What a great essay, I'm going to show this to my kids. As someone who didn't do a PhD I always wonder what it would be like. I could never have done it in Huma

What a great essay, I'm going to show this to my kids. As someone who didn't do a PhD I always wonder what it would be like. I could never have done it in Humanities but I reckon a fair few of his observations are the same. At the time my main concern was the self-starter aspect of it: if I'm not given a specific task to do like I have been since the age of 6, how will I get anything done? I was also eager to go make money, largely to do with my background as a refugee kid. It also didn't seem to fit the common life plan of having kids sometime in the decade after university. Specifically, how do you grapple with contributing something new? It occurred to me that that is a bit a of a lottery. You need to be digging somewhere that has something new, and you need to find it. But then I've also read a thesis or two and thought "hmm this is totally unsurprising and adjacent to this-or-that idea". As with everything else that's enjoyable, it's ruined by politics: finding the right advisor, getting in the right program, being comfortable with living on a tiny budget, competing with all the other smart kids. Seeing others doing and talking about PhDs, mainly in sciences, seems to have confirmed my main attitude on the idea: it's only a matter of effort to learn something that's established, eg I can read about quantum physics or relativity from someone who's spent decades digesting it, and thanks to diminishing marginal returns I'll be reasonably close to the edge without causing myself a mental health breakdown. It means I'll never know the cutting edge until it has become the establishment, but the upside is I can know the current orthodoxy on a wide range of subjects.