I Spent Twenty Years Becoming Good at the Wrong Game
A Russian researcher who earned two doctorates admits they were climbing a ladder against the wrong building. In 2024, at 41, they enrolled in a computational linguistics course with no coding experience, seeking work where reality gets a vote. They burned their second dissertation and booked one-way tickets out of the country.
Twenty years in the wrong game taught me that difficulty is not evidence of value. It only proves that the game is difficult.