It's pretty easy to be jaded by the end of a PhD even if you went into it for the field. You often don't get true academic freedom until you get a tenure track

It's pretty easy to be jaded by the end of a PhD even if you went into it for the field. You often don't get true academic freedom until you get a tenure track professorship, which is increasingly hard to come by. Even then you need to spend a lot of time on showmanship. Doing a PhD for the sake of it is still arguable IMO, I don't regret doing mine. But I wish I didn't go in with the delusion I was pursuing a long term career in academia. Post-PhD academia is a hell of a slog.