Hey community. Today I want to share some rather unique experience: how to kill ten years of your life. This whining should appear on some anonymous whiners' site, but I suppose only the CF members can, you know, truly feel all the spectrum. Soon you'll find out that I am very awful English-speaker, but I write it in other language intentionally, because it guarantees no person mentioned in the story would read it.

It all began with yet another codejam round, which I totally fucked up. I felt raged and exhausted. To be honest, I feel so after too many contests, and I even had a custom to go for a sole walk after onsites during my ICPC years, just to calm down. I treat contests as a negative-sum game: if you achieved your goal (to proceed to the next round, to win a t-shirt, you name it), you can sleep well today, otherwise you deserve your pain. Nobody of my friends beat that round too, so I opened chat messenger to talk about it. But all I got was some phrases like "don't push yourself, man, take it easy".

So... let me tell you why I cannot take that easy. Here on Codeforces you can find a ton of blogs about "hey guys I've just understood I am a complete looser in competitive programming, so I quit", every single one of those has an response from a random wise red participant like "do not compare yourself with others / ask yourself do you really enjoy solving problems / find a guts to stand up after each fall" and other motivating shit. And you know, I've discovered something about myself recently. I really do not enjoy solving problems. The truth is different — solving these problems is one of a very, very few things, maybe even sole thing, which I can perform more or less well.

I suppose I should tell some facts about myself, so you can get the whole picture. I grew up in a rather big, yet provincial city, and never attended some "technical" public school (for young mathematicians, future computer scientists etc.). My school specialized in languages, and I was the only one student who took Informatics as one of the graduate exams. I've got my first PC at the age of 12, if I am right, and solved my first programming problem three or four years later. Actually, I made a wish to become a programmer when I saw a website with problems archive. I thought "Wow, these guys can solve all these riddles, and I can barely understand the statements! Seems like if I would manage to solve these, I will become a really good programmer!". So I started to learn QBasic and solve problems from that site.

Then I attended to the local University Under the Rock and became a part of ICPC team (if you visualize this as a result of hard trainings and selection, please do not — it just happened that I was the third person in the university who wished to participate). Luckily, in the first year of my participation our team proceeded to the Regional Contest — for the first time for our university (I do not think I deserve any credit for that — my elder teammates did all the job).

...Oh, I did not suppose this story would become so long. Okay, the short version. I attended to the ICPC Regionals three more times (and spoiled the last one, glorious looser), started to make contests in our university, became a coach of ICPC teams (there were no one before). I never stopped to solve problems — now I have more than multiple thousands, here on CF and on numerous other archives. My bachelor thesis was development of testing system. My master thesis was development of problem management tools. Even my fucking PhD paper, which will never be completed, was (oddly enough) related to the competitive programming. I became a teaching assistant and read an Algorithms course in our university, and took part in multiple programs for secondary-schoolers. I started to create the problems — yet I conducted no rounds on CF, I have more than a thousand problems in Polygon. We organized a school championship in our region with more than ten rounds every year, and automated grading now is widely used in our university courses.

And a couple of years ago I got an offer from the top IT-company of the country — because I performed well in a programming championship (this gets funny as hell, I know). So I moved to the capital. As a pinnacle of all this madness, I even got an invitation to become an Algorithms course teacher in one of the most famous universities (again, me, who came from nowhere and graduated from Who Gives the Fuck University).

So, I think, now you understand my life has a thing or two in common with competitive programming. Then let me return to the original question — why I can not take it easy?

I heard that Microsoft employees have two options: either progress to senior positions in a few years or get fired. Let me explain: I experience no frustration when I see a newcomer who performs bad, or a red guy, who trained during all his life and paid the very high price for his current skill. But when I look at myself, I see pathetic diletant. How can I be a teacher if I can not solve some of the tasks I give to the students? How can I be a programmer if I only experienced with contest problems? And the main question is: if I chose this path, if I invested more than ten years of my life in it, how can I still perform so bad? I heard many times that being the perseverant looser is way worse than being simply a looser — "Do not do what you can not do well". God, there are middle-grade-schoolers who are stronger than me! They should have my job — many people of our country would have killed for that — and it's me who should go to school.

Friends had not understand me, and I preferred to broke up and denied any conversations (it was not too hard during the pandemic, huh). But they periodically tried to ping me, and that only bring me in rage. They did not understood that, and I feeled no need to explain. Self-hate just grew up, and I came to the idea of destroying my pretender's belongings. So one day when friends again tried to reach me ("hey guy we know you go crazy but help us with some shit") I shut down school championship site and almost wiped out the city's CP community in the social network. There were two main intents: to friends — "don't touch me" and to myself — "you know you are a pretender and don't deserve this all, so destroy it".

And things got well for some time — I enjoyed my simple convenient self-isolation. But today an accelerant appeared. I heard the door bell, but had no wish to open (who can it be — only yet another merchant, I did not expect anyone). But the visitor was very intense — he ranged and knocked many times. When I finally opened the door, I saw a delivery guy with a small pizza box. I said I ordered nothing and closed the door. But he ranged again and said it was ordered by some friends, and they said to knock the door intensively.

That crossed the red line. Now I was humiliated.

So pizza goes to trash. And the wiki site with algorithms tips that I maintained since 2012 goes to trash. And the youtube channel with lecture videos goes to trash. Next, I suppose, will be googledocs with some hundreds of problems tutorials.

I feel grief, but I do not see the other way. Here is the end of the story — I did not promised that it would be happy, or interesting, or even consistent or rational. Take care.