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How do cancer researchers and machine-learning engineers cope with the triviality of it all? (My brother-in-law works in cancer research. Most of his daily job consists of drawing blood samples, growing cell lines, killing mice, and managing lab techs. He has had one paper published in Nature [1], which, if you read the abstract, will make your eyes glaze over. I work in machine-learning. My daily job consists of labeling training data, debugging ETL code, and looking at relevancy scores and figuring out where I went wrong.) I think it helps to realize that this is the human condition - big developments are built out of little developments, and often aren't recognized as such until years after the foundations are laid. Usually, when we think of big prestigious work, it's because of an information distortion in our brains, which aren't equipped to track the minutiae of all the little steps it took to build something we notice, and so only latch onto the thing as a whole and whatever names we can attach to it. If you're bored at work, quit! Start working on some hobby projects where you're doing what you want to be doing, and then look for people that might have money and be willing to pay you for it. But basically all important work consists of 90% drudgery; you have to enjoy the drudgery and believe enough in the whole that it makes it worthwhile. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00493-9 |