Life after contest math

In the past few months, as summer ended and a new school year began, I’ve listened to some high school graduates reflect on their time doing contest math. Several said things along the lines of:¹

Thanks to Andrew Wu and Evan Chen for reading drafts and providing feedback.

Loss and grief

We’re most familiar with grief in the context of death. I am lucky to have been mostly spared from this type of grief. Here, I’m applying the word grief more generally, to describe the sadness of loss. While the pain of losing someone is incomparable to the pain of losing a part of ourselves we loved, or a time of our life we enjoyed, they have similarities.

People grieve in many different ways, and it’s never a linear process of discrete stages. It comes in waves. Many people I know experience grief as sadness or depression. I remember feeling quite empty after my contest math career, even if it ended on a high note.² Over time, though the pain may never fade completely, it does get less intense.

Sometimes, my grief feels like a heavy, sharp feeling, usually accompanied by crying. In Crying in the subway, I wrote about the grief I felt for my joyful undergraduate years. It might surprise you how delayed my response was, as I graduated six months before writing that post—but like I said, people grieve in different ways, including different timescales.

Our response to grief shouldn’t be to stop ourselves from feeling it. Grief serves a purpose. For one, it signals to others that we need help. The students I talked to reached out for support because they needed it, and there’s no shame in doing so.

You might be thinking something like “Why should I ask for help? There are others going through worse.” That may be true. Unfortunately, suffering is not zero-sum: making yourself feel worse doesn’t make others feel better. If you have trusted people you can reach out to, consider doing so. I also know of several online math contest communities that have supportive spaces to vent, if you’re in one of them.

Context-dependence

When I hear people say things like, “there’s a part of me that was so dedicated to olympiad math, and it’s gone,” I’m reminded of my own experience.

I was once afraid that I’d never be as strong as I was when I was seventeen. The younger me went through a lot of emotional abuse, summoned the guts to run away from home, and lived alone for almost a year. I haven’t done anything as courageous since. And I worried that this version of me I admired—someone who could stand up for himself, who fought for what he believed in—was no longer me. It felt wrong to talk about me having done all those things, and I’d think the younger me was a cooler person than I am.

I don’t actually know what you’re feeling. I share this story because you might have had a similar experience, of having this part of yourself that you loved, and realizing one day that this part was no longer there. This fear that you’ll never perform as well as you did back then.

It took a few years, but I’ve gotten better at taking my own advice:

By “situations change”, I’m referring to how our lives are context-dependent. Who we are is, in part, shaped by where we are.

In my case: I’ve never done anything as courageous as the younger me, because I never had to. In the past few years, I’ve never had to defend myself to the point of taking huge risks. This is partly due to luck, and partly due to the actions of my younger self: he took the risk so I didn’t have to. In other words, I haven’t been in a context where this part of myself was relevant.

If you feel like you no longer have the drive to work really hard, I’d have two questions. First, I’d ask if you need that drive. Is there anything in your life right now that needs you to put in the same kind of hard work? It’s necessary to have periods of rest and recovery. The willpower will come back when it needs to. (If it doesn’t, that’s a sign that there might be a deeper mental health issue.³)

Second, and this is a subtler point, I’d ask if it’s the willpower that you miss. Was it about having a goal to pursue, or wanting something to work on? Or is there something else you felt like you needed from that experience?

Higher-order reasons

To come back to grief, another one of its functions is to inform us that what we lost was important in some way. If you’re feeling this about contest math, I think it’s worth asking yourself: why were math competitions so important to you?

Here’s some of my answers. Some of these are less noble than others, and a bit embarrassing to admit, but that doesn’t make them less true.

• The math contest community was the first one I felt like I belonged to. I loved getting to say hi to the same people in different math contests throughout the year.

• I was good enough at math that school math was often too easy to be enjoyable, but math contests gave me a good challenge. Csíkszentmihályi was right about flow: it arises when the task’s perceived challenge is balanced against one’s perceived skill.

• I liked math. I’ve been on-and-off about this over the years, but I do enjoy learning and thinking about abstractions and structure. I loved how much you can build out of simple tools.

• I knew that my contest performance would’ve helped for college apps.⁴

• I wanted to get a shot at traveling internationally by qualifying for the IMO, because tourism sounded fun.⁵

• I got recognized for doing well at math contests, and it felt good to be praised by others for my performance.

I’ve heard many others express similar sentiments.⁶ I list these because I expect you have similar answers, but I’d guess our answers will differ once we start going into the higher-order reasons.

For each reason you gave, I’d push you to go a level deeper. Why do you care about that? Why did you feel that? You can continue the recursion with “why” until you hit a base case that points outside of math. For example:

To feel belonging is pretty abstract, so I ask a follow-up question:

This is more concrete, but it’s context-dependent, because it relies on math specifically. So:

This answer feels right to me. I’ve experienced being listened to in other contexts, among some high school friends, or in a certain Discord server.

When I do this, I often find there’s several reasons for each level. I usually just stick to the main one, though you can pursue all branches. Sometimes I might run into the opposite problem, where I feel like there’s no reason at a level. And sometimes there might not be another level, if it’s the kind of base case you can say “because I do, and for no other reason.”

Note the difference between “I care about it because I do,” and “I care about it and I don’t know why.” One reaches an answer and is sure about it, the other stops because the question is difficult. I think it’s worth spending a few minutes on the question, in the same way you wouldn’t stop working on a math problem after trying for a few seconds.

Reconstruction

A wise man once told me:

You might notice this doesn’t mention anything specific to MIT, because it isn’t. Reconstructing your identity can happen in many contexts, and times of change help in doing so.

Sometimes you find other things⁷ that fit your reasons. I found many other communities where I felt like I belonged, like floorpi or my student groups. I found many other academic interests that involved abstraction and structure, like programming, linguistics, and type theory.

Sometimes you look at a reason and realize you don’t care about it anymore. I didn’t have to care about college apps anymore, because I finished them. I found plenty of opportunities to travel, but my want to do so faded.

And sometimes, you’re stuck with reasons you can’t fulfill. For me, it was the want for recognition. No amount of praise or recognition I got ever satisfied me. This is one of the problems I’m still dealing with,⁸ and I’m not sure I can say anything more about the general case.

All the people I have ever been

While I’ve been using the term reconstruction, I’d like to clarify that we’re not constructing ourselves out of nothing. This isn’t about throwing your whole identity out. We look at the gaps that arise from our loss, and build on what’s left.

That past me, that younger me, is still a part of me. Somewhere in me lies a seventeen-year-old possessed with the great courage to run away from home, and the continuity of self connects us. His voice may no longer exist, but his echoes last.

1. ¹

   These are composites, not real quotes.

2. ²

   See my Mathira 2018 Reflections, page 15.

3. ³

   I’ve written about similar experiences in Dissecting emotion and demons.

4. ⁴

   In retrospect, they were probably more helpful indirectly. Contest math introduced me to competitive programming and high school research competitions.

5. ⁵

   I remember binging all the unofficial UK IMO reports back in high school.

6. ⁶

   See Evan Chen’s Lessons from math olympiads and Brian Chen’s Olympiads: The Infinitely Overdue Retrospective. Brian’s post, in particular, has a similar upshot of asking “What do you really want?”

7. ⁷

   Compare the rationality technique of goal factoring.

8. ⁸

   I’ve discussed the want for recognition multiple times: see contemplating envy, i like me better depressed, i can’t be cool if, and Not my best self.