[bodiekane]

Regarding your point 3, the challenge is that at present, so many incentives are aligned against that.

I'd love to do hard science, rather than my current meaningless consumer webapp job. But it'd mean... giving up 5-6 years of tech salary to go back and get a phD, and then post-phD my job prospects would be geographically limited to a couple locations where all the science/research jobs are, with worse hours, worse flexibility, less stability and drastically less pay.

It's hard to say "I should quit my fully-remote, wfh, $200k, low-stress, unlimited PTO software job to work in a lab in Boston for 50 hours a week for $90k". I don't have any solution here, kinda just venting through my golden handcuffs.

[namaria]

> my golden handcuffs

I never got this frame of mind. You chose to wear them. You like your golden bracelets. You can take them off any time you want. You are making the choice of staying. At the very least assume the responsibility.

[bodiekane]

I'm not sure where your confusion is, maybe it's just the terminology. I'll address your points individually and see if maybe that helps you understand what people mean by the "golden handcuffs" framing.

>You chose to wear them. Correct. Because it is the least-bad option that I see as a possibility.

>You like your golden bracelets I do not. I dislike my handcuffs. I just recognize that the other handcuffs I'm allowed to replace them with are worse.

>You can take them off any time you want. You are making the choice of staying I can replace them with different, worse handcuffs. I'm unhappy about being in handcuffs, but if someone suggests I replace my golden ones with the sharp, rusty ones, I will decline and choose to stay in my current ones.

>At the very least assume the responsibility I am? In fact the degree of agency here is central to the whole point. If you tell a prisoner they can choose between death by lethal injection or death by being burned at the stake, they can make the choice of lethal injection and "assume the responsibility" for that, but it's not like it's what they actually want-want. It's what they want under the constraints of the circumstances.

[aelmeleegy]

Loss aversion is way stronger than potential but not guaranteed gain.