[crispyambulance]

There are plenty of PHD's who lead thoroughly uninteresting lives, there are plenty that have exciting and meaningful lives.

Your degree isn't what makes your life interesting or not, nor is your job title, nor is your job, nor is how much you get paid.

The premise of the question is wrong, IMHO.

If you're "not sure" about the PHD, take some time off and work for a couple years in something challenging and then decide if the PHD is right for you. You'll still be sharp enough to resume the studies and you'll have more experience from which you can base your decision.

[dominotw]

> Your degree isn't what makes your life interesting or not, nor is your job title, nor is your job, nor is how much you get paid.

So a day laborer in India has equal chance at "interesting life" than a researcher at google ?

[debatem1]

I have been a day laborer (not in India) and worked at Google (not as a researcher) so I might be close enough to both worlds.

While my time at Google was very exciting for me, it didn't yield any stories that friends or family ask me to retell. Compared to "the time my boss asked me to catch running circular saws he would slide down a roof at me", "that time I found a complicated XSS" just lacks pizzazz. And since I worked hard, I had fewer off hours to generate stories like "the time <well-known political figure> got so mad he called me an asshole in a room full of donors" or "the time I got second place in a drunken knife-catching contest".

The net is that based on that coarse metric of how often retellings of stories from various times in my life are requested, my life at Google was actually one of the least interesting I led, and I suspect that will be generalizable for most people without a straight-line path through life.

[dominotw]

> my life at Google was actually one of the least interesting

I am assuming, you don't really care about living an interesting life as you traded an interesting life for one that insn't.

Also, when I say "day laborer" I am not talking about educated people who do that for a while. I am talking about ppl stuck in that situation with no way out.

[debatem1]

I was a day laborer before I went into tech or got an education. And (like most people, I suspect) I do care about living an interesting life-- I just didn't know that I was trading that away. Didn't figure it out for a long time, actually.

[dominotw]

> I do care about living an interesting life

Why can't you simply reverse your course of action though. Now that you have better understanding of both sides of it.

[debatem1]

I did. I left Google to take a job that is both more interesting and that leaves me more time to do interesting things.

[crispyambulance]

interesting != happy != success != wealth

These are all different, often orthogonal things.

There are people who are "stuck" in a socio-economic dead-end who still lead happy and interesting lives, nonetheless. They are able to take their situation in life and make the best of it.

The OP can do the same. He certainly has far more opportunities than a day-laborer or subsistence farmer. In a way, that abundance of choice is a burden. But nowhere is it written that PHD's are guaranteed to be "interesting", or even more interesting than anyone else.

[dominotw]

> He certainly has far more opportunities than a day-laborer or subsistence farmer.

Exactly. That contradicts the totally meaningless platitude "life is what you make of it".

[halfarmbandit]

Comment OP is trying to express that life is what you make of it. A PhD or an industry job at google etc etc won’t make your life interesting by themselves, but you need to make it be.

[dominotw]

well a day laborer in India doesn't have many avenues to 'make his life'. Why do ppl think he decided to " make his life" to be a day laborer.