Laziness
Especially as children, one “unusual” side effect of being very intelligent is laziness.
Very smart people learn quickly, and one of the things they learn is that there is a lot of work that just doesn’t actually need done. Conservation of energy is a major driving force in all natural systems. So when very smart young people encounter unnecessary use of energy, they are typically quick to limit their own.
This can mean cutting corners, skipping school, not doing homework, or any number of other childhood behaviors that get identified as just being lazy, bad, or wrong.
Smart kids are usually smarter than the adults who are just following orders, and so their behavior as they try to make sense of a world filled with unnecessary and unnecessary-seeming injunctions is sometimes misinterpreted as laziness.
Credit: Ben Boyarko Trauma therapist in training
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