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On a personal level, I feel empathy for you and your struggling peers. You should not hate your life that severely, no matter what your line of work is. And it's not right to be lied to by people who should be looking for out for you.

But to be honest - as someone who was born and raised working class and has a perspective colored by that - I can't for the life of me understand why you do this to yourself. Why don't you quit and learn a skill that's actually in demand? Is it just sunk-cost fallacy? Or do you feel that hard work and some degree of intelligence entitles you to a career that's meaningful, respectable, ethical, and well-paid - regardless of it's value and demand as determined by the rest of the world?

It's hard to say, but either your position is more valuable than you're getting paid for - which means you all need to unionize, or it's not actually that valuable and you need to quit. Or maybe it's worth exactly what you're getting paid, because so many others will line up right behind you, and take those terrible odds because they like the environment / self-pride / respectability they get from working in academia.

To play the devil's advocate: We really, truly, desperately need academics. The human race would be very much worse off if there weren't a significant number of people spending their lives on purely intellectual pursuits in the name of curiosity instead of quarterly profits.

The problem is not the role of academics in the world, that's clearly very important.

The problem is the current economic situation of Universities and their relationship to post-docs. It's more akin to a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme than a valid career. The music hasn't quite stopped, but it's already fading, and the people that are paying attention are starting to cry foul.

I luckily escaped this death march, but I still keep up with Physics research, and I've noticed that the political structure of modern academia has caused fundamental research to stagnate. Risk is no longer rewarded. The tall poppy is the first to be cut. Small, incremental improvements are rewarded, big theoretical leaps are never approved for funding.

High energy particle physics in particular has completely stalled since the 1970s! Similarly, we still don't quite understand how high-temperature superconductors work. Fusion research has burnt a lot more money than helium. The efforts to marry GR and QM have produced a lot of papers, but no results.

Take a casual stroll through ArXiV, and you'll discover that 99% of the stuff that is published is a total waste of time. It's "diploma mill", "publish or perish" garbage. This means that sifting through the endless torrent of worthless papers for the occasional insightful one would be a full time job all by itself. This alone is sufficient to stall progress!

Scientists are no longer standing on each others' shoulders, they are now trampling each other in a mad scramble for funding and tenure.

I don't deny that the world needs people who can be dedicated to intellectual pursuits - but the stagnation you've described might be further proof that academia itself is the reason the job isn't getting done. There are hundreds of well-regarded universities in the world, many with massive private endowments - if just one of those universities could prove that they are capable of advancing valuable knowledge without falling into that publishing trap - why wouldn't they? All of these institutions claim to have education and knowledge discovery as missions, but all they seem to do is build up barriers in the name of elitism.

The world needs innovators, discoverers, creatives, and engineers - but why is a university structure required for someone to be acknowledged as such? The market's needs certainly can't drive every valuable intellectual discovery - but I don't think they preclude them. Government agencies (NASA, EPA) are also capable of doing research and publishing.

To be clear, I do think academia does serve a valuable role and is a good thing in general. I just think that it's grown too broad in scope - probably because of the massive availability of government grants and competition for those grants.

> Why don't you quit

I did after several years. I, luckily, was in CS and landed on my feet. My partner and many friends did not quit. They, unluckily, were not in CS. So I have the displeasure of seeing it from both ends of the degree and many angles.

> Is it just sunk-cost fallacy?

Some but not all. You have to realize that the entire world is gaslighting kids every day into thinking that the hole-in-one once-in-a-lifetime shot is normal and common. But it isn't. It isn't normal. What's normal is failing to make it after giving 7 years of your life for less than minimum wage because there are 1000 applicants for every hyper-specialized position and almost all of them have more experience than freshly-defended-and-posted you, even if you're coming out of Harvard or Yale. But most people at the bottom never see this until it's too late, because nobody at the top talks about this ever. Worse, people at the top constantly lie about it or dismiss how bad everything is because _they_ made it and don't see what's so bad from where they are. They're all stuck in pre-2009 mindsets before available job postings completely fell off a cliff and never recovered.

To pervert a common expression, psychological warfare is a hell of a drug.

> which means you all need to unionize

This does happen, but, I don't know where you live, culture in the US is extremely hostile to unionization. Hell, the NLRB only decided that graduate students qualified as employees and were thus _allowed_ to unionize in 2016 after more than a decade of saying otherwise.

I'm glad to hear you did get out and did well for yourself. Thanks for explaining it from your perspective. As much as you were personally influenced by the people surrounding you - it was probably the exact same dynamic, but opposite (the people around me taught me was that academia was a debt-trap or a luxury for elites who didn't want to be demeaned by real jobs) and that is likely the source of my bewilderment and even low-grade bias against the field as a whole. I can see how if you are someone who respects academics, and listened to respected academics (who necessarily experienced success) - how that would lead you down a totally different path. Seems similar to what I hear about people who try to get into acting in Hollywood - they always listen to the people who make it.

Feel you about unionizing though. I'm in the southern US, and we don't see a lot success here. Still, I'm an IWW member, and my local hospital just successfully unionized a few months back - so it's something I do truly believe is worth continuing to fight for.

Thanks. It's hard to express how literally almost everyone who enters a PhD program is coming right out of undergrad and is still in many ways a child. There are no good decisions because making good decisions depends on having good insight and information and guidance, and the only people who can give good insight to the next set of children are either in therapy or quit, but the only people who get asked for guidance are the small fraction who made it.

And the entire system depends on funneling more children into the meat grinder so they have the most perverse incentive to just keep lying about everything. Graduate students are used and abused for a huge amount of lecturing, guiding, and grading so that schools don't have to pay for professors, so that they can have more millionaire administrators and football coaches and replace the flowers in the quad every week and other weirdly expensive stupid shit instead of providing basic healthcare or a decent wage for their lecturers. And then people are surprised to hear that the same schools that have grad students doing a ton of the work for peanuts don't have professor positions available at the end.

You raise a lot of good points, but I'd just like to comment on the "I can't for the life of me understand why you do this to yourself" part. I'm a postdoc in astronomy, and my situation is pretty good all things considered. But I think for many people their work becomes their identity, perhaps starting as early as childhood, and leaving is an enormous identity crisis. Going from being "the kid who has always loved space" to working on ad-tech or finance might as well be the same as changing your name, moving to France, and just hitting reset on your life. The "sunk cost" goes much further than just career skills.

The situation is actually very similar to what I've read from folks in game-dev. Almost one-to-one. And like you suggest, these sorts of situations probably all have their root in the supply/demand of labor imbalance from people choosing the career out of passion and being willing to sacrifice on many fronts for the opportunity to do it.

I can relate. I just read this at 3am while trying to stop wondering what to do with my life. I had the childhood dream of being a professor, and after a short stint in industry, when someone gave me the chance to do a PhD I took it. Life got in the way and got my PhD at 36 years old. Nobody guided me, and did not optimize my publication schedule, so it is impossible to land a job in academia. Now I am postdoc 39, non hirable bc I'm old and my cv compares badly to anyone elses. No clue how to provide for my family.

Last month we helped clean the room of a colleague after he "passed away" after 10 years of post doc.

Another colleague got a job at 36 as a bare programmer after a very successful PhD where he wrote books and was invited to conferences. At 40 he rage quit this job after a bout of frustration and we haven't heard from him since.

Luckily they didn't have kids. Wouldn't I have kids I would definitely follow their path.

I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)

I met one person at my Master's degree lab who went on to PhD, he said his childhood dream was to be a professor (and his father was a professor). I also have a father that is a professor (and have been very curious about PhD - although that window is getting narrower as I'm getting closer to 30:s) but he have multiple times told me that "it's not worth it", "it's a waste of time, the opportunity cost lost is too high", yet in my field I often see job post that requires a PhD, so I get mixed signals.

Doing a PhD is definitely not the same thing as becoming an academic. If anything, the PhD is a direct career boost: it's a recognised, high-level qualification that is known the world over (and, incidentally, if you go outside the US, you can probably get it done an awful lot quicker...). If you love the subject -- and you have to love the subject -- do it. It's like being paid to play.

Going from PhD to Prof though, is a difficult, unlikely path of awkward postings: for every 100 PhDs expect ~1 successful academic. Oh, and once you are a professor, expect a salary....less than that you'd get in a starting job straight out of your PhD.

Thank you for the reply :) I'll add it to my note of "pros/cons & advice to take in to account before important decision" that I've started to log after my repeated mistakes..!

> I'm curious, what advice would you give to a person that is in that position you were when the opportunity of PhD was given? (and have a childhood dream of being a professor)

Bluntly, if your goal is to become a professor, don't. With 99.99% certainty, you will not become a professor and the opportunity cost is extremely high.

Almost nobody with a PhD who dreams of being a professor ever actually gets to be. Most quit or only ever become adjuncts, and, in the US at least, adjuncts earn less than minimum wage and get zero respect from anyone. Most likely you will be abused by institution after institution who will keep telling you how important your dream is while stringing you along and paying you next to nothing. Or you will quit. Or you will have a mental breakdown.

If you can see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, do literally anything else. If you can't see yourself being happy doing literally anything else, spend some more time thinking about it.

If you're independently wealthy and don't really need to succeed at the goal to live a happy life of luxury, then definitely go for it.

Seems like the general consensus is that PhD might not be a waste of time, but whatever path afterwards in Academia might be. Thanks for the feedback!

>Another colleague got a job at 36 as a bare programmer after a very successful PhD where he wrote books and was invited to conferences.

I can relate, as this basically describes me - though I've been lucky enough to find bare programing jobs that I quite like doing.

One of the toughest things about leaving academia is discovering that (i) no-one who doesn't have a PhD has any clue what a PhD is and (ii) everyone who has a PhD has a healthy disregard for the intellectual capacities of their fellow doctors.

I can understand it too - I finished my PhD with 34. In the end, I could have seen it coming: my supervisor had 0 interest in supervising, so it took a huge mental strain on me.

I've also had immense luck - I've been a computer nerd for a very long time and I was programming a lot in my field (neuroscience). So all it took was a word from one guy I knew at a big software company and I was hired. I also have to say, that a PhD, or better said, a Dr. in my country still means something, especially if you have customer contact.

But I've seen things... bright people in their 40s who have to drop out in their 40s to be hired as a labor assistent at pharma. Associate professors who would run out of money and that's the end of the career. Doing a PhD was easily the dumbest and most risky decision of my life and I was extremely lucky to get away with only some mental scars. The only positive things I can think is the friendship with other PhD students (because you went through hell together!) and the confidence in my abitity to process and dissect huge piles of information. In the end, the latter is sole reason companies are willing to give you a shot. Dont undervalue it and sell it accordingly. If you have a PhD you most likely are very persistant and very capable of self-learning.

>I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.

I can think of plenty: Musics, Arts, Game development, (in some area) startups, "No college-degree nor drive & mid 30:s as cashier hoping for the middle-class life" people.

Academia is just like arts/musics: You only see the final result, and often from the top people; You won't see the struggling low/middle in their fields, largely being ignored in both their result & struggle.

I can easily agree with part of what you are saying, but the fatalistic exaggerated tone of your claims makes it rather hard to start a constructive discussion and definitely does not prompt people to discuss how things can improve.

> definitely does not prompt people to discuss how things can improve

One problem is there is plenty of discussion and no action to address the problems of the parent comment.

It's difficult to understand what action is possible, since the people holding the power to change the system are highly motivated to keep it as it is. But of course, we can discuss this all day.

In a tournament increasing funding will increase the number of winners but suffering will increase further if the greater number of winners leads to more entrants. Academia is a tournament. Most people who get a Ph.D. are aiming at a professorship and they’re not going to get it. They’re not going to get it after sourcing six years of their life, perhaps twelve or fourteen single mindedly chasing that goal. If you increase funding for a brief period there will be more spots but competition will re-emerge quickly. Things aren’t going to improve. The only people with the power to change anything are those who won under the current system. They have no motivation to change it so they won’t.

In various art groups there are always the people that want to spend 100-200k on an art Degree, or have and now sell coffee.

I try and give the advice that for most artist, you need to treat it as a hobby. Actual income needs to come from elsewhere.

It’s weird that science is becoming the same same thing. Many are better off as hobby scientists.

If you're a hobby scientist who happens to have money and goes off in an attempted to create something that would truly advance our technological understanding of the world/generally make the world a better place with whatever you're making - you'll probably be arrested by the FBI long before you ever get to succeed.

This is a bad thing. If science is to be seen as simply a hobby by the coming generations, the world as we know it is truly doomed to complete stagnation.

> I can't think of any other area where it's the _norm_ to need a support group to not quit or kill yourself because a fortress of gold has gaslit you into a deathmarch toward a tiny-fraction-of-a-percent chance of success.

Early startups?

Startups tend to at least pay you for your time and effort, I think? But I wouldn't call startup culture healthy either.