> why do people subject themselves to this? Just like military recruiters are able seduce 16 years without much of a future to join an exciting career in the m

> why do people subject themselves to this? Just like military recruiters are able seduce 16 years without much of a future to join an exciting career in the military academics are able to sell academically inclined ungrads on some fantasy that being a PhD in history in 2021 is anything like it would have been in 1921. By the time your realize you've been scammed you're at least 4+ years into a PhD, and so committed to the sunk cost fallacy, combined with very strong academic conditioning that nothing will ruin your life more than leaving academia, that you can't fathom the idea of stopping at this point. Once you have the PhD and done your time in post-doc purgatory, and start on your tenure track hazing, you start babbling about how it's impossible for anyone to do real research without a PhD, even though the general state of "independent research" in academia is increasingly a bad joke. People often fail to mention that the fantasy of a PhD as someone who spends their time working on hard problems and collaborating with other brilliant-like minded thinkers, is derived from an era when a precondition to getting a PhD was largely based on having a well-off family and a good upbringing. It was a time when PhDs where respected, not because it was a better world, but because only an elite group could reasonably be expected to follow that path. If you talk to any undergrads starting a PhD today the level of naivete is almost endearing. They unquestionably believe that they are pursuing knowledge for its own sake and starting a path to enlightenment. Academia benefits tremendously from this illusion and has absolutely zero interest in breaking it. It doesn't hurt that they mark anyone who has left academia as a failure. I've seen so many people in the PhD life cycle absolutely devastated when they decide to not take the abuse anymore.