After peaking at sixteen by rediscovering some absurdly profound intuitive overinterpretation1 of the most abstruse theoretical principle2 while feeling sorry for myself after sleeping through my morning alarm enough times to not even bother showing up for AP Physics3, I began deliberately cultivating the habit of wasting neither energy on perfecting skills beyond practicality, nor resources on causes beyond salvation.
Footnotes
the best intuitive description of anything close to it was published about a decade before my gloomy revelations, in Ted Chiang's infamous Story of Your Life↩
there's aready the predictably encyclopedic article about the practical mathematical technique for attacking the various forms this principle takes in different physical theories, although it doesn't touch upon any of the metaphysics that crystallise the intuition. ↩
I ended up dropping the course, probably for the best; studying physics in the university, after semesters of calculus, also at the university, was still eventually possible. ↩
Footnotes