There's not much anyone can say to me that comes close to the confusion, guilt, and pressure I felt making the decision to leave grad school. If I can provide some context: I'm a Chinese American whose parents and older sister are all tenured academic professors (in molecular biology, theoretical physics, and neuroscience). Becoming a professor was my dream, so I was also deeply saddened when I realized I couldn't devote my life to pursuing scientific truth and discovery.
But turns out, it just isn't for me.
I was miserable in academia, and that misery felt like a betrayal to everyone I knew, loved, and respected. To make things worse, I was also good at it (https://neurotree.org/neurotree/publications.php?pid=57690&s...). When it came down to it, I felt like I was living someone else's life, and I knew that my ability to make a positive impact on the world would be severely limited by how unhappy I was.
To this day, I feel obligated to be on the side of making things better rather than worse, and want to help people in whatever way I can. And while I'm no longer developing therapies for Parkinsonian patients, I do believe that I am still helping people. Key Values at its core is about helping people evaluate their personal values, find teams that will energize them, and feel genuine happiness from spending their waking hours doing work they love with people they love.
Now I feel inspired and excited, and I feel like the work I do is incredibly rewarding. I promise you I'll be able to do more for the world because I feel this way.
Listen, I get it. It's annoying that so many people today are so privileged, and here we are complaining about all of the amazing options we have. But this is our reality. If you don't love how you spend your waking hours, it is your responsibility to exercise your privilege and figure out what will. At the end of the day, the only person who has to live with every decision you make is you. So make sure you choose wisely.
Everyone wants to make a meaningful contribution to society, but that's just too vague of a desire. Maintenance and cleaning staff are some of the most overlooked and undervalued contributors, and thanks to Homejoy, I will forever go out of my way to express my gratitude to them.
Lastly, just for the record, I was not an engineer at Homejoy. I was both a city and regional manager, and I worked very closely with the cleaning professionals who serviced the Bay Area. I guarantee there are at least 100 people in the Bay who will tell you that I was the one who taught them how to clean a toilet. I scrubbed hundreds of toilets alongside them, and several of them continue to be friends of mine.