Eccentric Enthusiasm: A Quasi Examined Life

I’ve been called many things in my life—nerd, geek, techie, “peculiar,” “intense,” “a bit much,” and once, by a coworker who meant well, “a human version of a walking Wikipedia article nobody asked for,” and, at times, even their antonyms—slacker, moron, dumbass, and once even “a human 404: page not found.” A kind of, smart–dumb as my half sister used to say. My wife calls me pequeno nerd, which sounds adorable until you realize it translates roughly to “my little socially maladapted brain creature.” I accept all of it. Why? Labels save everyone time. They let people believe they’ve understood me without the inconvenience of actually doing so.

My life has been a long sequence of intellectual obsessions punctuated by professional misfires, autoimmune sabotage, and the occasional attempt at human interaction. I’ve never been particularly good at the latter. Being “highly intelligent, obsessive, introverted, and in possession of an inordinately high IQ” is not the golden ticket to belonging that inspirational posters promise. It’s more like being handed a backstage pass to a show that was canceled years ago.

But autobiographies demand chronology, so let’s pretend my life has one.

Early Genius, or Early Dumbass

I became a busboy at fourteen. Not because I loved cleaning tables and washing dishes, but because someone made the mistake of hiring me. At sixteen I graduated to fast food, which is to say I moved from serving dishes to serving despair. I learned two things: people are terrible at ordering, and I am terrible at pretending their choices matter.

College came next—briefly. One semester. I dropped out, not due to lack of ability, but due to an allergy to institutions that insist on teaching you things you already know or will never need. This pattern would repeat: enter system, excel, become bored, leave. Some call this “nonlinear career development.” I call it “intellectual whiplash.”

Then came the Army. They placed me in military intelligence, a phrase that still feels like a punchline. I outscored an honors West Point graduate on an IQ test, scoring at the top of the battalion, which was flattering until I realized it meant nothing. Raw ability and its cousin, rude intelligence, is only useful in institutions that know what to do with it. The Army did not. They honorably discharged me six months early from service, presumably for excessive thinking.

The Nauseating Academic Carousel

After the Army, I returned to college and majored in physics. I completed about eighty hours before life intervened. I got married. I got a job. I got distracted. I got bored. I got everything except a degree.

Then came the software years. I passed a C programming test with 95% and a general computer aptitude test with 99%, which impressed the second-largest software company at the time. They hired me. I worked there for five years, quit, worked at another software company for ten years, earned a six‑figure salary, and quit again. My résumé reads like someone kept rage‑quitting life and respawning in a new career.

Eventually I returned to school, finished a BA in math and physics magna cum laude, then completed a master’s in mathematical physics with a 3.85/4.00 GPA. I tell you this not to boast, but to illustrate the absurdity of a life spent oscillating between brilliance and burnout. I have always been too smart to fail and too restless to succeed.

The Geophysicists and the Great Autoimmune Plot

After graduate school I worked for a group of geophysicists. I wrote software that “blew their mind,” which is a polite way of saying I solved problems they could not articulate. Then I quit. Then I found a couple more jobs. Then I quit those too. Then my body quit me.

The autoimmune disorder arrived like a cosmic joke: “You thought you were done with burnout? Surprise! Now your immune system is burning you out.” Suddenly I could no longer hold any job requiring mental or physical exertion. Which is to say: any job. My body, in its impeccable comedic timing, decided that after decades of tolerating corporate nonsense, it would no longer participate.

So I retreated into the only world that made sense: the quiet of homework, the sanctuary of abstraction, the refuge of ideas that don’t require me to attend meetings or pretend to enjoy team‑building exercises.

On Not Fitting In (A Lifelong Tradition)

People like me rarely fit in anywhere. I don’t say this for sympathy. Sympathy is emotional spam. I say it because it’s true. When you speak with precision, people think you’re pedantic. When you think deeply, they think you’re pretentious. When you know things, they think you’re showing off. When you don’t hide your intelligence, they think you’re intimidating.

Intimidating?! As if I were some apex predator stalking the savannah of small talk. I’ve never understood this reaction. I don’t bite. I don’t roar. I don’t even correct people unless the error is so egregious it threatens my physical well‑being. But people sense something—some deviation from the norm—and recoil. Not out of fear, but out of existential discomfort. You remind them of the vastness of what they don’t know, and people prefer their ignorance to be cozy, not confronted.

Mathematics as a Coping Mechanism (Way Cheaper Than Therapy!)

Mathematics has always been my refuge. Not because it is beautiful (though it is), nor because it is true (though it is that too), but because it is indifferent. Mathematics does not care whether you are likable, employable, or socially calibrated. It does not care whether you fit in. It does not care whether you are sick or well, successful or unemployed. It simply is.

Take the inequality I once scribbled down while anxiously waiting in a doctor’s office and caught in a moment of eccentric enthusiasm:

4xy ≤ (x + y)^2

which reduces to

0 ≤ (x − y)^2

a statement so obvious it’s practically a dad joke in algebraic form. And yet, from this triviality emerges a profound truth: among all rectangles with a given perimeter, the square maximizes area. A simple fact. A quiet fact. A fact that does not demand applause or interpretation.

Mathematics is the only place where I have never felt out of place. It is the only language I speak fluently without fear of being misunderstood or asked to “explain it in simpler terms.”

Existential Dread: Or the Philosophy of an Outsider

If I have a philosophy—and I’m not convinced I do—it is this: life is a series of mismatched expectations. People expect coherence; life provides digressions. People expect progress; life provides loops. People expect meaning; life provides entropy.

My own life has been a testament to this mismatch. I have been intelligent without being wise, accomplished without being fulfilled, employed without being satisfied, and unemployed without being free. I have been, in short, an embodied contradiction. But living paradoxes are not necessarily failures; they are the natural state of beings who think too much and fit too little.

I have spent decades trying to understand why I am the way I am. The answer, I suspect, is disappointingly simple: I was born with a brain that prefers ideas to people, patterns to conversations, abstractions to realities. This is not a virtue. It is not a flaw. It is simply a configuration—like a computer with too much processing power and not enough social plugins.

The Irony of Intelligence (A Cosmic Practical Joke)

People assume intelligence is an advantage. It is not. It is a tool, and like any tool, it can be misused. A hammer is useful when building a house; it is less useful when trying to make friends. My intelligence has allowed me to solve problems, write software, pass tests, and impress employers—briefly. But it has also isolated me, exhausted me, and ultimately contributed to the collapse of my health.

There is a peculiar irony in being too smart for your own good. You see the flaws in systems, the inefficiencies in processes, the absurdities in institutions. You point them out. People do not thank you. They do not say, “Ah, yes, thank you for illuminating the structural deficiencies of our workflow.” They say, “Why are you like this?”

I have never had a good answer. “Because someone has to be” doesn’t go over well.

Quiet After the Storm

Now, in the aftermath of autoimmune rebellion, I live a quieter life. Not peaceful—peace implies resolution—but quiet. I read. I think. I write essays and equations no one will ever see or read. I contemplate the peculiar trajectory that brought me here: from busboy to conscript to physicist to programmer to chronically invalid philosopher.

I do not regret it. Regret is a luxury for people who believe they could have done better. I have always done exactly what I was capable of doing at the time, which is both comforting and tragic.

What Remains?

What remains of a life like mine? A trail of unfinished projects, abandoned jobs, completed degrees, and half‑completed ambitions. A mind that still hums with ideas even as the body falters. A sense of humor sharpened by disappointment. A cynicism earned through observation. An enthusiasm—eccentric though it may be—for the strange, the abstract, the unnecessary.

If I have learned anything, it is this: fitting in is overrated. Belonging is optional. Understanding is rare. But thinking—thinking is always available, always free, always mine.

And in the end, that has been enough. Or at least, it’s been what’s left.

Laughing Into the Void

“Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense.” Edward Morgan “Eddie” Blake

I always enjoyed that line from the Watchmen. Why? Because, there comes a point in every life—like Eddie’s (an odd concept for a superhero) flashback to the violence of Vietnam and with Doctor Manhattan, or less cynically, a nth career collapse, a nth + 1 existential crisis, or after reciprocating convergence, the initial time your immune system declares mutiny—when you realize the universe is not merely indifferent. It is actively comedic. Not in a warm, sitcom, laugh a minute sort of way, but in the way a cosmic standup comic might workshop new material by hurling absurdities at you to see which ones make you flinch.

My own life has been a long audition for the role of “unwitting straight man in the universe’s ongoing dark comedy.” I never asked for the part, but I’ve delivered the lines convincingly enough that the universe keeps renewing my contract.

The punchlines have been consistent:

• Work hard, excel, and you will be rewarded with… burnout.

• Think deeply, and you will be rewarded with… alienation.

• Seek meaning, and you will be rewarded with… entropy.

• Try to fit in, and you will be rewarded with… the realization that you were never meant to.

It’s almost elegant, in a bleak sort of way.

The autoimmune collapse was the universe’s boldest joke yet. After decades of being told I was “a mind seriously overqualified for its choices,” and even at times, “too smart for your own good,” my body finally agreed and decided to shut down in protest. Nothing says “cosmic irony” quite like being physically incapacitated by the very brain that once outscored an honors West Point graduate. It’s the kind of plot twist even Kafka might have rejected for being too on‑the‑nose.

But here’s the thing: once you’ve been knocked down enough times, you start to see the humor in it. Not the cheerful kind—more the kind of humor that emerges when you stare into the abyss long enough that it starts workshopping material back at you.

The void, as it turns out, has impeccable comedic timing.

It whispers things like:

• “Remember all those plans you had? Sure!”

• “You thought intelligence would help? Right!”

• “You believed hard work guaranteed stability? Really?!”

And after a while, you stop arguing. You stop resisting. You stop expecting the universe to make sense or to reward effort or to follow any recognizable narrative. Instead, you start laughing—not because anything is funny, but because the alternative is to take it seriously, and that’s a burden no one should have to carry.

Laughter becomes a survival strategy. A pressure valve. A way of acknowledging the absurdity without being crushed by it. You laugh because the universe is ridiculous. You laugh because your life is a series of improbable plot twists. You laugh because the void is laughing too, and it’s rude not to laugh along.

And in that shared, echoing laughter—yours and the void’s—you find something resembling peace. Not the peacefulness of resolution or meaning or triumph, but the peacefulness of acceptance. The peacefulness of knowing that life is absurd, unpredictable, and fundamentally uninterested in your expectations.

The peacefulness of realizing that if the universe insists on being a dark comedy, you might as well deliver your lines with good timing.

So I laugh. Not because things are good. Not because things are bad. But because the void is vast, the jokes are relentless, and the only sane response to cosmic absurdity is to laugh right back.

And in that laughter—dry, cynical, exhausted, but unmistakably alive—I find the closest thing to meaning I’ve ever known.

Kenneth Myers