"The most notable, and sad, case concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course before taking her finals and started waitressing. She later worked as a call girl, entertaining clients with her ability to recite equations during sexual acts."
The sad case?? According to whom?
She's working in an area she enjoys and controls her own life, something she didn't have as a "prodigy".
Nope. If you don't get it, it's probably lost on you, which makes it even more painful to see people so gifted squander their abilities. There are so many problems to solve and so few people who can solve them.
It sounds like you just have a lot of judgement about what is and is not valuable work in the world, and would rather hide behind condescension than be honest about that.
Life is a balancing act. People who worry about their legacy are usually not the nicest people to be around because they don't have time for other people, and they usually don't really end up making an impact either.
Mind you, I'm not a cynic, I think ambition is a wonderful thing... in the right quantity.
It has absolutely nothing to do with legacy. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will largely be forgotten in a couple hundred years. However, humanity benefits from their contributions.
I'm wondering why you think life is a balancing act. I hear people say "balance" all the time like this, but I don't see any real advantage to it. It just seems like a fluff word.
Like, what are you balancing, and where is the evidence that this is superior in ways that generally matter?
I dunno, even if the blame for going to university too early and subsequent estrangement from the family lies entirely with the parents it's not exactly a happy state of affairs, even if you don't think having sex to pay the bills afterwards is necessarily a bad thing.
All we know about her work as a prostitute, which might have ceased several years ago, is that newspapers reported that she started the work to pay off a relatively small debt and quoted her as saying she enjoyed the work, she may have earned from some of the racy images published and she now runs a blog dedicated to attacking the personalities behind said newspapers. I don't think that really leaves us with enough evidence to speculate on how much she's enjoying her life seven years after those reports.
The sad case?? According to whom?
She's working in an area she enjoys and controls her own life, something she didn't have as a "prodigy".
http://inquiringfeminist.com/about-me/