In my youth, mathematics was my manna. I imbibed it all day. My thoughts, discussions, and actions revolved around it. Life was beautiful, and I lived in the land of plenty. There was no struggle¹; it was everything in one, and one in everything. And why wouldn't it be? Math is the essence of the universe²! Math asked highest-order, philosophical questions, which would be distilled into branches, trickling down to form the elixir of equations and problems that I interacted with. It transcended the limitations of the physical world, provided purpose for me, and gave me existential purpose and companionship.

Children are pure, vibrant, and joyous³. Alas, they are also innocent so that, despite good intuition, they cannot overcome certain incorrect paradigms until, having waded in the treacherous waters of such incorrect paradigms, they emerge with philosophical understanding, conviction in the necessity of strategy⁴, and a vow not to be fooled again.

In 2016 I started losing mathematics. The kinship was slowly but surely being sapped, and I thought I knew why: I had been defeated in math competitions. Thus, if I worked harder, I would regain the vitality I had lost.

It didn't work. Despite accelerating my efforts in math, I only found myself angrier, ever more distant from the essence I held so well only a few years ago. Finally, in 2019, I tried to understand what went wrong. I concluded that I had forsaken true mathematics for a fake, superficial sheen of awards and prestige. Rather than find joy in solving problems and interacting purely with math, I instead went through the middlemen of medals and recognition by others.

I started pedaling away from competitive math, destroying and condemning it, as I lauded research and pure exploration. By 2020, with the toxic competitive mindset in math⁵ vanquished, and newly inspired by Prof. Yufei Zhao's comparison of mathematics to a marathon, with competitions being the first few hundred meters, I anticipated regaining my confidence and my love for math in re-exploration.

It didn't work. Though I lost my anger, I also lost my passion. As I sat through classes, leafed through textbooks, and gazed longingly at the moon, I lost the desire to keep the fire going. Math became a historical artifact, and I would rely on music, geography, art, and philosophy to hold me up. Indeed I loved the humanities and arts⁶, but I could not evade my guilt that such a beautiful field as math would be sacrificed. Deep into 2020, the spirit that carried me as a child breathed its last. Math had left me.

It is not until very recently that I realized the core reason for losing math. It has little to do with recognizing the importance of math research or competitions' leading me astray from the true power of math. Those sidestep the fundamental issue.

Throughout high school, STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—grew in popularity. We would talk of the intersection of logic-based 'hard' sciences, the triumph of technical affairs, and view it in contrast to other affairs, based on emotion and subjectivity. Though I became the flagbearer for STEM in high school given my prowess there, I was a reluctant one, because I felt it could not entirely capture me. My love for music and art were too powerful, and existentially, I could never forsake them.

Shortly after 2016, I must have wrongly embraced math as a cousin of science and technology. As a consequence, I recanted the inherent beauty and deeper meaning present in math, because they were not compatible with the technical nature of STEM. Math would be only a language to describe physical phenomena. There was no higher reality, no existential glory, and the implications were harsh, but necessary. We were just some accident patched together through equations, and whatever joy we obtained from math would be sufficiently described by chemical reactions in our brain. After all, science is rooted in empirical observation and offers good descriptions of our reality, but for this reason, it never offers—in fact, by design, rejects—transcendence. It is strictly 'rational', confining itself to what we perceive, and nothing more. As math and science were similar in nature by my mistaken paradigm, math must also lack higher meaning.

And therein lay the problem. I knew from my past that math was a fundamental essence, and that it did hold higher meaning. Math was very much not only a tool to be exploited by the S, T, and E. So STEM was a false paradigm. But there was more.

Weren't my adventures in piano also sublime at a high level? Music is the only enterprise in which the technical, 'blue-collar' components themselves, like diligent and iterative practice, are also fundamentally expressions of the holistic beauty. Music directly hits our hearts in a way no other artistic medium can. And what about art? Painting opens the imagination, allows us to actualize our desires, and invites us to share our experiences with others. And why should we limit ourselves to just music and art—weren't the other humanities and arts, by extension, also expressions of universal, greater significance, as math was?

After all, those 'subjective' departments ask highest-order, philosophical questions, which would be distilled into branches, trickling down to form the elixir of expression, however manifested. They transcend the limitations of the physical world, provide purpose for us, and give life existential meaning. Math does this too! Thus, the exact, numerical 'science' called math belonged with the expressive, 'subjective' humanities and arts, for they are all different ways to transcend our 'real' world. On the contrary, science and technology are in and of our reality⁷.

All this time I had been fooled. Math never left me, I had left math. In my first decade I was pure, vibrant, and joyous. Alas, I was so innocent that I did not have a paradigm of math and its place in academics. And when the STEM paradigm swept in, I had no ability to resist it. For seven long years I waded in the treacherous waters of this incorrect conception of math. After reflecting on my past I finally awakened and found a better paradigm. It proclaims that math, humanities, and arts all live in the promised land, happily coexisting, while the technical fields do not belong there⁸. For math and its true cousins pursue existential meaning and happiness, purpose and companionship, the very essences I desperately needed, the ones I got back, the ones that will, in due time, send me back to a beautiful life in the promised land of plenty.

Footnotes

¹ except with long division

² See the opening paragraph of my article "The Beautiful, Blue-Collar Nature of Code".

³ See my article "Rainfall of the Future" for my characterization of life in different phases/decades, especially childhood.

⁴ hence my Triplex Mindset!

⁵ not that competing, or a fighting spirit, is per se bad in math; I'm specifically addressing my mindset.

⁶ curing my indifference to reading in the process

⁷ By extension, math is more an art than a science.

⁸ I am not arguing that science and technology are meaningless, though I do think that that meaning is on a lower (material, practical) level (as opposed to the theoretical and abstract). I am explaining instead that I incorrectly assigned math to the low-level sciences, causing me to become confused—existentially so, given the importance of math to me—and lose meaning. The way to be existentially happy and not alone is to put everything in its proper place and find beauty in that.