[sph]

Even if I dont completely agree with your negative take, I appreciate the point your making.

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." applies to a lot of things. How worth is it for me to spend my evenings honing my programming skills, instead of traveling, seeing the world, falling in love?

At the end of the day, there is no preordained path, nor St. Peter at the gate or other God deciding our worth by weighing our heart. Do what is fun for you, no one cares, not even God. The person that played chess all their life, and the person that did something better end up in the same place, forgotten, waiting to be swallowed by our red giant sun.

But if your parents wanted you to become a chess Grandmaster, and you just want to play ball, fuck them, go live your life.

[erfgh]

If you spend the same time studying programming that you need to spend to become a good chess player then you will likely become a professional programmer which means you will make a decent living in most countries of the world.

Also, you can build interesting systems that actually improve peoples' lives whereas in chess you just sit on your ass calculating and memorizing stuff that affect nobody at all outside the game.

[ShoneRL]

If you say it that way, nothing is worth talking about in life and nothing is worth doing because we all just die and end up wherever as is per the usual nihilism doctrine. The quote I cited, indeed, potentially applies to a lot of things but hey, we are talking Chess.

I appreciate this community since I can voice out things that people might be contemplative about and my negativity filled post was really just no false positivity comment about the reality of Chess in a random world country which I experienced time and time again.

The OP is "How to learn chess as an adult" and as I saw it, my first question in my mind was "Why should you learn chess as an adult?" and then I saw the lengths this person went to improve and while I don't want to be a toxic or negative bub about it, I also feel like I can contribute to this discussion by sharing my own opinion since I directly have a lot of experience with Chess. Now, I don't say that in an elitist way, I don't claim to be an expert but I feel like this blog post and similar posts are quite misleading and might trap uninformed people into thinking that Chess is something really worth learning as an adult or just increase the bias that Chess is some unique sport when it's just really a overrated game, kinda like Monopoly or any other game.

I spent a lot of time on Chess and I am glad to have provided some information on what it was like for me, because I think that it's really valuable for someone to read this and take away whatever they can from my experiences. I don't claim I have it all figured out, but generally, I suggest to keep Chess in moderation and no, you don't need to get better at it because it doesn't really get more fun.

Have a nice day! Thanks for reading.