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My advanced math skills are going down the drain

5 points by DreamScatter ↗ HN
i'm giving up on pursuing my career, i put in thousands of hours into releasing free software and in my life i have only grown to hate interacting with people, i have never been able to find a proper job and i'm now permanently giving up and doing whatever i want until i'm dead, too bad i have so many great skills

16 comments

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aiscapehumanity
Sorry to hear. Yeah it's crazy out here, for those accomplished and those also still learning the pace of relevance related to appreciation and job entry is chaotic as accelerating factors brings us closer to the singularity. No cultural and structural support for folks is being established really.
uberman
A cursory review of your profile suggests you have been having a hard go of things for a while and you genuinely seem to be in a bad spot, and I'm sorry for that.

I know that it is kind of taboo to question mental health here but never the less, I'm going to recommend that you see if you can find a professional to talk to. Someone who is trained and can actually help rather than some random person (like me) on the internet.

Talking with a professional helped my daughter when she was in a dark place and I hope maybe it could help you as well.

DreamScatter
no thanks, i philosophically diasgree with the idea of paying people to listen to me like this
uberman
Perhaps rather than framing as paying someone to listen you could think about as engaging a consultant to give you some advice. In any case, I wish you the best.
pizza
Out of curiosity, why? Not to doubt you or propose the solution is in another person or something.

By the way, the work you do is fucking awesome, just so you know. At least, it matters to me.

DreamScatter
As a capitalistic transaction, it doesn't make sense to me. I would not trust a person who capitalizes on other people's mental health issues. Also, i can't imagine getting any sort of value out of it.

Theoretically another person in my life would be good, but in practice i prefer being alone with my math books.

pizza
Fair enough. I can see where you're coming from. I will just add, there are some people who are pretty good at listening to people's problems, without labeling you and without prejudice, and they still gotta eat somehow, too.

If you are still more interested in a self-reflection approach I would read about something like the theory of positive disintegration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration

Still, I would stress that the act of naming problems out loud to a person putting their attention on you, even like in a group talk therapy setting or something, is not a no-op

Also, with your skills, you may just be able to find somewhere where they give you a long leash so that you can work w/ your math books in a mostly self-directed fashion. I agree that the job search can be hard, though..

effingwewt
I feel you.

I was often told I wouldn't live to see 20, and at some point began internalizing it, and thus living as such. It's unbreakable now. Every hour I work I think of friends who are no longer here, and the last thing I want to think of as I die is 'I should have taken more time for myself'. It seems like absolute madness that we give away so much of our lives when tomorrow is not a given. And if we take the dollar earned per hour worked of life, we learn that those with money and who earn more have lives with more 'value'.

Fuck that.

Do you, the rat race isn't for all of us, and maybe you will find a path to happiness somewhere out there. Success is not objective, you don't have to hold yourself to a broken society's standards.

wrycoder
Frank Zappa once said: "The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn't, then blow it out your ass. I do it to amuse myself. If I like it, I release it. If somebody else likes it, that's a bonus."

If you are good at getting inanimate objects ("computers") to do something useful, and you still enjoy it, then do that. Turn off the comments. Turn off the bug reports. Torvards said, "Real men don't back up. They upload on ftp and let the world mirror it."

Dealing with people can be a pain in the ass. So don't.

Find other things to do to provide some balance. Cooking. Sailing. Gardening. Nand2tetris. Whatever!

My bottom line: the universe is fascinating and awesome. What's it all about? So, I do physics.

DreamScatter
Fair enough, that sounds solid, ignore people and do stuff ...
theoa
I heart your Grassman gradient vector field representations: https://github.com/chakravala/Grassmann.jl. They, heh heh, point the way toward representing aspects of physics and math that should be used far more frequently than they are now. They display the quirks that you could never apprehend looking at an equation. Your representations could eviscerate the representations of data base on paper-like metaphors.

Sadly our leaders, the John Baez and Scott Aronson and people like that, prefer to think in Euler notation and WordPress posts. As Kurt Vonnegut said: So it goes.

The world of representation of difficult concepts using interactive 3D and elegant code is still in its infancy. You are not yet at the ground floor of the construction of a future elegant structure. You - and a few others - are in at the second basement.

Fortunately, the only way out is to look up!