Being intellectually mogged is robbing me of my passion for learning. Summer breaks are enjoyable because I can learn whatever I want at my own pace, without being compared to others. What’s the point of staying in academia and pursuing some greater goal if it’s almost guaranteed that my research could be better and faster done by some of the many geniuses around the world? Mathematics, in particular, feels like an exercise on efficiency, where your potentialities are almost completely set from the start. There’s no personal trait, unrelated to brute intelligence, that gives you any hope of setting yourself apart from the rest. Maybe in some natural sciences or interdisciplinary fields this hierarchy is not so clearly apparent, since chance, for example, plays a greater role. Anyway, it seems to me that art is the only field where you can escape from this.