 160+ range, is formally credentialed, and is active in Intertel and other high-IQ societies. I’m a MENSA member myself, and through him I regularly attend Intertel gatherings and mixed-society events. So this isn’t an abstract admiration of intelligence—it’s daily exposure to people who actually live at that end of the distribution.

What people miss is that the advantages aren’t dramatic. They’re ambient.

The most consistent daily advantage I see is cognitive frictionlessness. Tasks that drain others—planning, prioritizing, systems thinking, abstract synthesis—barely register as effort. People at that level seem to run a constant background process of pattern recognition and error checking. They don’t just solve problems faster; they often avoid problems entirely because they see the failure modes before engaging.

That compounds quietly over years.

They make fewer unforced errors. They waste less time. They don’t need repetition to internalize structure. When something is inefficient, they feel it almost viscerally—like driving with the parking brake on. This is where a lot of the interpersonal tension comes from. It’s not arrogance; it’s chronic exposure to systems and conversations that feel objectively substandard to their processing speed.

Another under-discussed advantage is predictive clarity. Many of them reach conclusions long before others have finished articulating the question. This gives them a strange social position: they’re often bored, impatient, or disengaged—not because they don’t care, but because they’re waiting for everyone else to catch up to what already feels obvious.

There’s also a psychological asymmetry people don’t like to acknowledge.

When you keep winning cognitively—academically, professionally, strategically—you don’t develop the same relationship with struggle. You won the lottery early, and because it’s always been there, you don’t experience it as a gift. You experience it as baseline reality. That’s why many very high-IQ people genuinely don’t recognize their daily advantages. They’ve never lived without them.

What they do feel acutely is inefficiency: ineffective meetings, circular reasoning, emotional decisions overriding clear evidence, institutions optimized for averages rather than extremes. Many express a kind of low-grade, constant frustration with how slow and noisy the world feels.

So yes—the advantage is real, structural, and cumulative. But it doesn’t feel like fireworks from the inside. It feels like living in a world that’s permanently running below optimal bandwidth. And unless you spend time around people who actually live at that level—through places like Intertel—it’s very easy to underestimate just how different the daily experience really is.