Leisure And Intelligence

It is impossible to discern someone's true intelligence by purely external evidences.  A lack of telepathy leaves different human minds disconnected (if there are other human minds to gaze into in the first place), but each person can directly see and understand their own intelligence, even if they find it difficult to express their rationality easily or fully.  For those who understand that intelligence is nothing but rationality, it can be liberating to realize that faulty perceptions of one's communication skills, sharpness of memory, and breadth of experiences do not signify one's grasp of logic.  Unfortunately, there are even more irrelevant characteristics that some might have their intelligence fallaciously judged by.

How someone handles leisure, even if they engage in certain things that are not abstract, complex, or aimed purely at depth, is yet another thing that has no immediate connection to someone's intelligence.  In part, this hinges on the subjectivity and individuality of the motivations and appeal behind certain kinds of leisure, and it also hangs in part on the fact that immense intelligence does not mean someone is externally occupied by grand conversations or activities at every waking moment.  Regarding the former, one cannot be unintelligent simply for having a certain subjective desire because subjective desires are not always controllable.  Regarding the latter, intelligence is a feature of someone's mind: it is solely the extent to which someone understands and looks to the laws of logic without using fallacies.

A perfectly intelligent person--and I mean perfectly intelligent in the sense that they could not be any more rational than they are, whether or not there are more logical or experiential facts for them to discover--can enjoy specific kinds of entertainment or other pastimes that are intentionally supposed to be simple, casual, or ridiculous.  For example, someone who spends a sizeable amount of free time watching videos of other people failing to perform everyday tasks correctly for the sake of amusement has done nothing that diminishes their rationality or that conveys a lack of rationality.  Such habits are irrelevant to the degree to which they are aligned with reason and to which they genuinely care about matters of ultimate truth.

Of course, if a person enjoys an activity out of a misunderstanding of its true nature or out of some shallow set of priorities, they do indeed display a lack of intelligence as they go about their lives.  The difference is in the grasp of reason and self-awareness exhibited by the latter person.  Two individuals whose leisure looks outwardly similar could have drastically different levels of rational comprehension of themselves and their pursuits.  Leisure otherwise does not express a person's intelligence and philosophical competence, though it might display key aspects of their personality to onlookers.  Displays of the latter may not exhibit the former at all.

It is far easier for a philosophically inept person to assume someone possesses or lacks intelligence because of an arbitrary external characteristic like communicative ability or preferred pastimes than it is for them to refuse to make the assumptions that might come naturally to those around them.  An intangible quality like intelligence relates to a person's rationality and worldview instead of how they carry themselves in public or in private.  A distinctive sign of unintelligence is embracing the non sequitur approach of equating an outward factor like leisure habits with intelligence.  This irony means everyone who does such a thing intellectually shoots himself or herself in the foot.