It's great advice, but can be depressing. The question of "why bother doing anything if you're not advancing your field?" feels like a bucket of ice water on the head.
The world still needs a few workers doing non bleeding edge stuff, and they deserve to be content with life, too. People doing CRUD work aren't necessarily a waste of life.
https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity
Tenure by matt:
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
Mitchell's suicide notes:
https://web.archive.org/web/2015/geenstijl.nl/archives/image...