In some ways it would’ve been a better world for me, though I don’t yearn for its return.

Here I am referring to the days of “computer girls” calculating and working out equations while others — usually men — played with the ideas and discoveries*. I will never have any ability in math and I don’t seem to be trainable in that area, but I’m a dab hand at connecting disparate arenas of science and thought, and understanding complex systems quickly.

In those ways, I’m more well-suited to the worlds of the 1930s and the 1940s than I am the contemporary milieu where getting into science basically means taking a math-focused IQ test regardless of your other talents or abilities.

Then, I could’ve contributed something. Possibly a lot. Now, I’d be written off because I’m not interested in becoming a full-time mathematician with a small side of science. Not only am I not suited to it, I am extremely, agonizingly bored by pretty much all math.

*I know that many discoveries were probably actually made by these “computer girls” because sometimes the only way to discover is by doing, but this is mostly lost to history.