Why My Life Began at 60: Trusting My Authentic Self For The Long Game

Sunil Singh
4 min readDec 13, 2024

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Divorce. Quitting Teaching. Failed Business Partnerships. Losing a Math Store/School to a Fire. Financial Ruin/Struggle.

Those are the key low-lights of my life in the last decade. In this light, I am the summation of bad luck and bad decisions.

The only thing I clung to mercilessly — some might say to a fault — was my integrity and uncompromising belief in myself.

I have been unrelenting on my criticism of mathematics education ever since I began teaching. In the end, I was so appalled by it, that I quit, knowing to some degree I would put myself in some kind of financial peril. And, as I have often mentioned, if it wasn’t for my parents, I wouldn’t be able to say life began for me at 60.

In reality, it would have been life was ending for me at 60. Sleeping on a basement couch for six years preceding that birthday milestone is proof that there was no exaggeration in that statement.

Desperate times did not call for desperate measures.

In that regard, I was perhaps foolishly stubborn. I didn’t want to sell out just to endear myself for mainstream mathematics education.

I had zero fuckin’ interest in being in the hollow ecosystem of stuff like Building Thinking Classrooms or quick fix pedagogy that needed to jettison any rich mathematics to sell itself.

The universe conspired to ensure that my patience in not wavering from my authentic self would pay off. In 2025, I am co-organizing a first ever(not the last) Global Math Summit in Sardinia. How this all came to be was from a LinkedIn message I received back in August 2023.

Sardinia in Summer 2024?

Hi Sunil,

I recently read your book “Pi of Life” and loved it. My wife and I have an 8 year old daughter who loves math. Would you be interested in teaching a fun summer math camp for our daughter and a couple of her friends for 5–7 days in Sardinia in August next summer?

From that query resulted a relationship that is so tight, that I am considered family now.

The universe was not finished conspiring…

This year, I released my fourth book. It was, for many a curve ball. It was a book about the heavy music I have loved for most of my life and the impact it has had on me.

Naturally, I had to end up at my first music festival in 20 years in 2024. The fact that it was this one is part of the conspiring cosmos of events.

I have written about this life-changing event over at Metal Talk, a UK publication where I have been writing articles/concerts reviews for a few years.

But now, as the calendar year closes, and I do a full audit of what that weekend meant to me, the experience has a profundity that transcends the event itself.

Everyone I met, I added to my Facebook friend group. Nothing unusual about that. However, the daily check ins through sharing music and the memories of RippleFest have been critical in solidifying my authentic self.

With only knowing these people for hours — even minutes in some cases — a collective mirror of the importance of being unflinching and unwavering with musical obsessions of all things heavy was permanently erected.

My book — breathing with a sigh of relief — foreshadowed this kind of connection and lasting friendships.

Even my mother, an avid reader, is curious as to how much music has meant to her son.

My 50’s were rough as hell. How and why I held onto my raft of integrity and hope — which always had little currency in the moment — is something that is a little inexplicable.

But, here I am. On the brink of leaving a legacy in both mathematics education and the music of stoner/doom.

As 2024 closes, with my pockets still relatively bare, who can say they are richer than me?

Thank you to all my math and music friends — old and new — who are sharing this ride of gratitude and abundance.

The best is still yet to come. I know this because I know the value of being married to truth/honesty of who you really are and want to always be.

Mathematics and music have been the pillars of such wisdom.

All of this is best summarized by photographer Glen Friedman’s definition of “punk”

Go hard or go home?

I went hard and I stayed in my home of mathematics and music…

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Sunil Singh
Sunil Singh

Written by Sunil Singh

Author, porous educator, audiophile.

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