Everyone goes through this, but I suspect I carry a lot more anxiety, so I keep trying to find an answer while most people simply mature and move on. This is an attempt to get some serious advice from the reader, not reassurance.
One of the happiest memories of my childhood is a geometry class. I was in a trance state. Attention felt narrow, sustained, and effortless. Neuroscience would describe this as a flow-like state, where task demands closely match the brain’s dominant processing strengths. Everything felt tactile and concrete. My math teacher already knew I wouldn’t disturb the class, so she let me do my thing. I was naturally attracted to tool use, the compass and ruler, and to solving visual problems. Research on visuospatial cognition shows that such tasks preferentially engage parietal–occipital networks and the dorsal visual stream, which are responsible for spatial reasoning, measurement, and action-oriented perception rather than symbolic manipulation.
Ironically, the only subject in college for which I received a good pointer was engineering drawing, which had almost nothing to do with the rest of the curriculum built around coding and symbolic abstraction. I also dreaded almost 99% of what people were teaching at that time, especially subjects that relied heavily on verbal explanation without visual grounding.
I developed an interest in carpentry as well. Again, it is tactile, deeply visual, and geometric. Tool use and construction activate sensorimotor and spatial planning systems that are tightly coupled to perception. I could never design anything structurally sound, though, and that likely reflects a lack of prolonged practice rather than a lack of aptitude, since constructional skill is known to improve primarily through iterative feedback rather than conceptual instruction.
I never liked learning languages or language teachers, almost failed algebra in 8th grade (but later topped it when I learned about “symbolic meaning”), and never liked sports. Algebra relies heavily on symbolic mediation and working memory for abstract symbols, which is a known bottleneck for people with strong spatial but weak symbolic processing. I absolutely loved geography at the high school level and absolutely hated history, though I never failed it. Much of it also felt like propaganda in the Maharashtra state syllabus, but that is a separate discussion.
I have some interest in architecture, but I am terrible at it, largely because modern architectural training requires a large amount of formal, verbalized knowledge, regulation, and documentation. This again aligns with research showing that spatial intuition and formal academic performance in design fields do not always correlate, especially when instruction is language-heavy rather than model- or prototype-driven.
I work in computer vision not because I love it, but because it is the most visually grounded field among otherwise linear and abstract domains. Physics might also qualify, but its reliance on algebraic formalism explains why I struggled there.
So what am I supposed to do? This resembles what cognitive psychology sometimes describes as a non verbal or visuospatial learning profile (and they call it ADHD, which is an absolutely dog shit diagnosis), where reasoning is dominated by visual, spatial, and constructive representations rather than language. Such individuals often perform actions correctly before they can explain them verbally. This is a documented phenomenon: procedural and perceptual knowledge often precede declarative verbalization. That is also why an architect or designer frequently struggles to describe how something will “look” using words alone. This profile overlaps with certain forms of neurodivergence, though it is not inherently pathological. Estimates suggest that a small (at least 2%) but significant percentage of the population shows strong right-hemisphere or dorsal-stream dominance in cognition.
I envy the old timers. The Renaissance artists and visual-spatial thinkers who designed entire cathedrals and cities. Michelangelo fits squarely into what we would now call a visuospatial thinker. Leonardo thrived in an environment where geometry, anatomy, mechanics, and drawing were not separated into artificial disciplines. The “Taj Mahal”, arguably one of the most visually refined structures in the world, was commissioned by multi-trillionaire Mughal rulers, which suggests that visual intelligence once occupied a central, socially valued role. Historically, large-scale societies invested heavily in visual and spatial expertise because cultural, religious, and political power had to be expressed physically and visibly.
Today, this has changed dramatically. Economic and cultural value has shifted toward abstraction. Modern technological progress is driven largely by symbolic systems: mathematics, programming languages, formal logic, and now “large language models”. These domains reward verbal and symbolic fluency more than spatial intuition. While architects, artists, and visual creators still exist, they are rarely central to trillion-dollar institutions. When they are, it is exceptional. Contemporary design trends, especially minimalist traditions influenced by modernist and German schools, often emphasize reduction and abstraction rather than visual complexity.
As a result, visual thinkers are pushed toward niche roles. Computer vision sits closest to my cognitive strengths, which is why I chose it not purely out of passion, though there is some, but out of necessity.
The advice to “do your job to fill your belly and do whatever you like in your free time” does not work for visual thinkers either. Studies on motivation and mental health consistently show that prolonged engagement in cognitively misaligned work increases stress and depressive symptoms. I feel almost as depressed as “Devdas” when I work in finance-related roles that are entirely non visual (/statistical). No modern job is purely visual, and I can accept that. What I cannot tolerate is a job where the majority of thinking is non visual, which describes roughly 80% of contemporary tech roles.
The brain does not easily forget states of deep attentional alignment once experienced. That geometry class set a reference point. The mind keeps searching for that state. Whether that search ever resolves is unclear. For now, all I can do is acknowledge that this is not mere indecision, but a structural mismatch between cognition and the world I am expected to operate in. In short, I’m not dumb or unfocused or ADHD or immature, I’m just struggling to find something in this verbal world. Don’t want to sweat it.