I'm not sure how brainy I am. Perhaps the main reason I came across that way in school is because my mom taught me to read early.
In any case, no one in the lower-end workplace has been particularly interested in what brains I do have, or (apparently) anyone else's around me. It's all about how you can fit into the local pattern, which is often suboptimal yet resistant to change. Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have-- so the chances seem low of me making a useful contribution. To say nothing of barriers to entry constantly & furiously being erected.
The main danger to me with regard to the question in the title seems to be the realization that despite what I was told as a child, I am pretty obviously redundant and unnecessary. Not needed. The world has enough brainy people already. There is little for me to do but try to care for those in my immediate vicinity as best I can and wait out my time.
> Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have
You may be surprised to learn how false and limiting this belief is. Turns out most of those people are also just winging it, so if you wing it too, hey, you may actually reach a better outcome.
Exactly, defeatism can be pathologic to individuals and society. It's frustrating that doing anything involves the extra effort of countering this attitude.
Wanted to +1 this, if you’re talking about technical problems that aren’t prohibitively expensive to work on, I garuntee you the world has room for your work. I swear, once you enter a tech company it’s like any given task suddenly takes 10x longer than it would if you pursued it as a personal project.
The catch is you have to develop the experience. You may well be able to reach a better outcome! But you do also have to commit to developing the depth, which can be a process of years.
The following is a link to the Mathematics Subject Classification [1]. There are thousands of lines, with each line being a different area of specialization in the disciplines of math. Every time you think we are close to "running out" of ideas, things to do, or things to learn, I ask that you pull this up. Even if we limit to mathematics and don't talk about things like agriculture, psychology, and so forth, you have so many possible things to do with your life that even if everyone picks one thing and specializes in it, there will still be something unique for you to explore. Consider that something like machine learning is largely applied statistics, optimization, linear algebra, and a few other things and then look at this list with those things omitted! There is still a lot left. We are nowhere close to having worked on all the interesting problems or running out of things to discover.
What makes a lot of those hard is solving them while keeping the current political class ordering in place.
Wealth transfers and reduction in consumption are clear solutions, but getting people to give up their luxuries and prioritize future generations’ lives over their own is the root problem, which may not have a solution.
> Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have
I noticed that reading "recommended content" (like from google news) always gets me to thinking like this, but remember 90% of startups fail[1].
In any case, no one in the lower-end workplace has been particularly interested in what brains I do have, or (apparently) anyone else's around me. It's all about how you can fit into the local pattern, which is often suboptimal yet resistant to change. Meanwhile, everything interesting/challenging I might have liked to work on is already being worked on by someone else, who is probably doing a better job than I would have-- so the chances seem low of me making a useful contribution. To say nothing of barriers to entry constantly & furiously being erected.
The main danger to me with regard to the question in the title seems to be the realization that despite what I was told as a child, I am pretty obviously redundant and unnecessary. Not needed. The world has enough brainy people already. There is little for me to do but try to care for those in my immediate vicinity as best I can and wait out my time.