On Recalling A Decade of Perseveration on Nothing

I just Tweeted this recently and thought I'd dilate a bit. I said something on Twitter about 10 years of doing quant stuff for more or less "no reason." It's still really kind of a mystery to me. Here was tweet #1: 

"10 years ago at ~52ish I fired up a broad attack on learning stuff in several quant disciplines along 3-4 fronts. No school, no degrees, no credentials. 10 years study! Whatever. I was just curious. I am comfortable with my capability in that domain."

Just a cast-off comment but a dude asked "what disciplines?" I have a placeholder on LinkedIn for that but that was in bullshit-speak so I condensed it for my asker more succinctly: 

eg: 

Quantitative finance chunks

Fragments of macro econ 

Actuarial science pieces 

Comp/data science stuff 

- modeling & simulation 

stochastic calc stuff 

Intro stats (limited) 

Intro prob (limited)

Some optimal control stuff 

“Mini” reinforcement learning 

Linear algebra basics

Options theory or principles of optionality

Game theory 

Tiny bit of chaos theory

etc...

I then retweeted myself thusly: 

I don’t use this stuff anymore and have made no money off of it and no one cares. I don’t regret it though. I really wanted to know something and feel like I saw what I wanted to see. When I was dating in my late 50s this was an eye-glazing way to end dates. Heh.

I mean it really was eye-glazing.  The two things I learned that were buzz-kills on dates were: a) talking about what a good, sensitive, caring, loving, beatific, full time 24/7 father I had been for more than a decade, and b) quant finance. Try it sometime on a date and you'll see. If I said I had been in prison for hacking someone to death and had a forehead covered with tattoos, my dating success might've been different. As a side note, my current gf was probably as intrigued by my indifference as the previous crew had been put off by my groveling solicitousness. But that is a different story altogether.