The competitiveness and status striving are what drove me out of academia. I wanted to be there because I liked playing with ideas. It was the people who were d

The competitiveness and status striving are what drove me out of academia. I wanted to be there because I liked playing with ideas. It was the people who were driven there by their competitive impulse that poisoned it for me. That and the zero-sum nature of the game: the overproduction of candidates for a fixed number of positions, which forced everyone into the same mindset, where you'd be lucky if in the end you landed with a job in some place you'd rather not be mostly doing stuff other than what you wanted to do in the first place.