> Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you. People pay money to do what they enjoy all the time. P

> Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you. People pay money to do what they enjoy all the time. People take classes, eat at fancy restaurants, go on vacations, etc. This is just a more extreme instance of that. I'd like to get a PhD one day even though I've worked in the industry. It has nothing to do with my "career". I just have topics I'd like to do research in because I find them fascinating. Also I feel like working in the industry makes me dumber. In my experience the percentage of people who seem super excited about their work is much higher in academia than in industry. This shouldn't really be a surprise since the proportion of people who stay in academia for money is much smaller than for industry. That said, there definitely are people who just didn't know what else to do, but there are those people in industry as well.