Life is too short for these shenanigans. But, I think that you should still go for it if and only if you understand what you’re getting yourself into. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
I think this is the most important comment. Most people don't realize until much later, that everything is a trade. This for that. You get an advanced degree at the cost of: higher income? free time? finding the right partner? That's what life is about. Everything has a price, and not knowing the cost is the biggest mistake.
>> you should still go for it if and only if you understand what you’re getting yourself into
> Most people don't realize until much later, that everything is a trade. This for that.
> Everything has a price, and not knowing the cost is the biggest mistake
I agree. Yet people often -- perhaps nearly always -- choose to pursue things based on limited information. Some people decide at a young age that they want to be a physicist, or a ballerina, or an astronaut, or a doctor, or a professional basketballer. Perhaps the decision is based on a dream or naive external understanding of what the occupation involves that isn't based on the reality of what the training and doing the work actually entails. Let alone the realities of the labour market: is there an oversupply of people willing to do the work compared to opportunities? What base rate of intelligent, hard working aspirants actually succeed at turning that job into a career? What compromises -- in ethics, in freedom of action and thought, in terms of making the work pay a living wage -- need to be made in order to have the career succeed?
Another lens: universities are in the business of selling education. If the young customer wants to buy an education in some specialised niche based on a naive misunderstanding of the true costs in doing so, who is the university to disabuse the customer of their naivety and turn away their custom?
Similarly for people wishing to pursue a career in academia: if we think of the system as some kind of industrial process, what inputs does it require? Funding from grants is helpful, a few blackboards, access to libraries and journals. But we also need a feedstock of smart, well-trained, hard-working low-cost graduate students to feed into the machine.
"In short, some young people think that science is a good career for the same reason that they think being a musician or actor is a good career: "I can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."[0]
>choose to pursue things based on limited information.
I've pondered over this for a while and one workaround I've found is to: rather than ask people "what do you want to be when you grow up?", ask people " where do you want to be when you grow up?". The former question almost always returns a wish/pursue based on limited information and idealization. The latter often gives bland or blank answers, but can be answered from your current (less) limited information about your own preferences, rather than your own wish and idealization of others/other things
