Math Team and Other Horrible Things You Do to Get into Stanford

> It's terrible to contemplate, even now. Competitive math was just one piece of it. We started school at 8 and went until 4:30. Nights were for other worthless extracurriculars to pad out our applications. I did debate team and jazz piano, student journalism and improv, extra science and math classes on weekends. None of it meant anything. Each activity was like the last, one box ticked after the next, each school day starting when it was still dark out and only ending when it was dark again, every hour blended together into some kind of gray resume goo.

And we wonder why anxiety and depression are on the rise amongst children. This mirrors what I went through and it's not something I could ever put a child through; as though they don't already have enough real problems to worry about; there's no need to add highly abstract math trivia to that list.

> The problem with doing something pointless for accolades is that you have to do so much of it, for so much longer than you expect. Time flattens out like a square stretched in both dimensions. First it feels like it's taking forever subjectively, because it's so damn boring, then it also drags out objectively because you are doing it so ineffectively, because it's so damn boring.