I used to be truly, wonderfully in love with mathematics as a field. It took up so much of my thought process and it felt like doing mathematics was the most enriching thing I could possibly be doing. That nothing was worth more than that.
After however many 80 hour long weeks doing research, I got sick. I tried to keep doing research in recovery. this made my recovery worse, and arguably contributed to a chronic condition that took about 4 years to largely recover from (and still I deal with problems related to it, especially in times of stress).
After getting sick and reckoning with lessened energy, I started to feel deeply in-tune with Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology". It takes immense effort to work as a mathematician, and it is largely individualised. At least, that was my experience as someone unable to really view my own work as valuable enough to be considered meaningful mathematics, lacking peer encouragement within the field. I felt broken and like the floor had been taken out from under me. Chronic illness and research mathematics rarely mix, it is assumed your entire self is directed towards your work.
A year after getting sick, I began to be frustrated with how difficult it was for me to envision socially helpful mathematics. Up until this point I was mostly concerned with how mathematics had a "pure" nature to it – it is considered that mathematical work is beyond the social context. But the more I looked at potential employers and research institutes, the more it was clear to me that many of the most interesting possibilities had ties to military, financial, imperialist organisations.
I tried really hard to envision why this was. It thrust me into some pretty bad spaces mentally, seeing my own work as blood on my hands if I ever published. I still feel some of that today, if much less. I did the most obvious and normal thing someone would do and did a masters degree in philosophy about it. I tugged at critical approaches until I had the words to argue how I feel about such a wide and interesting field.
A part of my attachment to mathematics at the time was a feeling of wanting a kind of immortality. Mathematics as the most Objective intellectual output of the human race, and therefore the one which if you can etch your name on you will live forever in name and story. Before I got sick, I learnt a lot about the history of mathematics through my own backreading of papers. Mathematics in its current formalist form is 150 years old, give or take. I truly believe its current form will itself face radical changes that are currently beyond the imagination within the field as it is. Theorems and formulae have contexts in which their design and reproduction matters, and context changes drastically over time. We are at no end of history.
What I certainly don't feel towards mathematics today is love. Falling out of love with mathematics is something that doesn't get talked about much. There's so much depth to the systems you can learn and build with it that it seems unthinkable to an extent. When you're deeply in love, you might only be able to imagine the best futures together and never the breakup. Maths is always talked of as beautiful, but never talked about as the one that exploited you and broke your heart.
i also fell out of love with math. it used to be my favorite subject!
i had some knack for it, but i always approached it as a problem solving. this wasn't as helpful in grad school, because to be efficient i needed familiarity with standard proofs of things that were known, and way to explore spaces that were unknown.
i fell out love when i realized i wasn't going to get much traction starting from first principles every time.
